Dear brilliant students: Please consider not doing a PhD.

It was wonderful.

I am not saying that I loved staying up late; I am not sure that I did great in my day job. The experience of learning and studying for the sake of the learning was one of the most fulfilling in my entire academic career.

Now, I want a PhD. Because I know of no other way forward to where I am tasked with advancing our field, publishing the result, and building a paying career on that. I want to take the knowledge of a field into the next place. From what I can tell, generally you have to be "someone special" to do serious (by which I mean paid) research without a PhD, particularly publishable research (by which I mean serious work advancing the field), and I'm not particularly special; just tenacious. I'm pretty sure I'm stupid enough to launch onto the 4-7 year journey to get the drek piled higher and deeper. Maybe I'm not smart enough to get in. That's OK. I'll still take my best shot, and if I fail, so be it. I won't live with the regret of not having tried.

I think there's something amazing about the idea of creating an original work, and then telling everyone who cares (a very small audience) about it. Part of my task will be to open up the details of what I did and tell people about it; to publish this and move the world forward in knowledge, by a very small amount. There is so much terrible crap involved in the academic world, but it pales in comparison to industry. Some of the commentators lament being broken and bitter due to the everlasting stress without any control over their circumstance. I see this every day in industry. I might be naive, but I don't think it can be worse in the PhD. My MS was pretty much lousy, but it was better than seeing people get inculcated into industry and grow bitter and tired.

I want a PhD.

That sounds like so much fun.

Hey, what was your PhD on? Can you talk about the product you shipped?

21.4-22.0: usual pre-PhD stuff like GREs and those ungodly applications where they make you list textbooks going back to freshman year calculus. Then there were the rejections, the acceptances, and the prospective student meetings. Those were fun.

22.1-23.2: in graduate program (math PhD) until internship on Wall Street turned into full-time offer. Did not return for 2nd year.

23.2-29.6 (now): variety of experiences in industry, some good, some not-so-good. Sometimes wish I could go back for a PhD in CS, but I realize that the opportunity cost of 5 years' income is, at this point, a house everywhere except Manhattan (where it's still a few decihouses).

Here are some observations:

If you're funded, a PhD program isn't that bad. It can be stressful, or it can be a lot of fun. You will probably fall behind with the opposite sex. Your lifestyle will be lower-middle-class. Your social life will be weird. You can't hang out with undergrads anymore, because the first thing you learn (late September, usually) is that college was a different planet to which you can never go back. I had an undergrad girlfriend for a little while, and the contrast between her concerns and mine was stark. Grad school is part of the Real World, and not a financially flush one. Hence, you don't really have much in common with young professionals (who are enjoying having money until the kids arrive and they're strapped again) either. Other grad students are your social pool, and inter-departmental interaction is rare.

It's hard. Self-study in addition to courses is no longer optional. Procrastination will ruin your life. College encourages specialization and creativity: write for a sketch comedy group, go to poetry slams, play cards till 5:00 in the morning, get sloppy drunk once a month (actually, you're not missing out if you skip that). Grad school doesn't. You might have time for one extracurricular activity. Don't start it until you've had a successful first year. You need to become an adult, and quickly. People who manage their time and money like a 28-year-old seem to do OK. They aren't always happy, and there's still a lot of opportunity cost in pursuing a graduate degree, but these people manage to get through it and enjoy the process. People who try to relive college do not.

I don't think graduate school is this horrible wringer for most people. Some are unhappy, but many of them would be unhappy anywhere. Some love it. It comes down to personal and technical maturity, as well as desires. To complete a PhD, you really have to have to want a research career.

What is horrible is the job market people face after their PhDs. That is an outright disaster. But that's another topic.