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Sources of funding vary widely for people with PhDs. If you have a PhD in a scientific field, especially from a place like MIT, the money is in defense, energy
by Goladus 16y ago
Sources of funding vary widely for people with PhDs. If you have a PhD in a scientific field, especially from a place like MIT, the money is in defense, energy, and medicine. You might work for companies like Exxon-Mobil, or iRobot, or a National Laboratory.
Research at Universities is funded by the government and industry as well as by student tuition. The more promising the research (or the more persuasive the PI), the more likely it will be funded. And in science, it's quite common for the PhD to have been funded by those grants to begin with.
- TomOfTTB 16y agoMy understanding, and I could be wrong because I don't know the percentages, has always been that research done on energy and medicine is primarily done by Universities with government grants. Don't get me wrong. I don't deny there are jobs for PhD's outside of academia but we're talking about averages here and I still think the majority of PhD's end up being paid by a University of some kind (be it as a professor or in a research lab)
- Goladus 16y agoPhDs at a company like Exxonmobil aren't necessarily doing research in the classical sense, they are basically looking for oil. But I don't know the numbers either. I do know that there are lots of Pharma companies doing drug research in the Cambridge/Boston area.