From talking with my PhD and MS friends, it's mainly about time. PhDs work around 40-60 hours a week. Full time MS students are juggling courses, research, and

From talking with my PhD and MS friends, it's mainly about time. PhDs work around 40-60 hours a week. Full time MS students are juggling courses, research, and part time work, also around 40 hours a week. That usually leaves little time and energy to apply for jobs and practice interviewing. As a terminal MS student, most of the interviews and offers I've gotten were from professor recommendations to their industry colleagues. I researched computational linguistics and dynamical systems in my undergrad, and in grad school I researched HPC and distributed systems. I still interview poorly because I don't invest enough time practicing/applying compared to reading papers or doing grad student grunt work. On paper, having an MS can also be a negative signal.