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A PhD is a degree in conducting research. Get one if you want a career in research. If you don't like research, don't do a PhD. Any decent program pays students

A PhD is a degree in conducting research. Get one if you want a career in research. If you don't like research, don't do a PhD. Any decent program pays students about a $1.5-3K monthly stipend. Don't have being a professor as the only acceptable end-goal. There are lots of careers that benefit from or require a PhD besides being a professor. People with STEM PhDs are found in great concentration in R&D settings. For example, when I worked at NASA JPL probably about 50%+ of the scientists had PhDs. Outside of STEM activities, it can still be an enriching life experience. You don't incur significant debt. It does have a high opportunity cost, if one's undergraduate degree is lucrative. On the other hand, you get the privilege to spend your time trying to create new knowledge. Real PhD Issues (and Cons): 1) Research is hard and it requires a massive time investment to create new knowledge, especially when just starting. 2) High levels of impostor syndrome. You will likely meet people much smarter than you, and those that can work 80+ hours per week for years. If you fall into the trap of comparing yourself to them, your mental health will suffer. You have to just work toward solving your problems. As one old friend put it, he felt like a genius when he worked as a software developer, but throughout his PhD he felt like an underachiever. 3) Jealousy of your friends "getting their lives started" (kids, buying a home, etc.). Very hard to have any work-life balance as a PhD student. 4) Don't expect to get rich after a PhD. Do it because you think a career in research will be satisfying. 5) If you want to be a tenure-track professor running a lab, you have to be very flexible with where you live. Being a professor is also very stressful. 6) If you want to teach in college, a PhD is required but the main thing a PhD teaches is research -- not teaching. 7) Clearly assess your ability to get a professorship if you choose to do a podstoc. There is little point in one unless a professorship is your end-goal. Many don't realistically assess their competitiveness for professorships. I wrote a blog post about this about 6 years ago (it needs updating): http://www.chriskanan.com/planning-for-life-after-your-phd/ http://www.chriskanan.com/planning-for-life-after-your-phd/

gowld 8y ago
I thought the entire appeal of a "liberal arts" college was that the college focuses on quality teaching instead of research. Why on earth would they demand their profressors have PhDs?
- privacypoller 8y ago
  Requiring a PhD to teach serves the same purpose as requiring a degree to apply for a job: an arbitrary but easy to apply filter. While PhDs are research-oriented, in reality you can end up in a research or pedagogy track depending on (a) what you want and (b) how your research progresses.
- majos 8y ago
  If a student wants to get a taste of research, then they will probably need a research mentor with a PhD. Failing that, somebody who has published a few good papers -- but such people usually have PhDs! So it's not unreasonable to have PhDs around for student enrichment, even if having a PhD does little to make you better at teaching undergrad material. The actual administrative reasoning here is probably a combination of the above and "you just can't be an academic without a PhD!".
- neuromantik8086 8y ago
  The PhD first really became a requirement for professors wanting to teach at SLACs around the 1940s. Prior to that point, it wasn't that uncommon for you to find teachers that "only" had BAs. This transition (a BA being the minimum to a PhD being the minimum) occurred substantially earlier at large universities [0]. During the period between the 1940s and the late 80s-ish, the PhD involved research, but not with nearly the same competitiveness as today. As such, budding candidates were able to devote substantially more time to developing their pedagogical skills (even in the past this viewed more like an extracurricular pursuit, but a lot of PhDs took it seriously enough that they got really good at it). The folks who came out of this era had dual competencies in teaching and research. The need for research skills primarily was to help more advanced and motivated students (juniors and seniors) to get some limited research experience on-campus. Sometime between the late 90s and early 2000s, the balance in competencies shifted due to hyper-competitiveness. As a result, almost no PhD students today really focus on pedagogy and it is still treated as an increasingly neglected extra-curricular pursuit. This has become a very big problem for SLACs, since almost all PhDs coming out now are enculturated to feel that they have to create a large research program, and almost view working at a SLAC as a "backup" option if they don't land a large university job rather than a goal in and of itself. SLACs have had to compensate for this by offering increasingly attractive incentives / research starter packages to get new faculty. This trend is also being aggravated by helicopter parents who now insist that their children participate in research at increasingly younger ages (oftentimes high school) so as to pad their resumes for med school. [0] https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/octopus.html https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/octopus.html Disclaimer: Source for some of this is free recall from a temporary job in SLAC archive. Some of it may be wrong. Visit a SLAC archive if you care enough to verify.
anticensor 8y ago
8>Some research doctorates require taking instuctor education as part of completion requirements.
privacypoller 8y ago
>> 2) High levels of impostor syndrome. I felt this, but was surprised that while there were a few genuine genius-level people in my program, the vast majority spent most of the effort trying to look like a genius but were far from it. One of the things I tell people when they ask me about grad school is, "I thought everybody would be smarter".
- neuromantik8086 8y ago
  > I felt this, but was surprised that while there were a few genuine genius-level people in my program, the vast majority spent most of the effort trying to look like a genius but were far from it. An astounding amount of time is wasted in academia on puffery. I'm not sure how it compares to industry because there's never been a systematic comparison (and I don't really believe such a comparison would be feasible). My personal experience was that the "mediocrities" who kept a low profile and stayed out of departmental politics as much as possible seemed to actually be accomplishing the most work with any actual substance. Some of these folks were working in state-sponsored institutions rather than universities. All of them seemed to be in their 50s and 60s, tenured (or tenure-equivalented) before higher ed became a hypercompetitive shitshow. This pretension really comes through when scholars don't respect the limits of their expertise / properly delegate to specialists. In software and IT especially, you find academics using technologies that are a poor fit for their work, not understanding budgeting and concepts such as total cost of ownership for compute resources, and reinventing the wheel.
- fybe 8y ago
  >"I thought everybody would be smarter" I don't remember where I heard it but I think has some truth to it. A bachelor believes he's the smartest A master thinks he's not smart at all A Phd understands no one is smart
WhompingWindows 8y ago
If you're not in STEM, if you want a PhD in the humanities, it's going to be a VERY tough path. Many of those students do shell out many thousands of dollars per semester, ending their PhD with very high levels of debt. At the same time, the jobs for people with PhDs in humanities are becoming less frequent, even as the number of PhDs in non-STEM is increasing. Many of these individuals are stuck in adjunct slavery. It's a sad state of affairs that those who want to further their own knowledge can be so mired in debt, yet it has happened to multiple friends of mine who "followed their dreams".
- Fomite 8y ago
  Yeah...my default response for people asking about a PhD in the humanities is "Don't."

gowld 8y ago

I thought the entire appeal of a "liberal arts" college was that the college focuses on quality teaching instead of research. Why on earth would they demand their profressors have PhDs?

privacypoller 8y ago
Requiring a PhD to teach serves the same purpose as requiring a degree to apply for a job: an arbitrary but easy to apply filter. While PhDs are research-oriented, in reality you can end up in a research or pedagogy track depending on (a) what you want and (b) how your research progresses.
majos 8y ago
If a student wants to get a taste of research, then they will probably need a research mentor with a PhD. Failing that, somebody who has published a few good papers -- but such people usually have PhDs! So it's not unreasonable to have PhDs around for student enrichment, even if having a PhD does little to make you better at teaching undergrad material. The actual administrative reasoning here is probably a combination of the above and "you just can't be an academic without a PhD!".
neuromantik8086 8y ago
The PhD first really became a requirement for professors wanting to teach at SLACs around the 1940s. Prior to that point, it wasn't that uncommon for you to find teachers that "only" had BAs. This transition (a BA being the minimum to a PhD being the minimum) occurred substantially earlier at large universities [0]. During the period between the 1940s and the late 80s-ish, the PhD involved research, but not with nearly the same competitiveness as today. As such, budding candidates were able to devote substantially more time to developing their pedagogical skills (even in the past this viewed more like an extracurricular pursuit, but a lot of PhDs took it seriously enough that they got really good at it). The folks who came out of this era had dual competencies in teaching and research. The need for research skills primarily was to help more advanced and motivated students (juniors and seniors) to get some limited research experience on-campus. Sometime between the late 90s and early 2000s, the balance in competencies shifted due to hyper-competitiveness. As a result, almost no PhD students today really focus on pedagogy and it is still treated as an increasingly neglected extra-curricular pursuit. This has become a very big problem for SLACs, since almost all PhDs coming out now are enculturated to feel that they have to create a large research program, and almost view working at a SLAC as a "backup" option if they don't land a large university job rather than a goal in and of itself. SLACs have had to compensate for this by offering increasingly attractive incentives / research starter packages to get new faculty. This trend is also being aggravated by helicopter parents who now insist that their children participate in research at increasingly younger ages (oftentimes high school) so as to pad their resumes for med school. [0] https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/octopus.html https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/octopus.html Disclaimer: Source for some of this is free recall from a temporary job in SLAC archive. Some of it may be wrong. Visit a SLAC archive if you care enough to verify.

anticensor 8y ago

8>Some research doctorates require taking instuctor education as part of completion requirements.

privacypoller 8y ago

>> 2) High levels of impostor syndrome. I felt this, but was surprised that while there were a few genuine genius-level people in my program, the vast majority spent most of the effort trying to look like a genius but were far from it. One of the things I tell people when they ask me about grad school is, "I thought everybody would be smarter".

neuromantik8086 8y ago
> I felt this, but was surprised that while there were a few genuine genius-level people in my program, the vast majority spent most of the effort trying to look like a genius but were far from it. An astounding amount of time is wasted in academia on puffery. I'm not sure how it compares to industry because there's never been a systematic comparison (and I don't really believe such a comparison would be feasible). My personal experience was that the "mediocrities" who kept a low profile and stayed out of departmental politics as much as possible seemed to actually be accomplishing the most work with any actual substance. Some of these folks were working in state-sponsored institutions rather than universities. All of them seemed to be in their 50s and 60s, tenured (or tenure-equivalented) before higher ed became a hypercompetitive shitshow. This pretension really comes through when scholars don't respect the limits of their expertise / properly delegate to specialists. In software and IT especially, you find academics using technologies that are a poor fit for their work, not understanding budgeting and concepts such as total cost of ownership for compute resources, and reinventing the wheel.
fybe 8y ago
>"I thought everybody would be smarter" I don't remember where I heard it but I think has some truth to it. A bachelor believes he's the smartest A master thinks he's not smart at all A Phd understands no one is smart

WhompingWindows 8y ago

If you're not in STEM, if you want a PhD in the humanities, it's going to be a VERY tough path. Many of those students do shell out many thousands of dollars per semester, ending their PhD with very high levels of debt. At the same time, the jobs for people with PhDs in humanities are becoming less frequent, even as the number of PhDs in non-STEM is increasing. Many of these individuals are stuck in adjunct slavery. It's a sad state of affairs that those who want to further their own knowledge can be so mired in debt, yet it has happened to multiple friends of mine who "followed their dreams".

Fomite 8y ago
Yeah...my default response for people asking about a PhD in the humanities is "Don't."