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This post focuses on the job market after the PhD, but another reason to avoid a PhD is that it is just too much work. I have an MA but remain very involved in
by Mediterraneo10 5y ago
This post focuses on the job market after the PhD, but another reason to avoid a PhD is that it is just too much work. I have an MA but remain very involved in my field, I publish a paper or two each year and present at conferences. But after seeing my colleagues' workload unrelated to their actual research, I don't want to do a PhD: the students in PhD programmes are expected to help out in the exhausting process of grant application writing, editing the department's publications, teach courses, etc. This is true of all the universities with a department dedicated to my specific field. Even a fully externally funded position doesn't allow you to escape such obligations and focus solely on dissertation writing.
My conclusion is that I would actually have less time for research in a PhD program than in my current life where I find time for it around a job outside academia.
- huitzitziltzin 5y agoIf you publish a paper or Two every year in your field... what more do you need to do to actually get the degree? If I had a student like that I would go ahead and graduate him or her. (It takes a very long time to publish anything in Econ so that kind of productivity would be hard to reach though.)
- baron_harkonnen 5y agoThat's not how academia works any more, because academia is not remotely about real research or discovering truths about the world. If it was we wouldn't have a massive reproducibility crisis and things like collusion rings in publishing. Today academia is primarily about achieving and maintaining funding and perpetuating the academic status quo (including insanely cheap labor) as long as possible. Wittgenstein famously got his PhD from Trinity College in Cambridge by basically showing up and handing in the finished Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. Wittgenstein was of course a rare case, but that work was groundbreaking and leading philosophers at the time agreed, he defended and was given a PhD. Moore, one of the people overseeing his defense, stated “I consider that this is a work of genius but, even if it is not, it is well above the standard required for a PhD degree.” Today getting that PhD is a combination of a bizarre hazing ritual and making sure you don't offend any of the other department faculty that will ultimately be deciding if you're worthy. I've seen a few cases from my time in academia where jealous or bitter faculty will do anything to ruin the carer of someone they view as threatening. If Wittgenstein where alive today he probably would have ended up a software engineer writing an engaging blog in his spare time that most academics viewed as hopelessly obscure and amateur.
- Mediterraneo10 5y agoI feel like I should mention that the GP was asking something of me, and little of what you write here is relevant to my own situation. (Maybe it is relevant to people in other fields.)
- Mediterraneo10 5y agoWhen you choose to compile a dissertation from peer-reviewed articles, only those articles count which are written after you start the PhD program, discussed in seminar, and published. For me to write sufficient material for a dissertation and see it published would take about three years. So, that is three years I would be expected to do various administrative drudgery within the department.
- pradn 5y agoDo you have a regular day job and publish on the side? How do you manage it?
- Mediterraneo10 5y agoI work as a freelancer with some specialized skills that command a high rate, and I live in a country with low cost of living. That means that I typically only work 2–4 hours per day (and not even every weekday), and the rest of time can be dedicated to research. Over the years I have managed to scan virtually every publication relevant to my field, so I don’t even need to make the expensive trek to an academic library very often.