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As a CS grad I can confidently say: No! They are absolutely worth your time.
With so many things going on in life outside of work and academics, there is only so much you could research and pay attention to to fully know what you could get into. Only practical experience will tell you if it’s worth it. As they say, experience is the best teacher. And even then, don’t regret and blame yourself. You made the decision based on what was the best available information at the time. I tell this to any people who tend to be anxious about decisions.
You never “do your own research”. You trust the experts and listen to them.
You just have to observe how many McDonalds employees are cursing their life in Latin
I thought one of the fundamental principles of a PhD was that you were no longer expected to have information spoon-fed to you. Dude failed two different tests at the same time.
TBH if you attend 5 years at uni and don’t catch on how few professors there are to literally everyone else at the university perhaps your reasoning skills are not that great.
I mean I did 5 years with a master in thermodynamics (physical chemistry) and my section had 20 offices. Three had a professor in them.
Top sciencetists are is like top athlets. The same drive, dedication and forsaking other things to be best.
This is a computer sci PhD. They rarely even finish their degrees and most bugger off directly to industry if they do. Couldn’t have picked a better degree of you want to be a professor.
Interestingly enough, I only got my PhD because the job market sucked after Bush’s recession and I was promised 5 years of funding. I did get some great data analytic skills out of it, but academic positions are indeed far and few between.
One of the main factors after my graduation a few years ago was that professors just refused to retire, leaving very few faculty positions open; that changed slightly right after my kid was born but by that point I was and am ok with an adjunct part time and homemaker full time situation.
Now it’ll mostly be a lack of funding, though, unless I leave the US. Meh.
i said many times in other forums, people think thier career is a tenure track, but they underestimate the competitiveness of the tenure positon, plus tenures tend to not retire until they CROAK, or become to ill, old to teach and thats expected 20-40+year wait.
Well, what a surprise. For the first time I feel smug about not having a phd, much education or common sense
When I was in college I got a science-related scholarship and as part of it they literally made us all chant together that we would go on to get a PhD.
Thankfully that was obvious enough cult behavior for me to tap out and take my career in a different direction.
Meyerhoff?
I dunno… getting a PhD just teaches you how to do research. If you want to get a faculty position, there’s a whole other set of skills on top of that; in the US for CS at larger universities it’s mostly about getting funding and becoming “respected” in your field. But you have to tell people that you want to learn those additional skills. That’s the part that’s hard to know about beforehand.
Hard to say what exactly a PhD teaches. It is a unique type of qualification that varies radically between situations, even in the same department. I can definitely say there is a difference between people with and without a doctorate, but many of the skills gained are soft skills.
Yep, my buddy is finally on a tenure track at a really nice school and it’s the accumulation of like 15 years of stressful work that might have never really paid off.
You have to be good at getting published, attending conferences, creating conferences, building relationships with different universities and that’s just to keep up with the competition. I think what seals the deal is not only getting funding for yourself, but showing universities how employing you would actually be a sound investment.
its pretty painful, just having to put dozens of publishing research on CV is a huge task on its own.
The one “secret” I wish I’d known a lot earlier is that you don’t have to do it alone. In fact, the more you collaborate the more successful you’ll be: more research ideas, more publications, more committee memberships in workshops/conferences, more participating on teams being put together to apply for research funding, more people to reach out to when you’re looking for a job, etc. The most successful scientists I’ve known had huge networks of collaborators.
I’ve said it before, but one reason I didn’t pursue a PhD is that there appeared to be an element of hazing in the entire thing.
Several of the PhD students I knew were languishing for years trying to get their thesis together, in what can only be described as poverty.
Meanwhile, half of the professors were miserable, and if they made good money, it was because they were very focused on how to make money. The happiest postgrad I knew was a senior lecturer who had given up on becoming a professor.
The best you can hope for is that your personal area of interest happens to have a lot of funding.
Yet these people almost universally seemed to think, “Well, that’s just how it is. The nice thing is that if you can get an academic position, it sucks less than being a PhD student.”
not to mention the dozens of PAPERS(fluff pieces) you need your resume to get certain positions in a faculty positon in a university. thats where im hearing the complaints coming from. Plus PHD spends alot of thier time chasing grants in universities( at least for the most part), Also they have to frame certain research in a way that does blame “anthropromorphic causes”.
I have a PhD because I thought I wanted to go into research. And while I loved research, that didn’t come close to cancelling out how much I loathed all the non-research shit you need to do for funding and keeping a job.
Then I went from academia into corporate R&D, and realized I basically started to hate doing chemistry in general. Mostly because it reminded me of all the stuff I hated.
Im now super happy as a safety consultant, and my PhD sometimes helps in convincing people that I do in fact know more than them. It also covers an ugly spot in the wallpaper, a purpose it fulfills much more frequently.
thats what i heard in college and in other discussion boards, basically just grant chasing for your career. and then i recall while i was in courses with these professors, they said they spend most of thier time chasing grants. i wanted to be in research to, but at the undergrad level, i needed experience in the field, and i wasnt eligble for MS, and the jobs out there are next to impossible without significant experience by the time of graduation.
I got my current teaching position by essentially volunteer-professoring while doing some grad work. Super exploitative on paper, though that wasn’t the intention of anyone involved (tiny college hated by the conservatives so they kinda had to wing it every time legislative fuckery happened). But it’s rough, I don’t make enough to pay my (incredibly cheap) mortgage so I’m in the awkward position of having been financially unemployed for a year while still working full time. Not to sound too whiny but man, the culture of “Guess I’ll starve because I just love my students so much” is absurdly toxic. And that’s coming from someone firmly part of that culture.
they abuse the use of part-time professors/PHD for instructors, so they dont get tenure, to cover all thier neccesary classes. it explains why certain colleges dont offer the same stem courses every semester, because the UNIVERSITY is being a cheapskate.
This is why I dropped the dream of being a French professor. By the end of my first year I realized there were only 2 or 3 on my campus and I’d have to work with them for many years and still not score a job.
Funny story about my first professor: When I would speak French in class the girls would all giggle. WTF?! One night I got invited to an all-girl study group at the dorm next door.
“OK, why do you all giggle when I speak French?”
They got real quiet, looked around at each other. Finally one girl pipes up.
“We’re sorry, it’s just that your accent is so much better than the professor’s, it’s embarrassing for him.”
And that’s the man I would have had to work with for years. :( (BTW, he spoke 5 other languages and his grammar and vocabulary were unmatched. He just couldn’t speak worth a shit.)
I find it hard to believe that someone who entered a PhD program wasn’t given a heads up immediately about the competition for professor positions.
they probably were, but it was OFUSCATED or they dont actually “address people on the issue” its also the same with undergrad and MASTERS level. the university benefits by not telling so they can keep the cash cows coming into as undergraduate, masters, or PHD. if they warned them in Undergrad, people will just not take a certain major, or dont even go the university altogether.
the competition is insanely intense for many 4-year universities, at my low prestige school(thats not even that good)’ one professor i had as a course, was reviewing 30+ candidates for a position, you can imagine how hard is it. and some other ones are only working as adjunct (like one physics professor i had, he had no interest in teaching the class, considering how the exams, and lectures were, just wanted to do research).
at an oral presentation, the announcer mentioned the PROFESSOR coming to talk has at least several dozen papers on his cv, before even recognized for a position in a university.
I don’t. It’s the sort of thing that is “evident” so no one talks about it much. Plus, professors don’t want to point out how much the whole system sucks and not a lot of people go into PhDs to become professors.
It’s a tough dilemma. Takes a PHD to understand the tenure track.
its brutal even if your not a phd, apparently universities would rather not hire them, instead try to use part timers instead, so they can avoid giving them benefits. the ones that are currently hired, are male dominated soon to female but that would take decades. and these professors had thier careers set when they were hired 20-30+ years ago when there was significantly less competition in the stems, and so few people went to college in the 80s, 90s.
