10 ms·

Why I got a PhD at age 61

135 points by breck 5y ago

davesque 5y ago
As much as PhD students are often "funded" by their university, they're only really surviving at best. I'd like to do a PhD more than almost anything. However, at 41 and well into a career with each job paying higher than the last, the opportunity cost is becoming more and more prohibitive. Stepping back from earning (and saving!) for five years seems like a kiss of death to me and a virtual guarantee that I won't be able to retire comfortably. These kinds of articles, while well meaning, really irk me. They come across as completely tone death and inadvertently cast a fair bit of light on the author's personal financial situation (or perhaps their lack of awareness of it).
- creakingstairs 5y ago
  Doing a PhD later in my life is also my bucket list and I suspect I probably won’t be able to cross it off unless I really prioritise it or get lucky. That being said I think you are being a bit unfair to the author. They do acknowledge that you need to have an opportunity. > My advice is: if you have the opportunity to dive into a new field, take it Also, you are 41 and I would definitely agree that doing one when you are in your 40s would be almost impossible due to things like career, kids and mortgages etc. But the author around 60! I don’t think it’s “tone deaf” to suggest that one may be able to find some freedom to squeeze in a phd while working part time after working till 60. Edit: I will acknowledge that having a good job and being able to comfortably retire or cut income around 60 is a privilege that many people unfortunately won’t have. But I don’t think its unachievable though.
  - Beldin 5y ago
    If you can free up one day per week from your regular job, you can pursue a PhD in part-time. It would likely be unfunded, take a little longer, and there may be expenses involved, but still, the option is there. Moreover, this dramatically lowers the opportunity cost.
- whathappenedto 5y ago
  I'm wondering if you would define a higher than median US salary to be "surviving at best", as most CS PhD programs are at that amount plus health insurance. But certainly far from a FAANG salary, and I agree that there are disciplines usually with smaller programs that are "surviving at best."
  - wh313 5y ago
    The highest stipend I've been offered by a CS PhD program has been 50k. In NYC. Most other offers I had were around the 30k-40k region. The median household income in 2020 was $67,521 [1] [1]: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-273.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27...
    - myle 5y ago
      At ETH in Zurich it is around 60k.
      - Matumio 5y ago
        Of course there is also cost of living, and, quoting the AVETH survival guide (2012): "It is common in many departments to reduce the amount of payment from 100 percent to 80 percent or 60 percent. However, you are still expected to work full time. Make sure you know what you are about to sign."
    - swimfar 5y ago
      That's not the correct comparison. Household income often includes two incomes, which is going to bring the value up. Your same link says the median earnings for a male individual is $61,417. Not significantly less, but this distinction is often important.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > The median household income in 2020 was $67,521 Median personal income is around $36k. [0] Annualized median earnings of the full-time employed are around $52k. [1] Households often have more multiple income earners. [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N [1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t01.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t01.htm
- dagw 5y ago
  At least here in Sweden it is not uncommon for employers to help sponsor employees getting their PhD. The basic deal is you split your time 50/50 between work and study and your research has to be something directly relevant and useful to to company and what you do there. Often you will be directly applying the research you do at the university to a project you have at work, and your work project will be the 'platform' on which your research is tested and evaluated. In exchange the company will pay you 50% of your salary plus a stipend so that your total take home salary doesn't drop off too much. Does such a thing exist where you live?
  - triyambakam 5y ago
    Wow, det visste jag inte. Det är jättekul!
    - dagw 5y ago
      Yea, it's called "Industridoktorand" and many of the larger engineering/tech companies (say 1k+ employees) I've been involved with had 1 or 2 people doing it.
  - achenet 5y ago
    we have a similar thing in France, called CIFRE :)
GianFabien 5y ago
I started my PhD in software engineering at 51 after decades of work in IT. The point is that if you value money over knowledge and unique experiences, then by all means keep doing what you love the most. Some of use are prepared to build up our savings and then live frugally on less than ramen noodles stipend whist pursuing making a tiny dent in the universe of knowledge in a specialized field. At my university there were dozens of mature age PhD students doing research in a broad spectrum of fields. None of whom I met were rich in materialistic terms.
- NonEUCitizen 5y ago
  Which university is this (that seems open to mature age students)?
  - R0b0t1 5y ago
    And as a follow up to this, are there any that are open to nontraditional students with an interest in research? Stopping everything you are doing for a minimum of 4 years is a complete nonstarter for the majority of working people, some of which would be great at research.
  - 019341097 5y ago
    I'm a mature student returning this year. I'd say a lot of universities in Ontario are very open to mature students, and they've really made the process easy. I can't speak to other places, but I've been very pleasantly surprised.
  - Shorel 5y ago
    Which aren't?
  - GianFabien 5y ago
    In Australia, all Group 8 universities (most are in the World Top 100 rankings) will accept mature age students. It's not your age, it is your research proposal that earns a place. Typically you need a prior research Masters in a related field and bring a substantial amount of industry experience and connections. Universities are encouraged to increase their collaborations with industry. In order to prepare a successful proposal you need to read 20-100 recent papers in the field and cite at least 10 of them. Going to conferences is good for social networking, but you will only get a briefest summary of the research being conducted. The purpose of a presentation at a conference is to raise sufficient interest for some of the attendees to read the presenter's paper(s).
TedShiller 5y ago
boredom, counterintuitively, can be a powerful motivator
brutus1213 5y ago
Here is a possibly unpopular opinion. I have a Phd (got it when I was young). In some areas of computing (e.g. OS, Systems) work gets obsolete fairly quickly. I suspect my PhD topic was useless about 4-10 years after I finished the thesis. Of course, I got a few hundred citations, and this suggests that perhaps more enduring work was done based on mine, but in any case, I don't buy the dent in the universe argument for some fast changing fields (e.g. Deep Learning today). My wife was reading the life story of Louis Pasteur to our 6 year old, and it was remarkable what a dent his contribution made. Most people I knew who finished Phds did not do much of note (and this is fairly elite tier). One person has an algorithm named after them but it is also a bit obsolete (e.g. happened to a lot of classical CV and NLU algorithms post DL). I was talking to a theoretical Physics PhD at a conference recently, and even he was quite jaded (he switched to CS post PhD). It was obvious that this person was wicked smart and had quant knowledge. So if you want a PhD for transferable skills, go for it! A masters might be faster though. Do what makes you happy at the end.. it is sort of nice I can drop in the fact I have a PhD and it was probably good for me on the whole .. but if you are thinking of getting a PhD in CS, consider attending top conferences in your field before committing (e.g. SOSP for OS/Systems, CVPR for vision, CHI for HCI,...). I just had no clue what I was getting into and I actively wish someone had given me this sort of info before I got into it. A PhD has a huge opportunity cost.
- beambot 5y ago
  Whenever anyone asks about pursuing a PhD, I usually tell them it only makes sense if one of more of these hold true: (1) You want to pursue a career in academia or research where the credentialing will matter; (2) You want access to equipment or material that is otherwise difficult to obtain; (3) You want the freedom & flexibility to pursue random interests for another couple years; or (4) You have a deep affinity for a specific topic at the frontiers of human knowledge. The PhD definitely isn't required if your goal is to maximize learning & earning, apply research to commercialization, or to make a huge dent on the world -- the latter is just exceedingly rare statistically speaking.
- light_hue_1 5y ago
  > In some areas of computing (e.g. OS, Systems) work gets obsolete fairly quickly That's a very surprising statement. The number of advances in systems in the 21st century is.. embarrassingly low. It feels like a stale dead field. People keep pumping money into what is basically a dead body at this point. > consider attending top conferences in your field before committing (e.g. SOSP for OS/Systems, CVPR for vision, CHI for HCI,...). I I don't think that this is good advice. Certainly I would never suggest it to my own students. It's hard to see what they would gain. So you go to CVPR or NeurIPS, you see hundreds of posters per session and talk after talk. Maybe you stick around for workshops to interact with people. So what? This gives you zero information about what you will be doing as a PhD student or how useful your PhD will be. The way to figure out if you want to do a PhD is simple: do research first. Spend a summer in a research lab related to some topic you like and figure out if you like it. > I was talking to a theoretical Physics PhD at a conference recently, and even he was quite jaded (he switched to CS post PhD). Speaking of dead fields... I know many postdocs who come from physics into ML because many areas of theoretical physics just don't seem to be going anywhere anymore. Not a good sign!
refurb 5y ago
If your goal is actually “pursue scientific advances” rather than “put food on the table”, “make sure I get a job when I graduate” or “make my PI look good”, then doing it at 61 makes perfect sense.
- dagw 5y ago
  My aunt did her PhD after she retired. Through working for decades in her field she had developed a hunch and a personal theory about the best way to do a thing, and she basically just wanted to see if she was right.
  - philshem 5y ago
    I would like to read about your aunt!
jarenmf 5y ago
I think there are actually many advantages to doing a PhD at an older age. Especially after having a fairly long work experience and if you can bring that to another field say Biology.
mgaunard 5y ago
3 years working an engineering job will teach you much more than doing a PhD.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Depends pretty much if the company is doing real engineering, the one accepted by the Engineering Order, and not putting an "engineer" label on coders out of boot camps.
- nikanj 5y ago
  It will teach you more about engineering. Most jobs aren’t pushing the boundary of CS knowledge, or doing important discoveries
- captainmuon 5y ago
  I learned a lot in my PhD that I wouldn't have learned in my subsequent engineering job: Public speaking with confidence, how to be proactive in your job, how to apply for public funding, teaching experience. How to present results, and how to write. I had exposure to what (at that time) were rare computing resources, which is useful now with in the cloud era. And I learned a ton about my specific field of course - which is probably not monetarily useful, but was a lot of fun and you can't learn it in such depth anywhere else.
- dagw 5y ago
  They teach entirely different things. My first 3 years working taught me a lot about the real world practicalities of writing useful software, as a team, that you can charge money for. It taught me very little about doing research or the cutting edge of my field. I suspect a PhD would be the exact opposite.
- physicsguy 5y ago
  The biggest difference between working and research is that you're free to just try things out without so much pressure.
  - sdk16420 5y ago
exdsq 5y ago
It’s never too late if it’s something you want to do :) Hell, I have a friend who’s 20 years into his DPhil taking it at a snails pace, but gives him accommodation when he’s in town for the pub. People talking about how much of a dent you’ll make within your PhDs field… almost definitely zero! Your thesis will probably be read by you, your supervisor, and viva board. You’re still a student and it’s a course on how to do research. It could be fun to dig deep into a subject and that’s a totally awesome reason to do one, making a significant change to your field is very very very unlikely.
bo1024 5y ago
Funny, the article explains “how”, but I don’t see any discussion of “why” at all.
- voxl 5y ago
  Because the "why" is always going to be personal. A PhD in CS is never going to be a sane financial choice, and it has heavy risks if you find yourself with a bad advisor. Anyone who has thought about doing a PhD critically knows that there is no reason to tell someone else to do one, and that their reasons for doing one likely only apply to them.
  - bo1024 5y ago
    Well, it's funny (haha and peculiar) because of the title.
  - Ar-Curunir 5y ago
    It depends on the area of CS. Eg: a PhD from a good group in NLP/CV or ML generally can get you a fantastic well-paying position in industry that would be out of reach without the PhD. Same for, e.g., cryptography.
captainmuon 5y ago
The funny thing is that while it is possible to get a PhD at an advanced age, it is probably impossible to land a scientific job at that age. Sometimes I think when the kids are grown up and I've saved enough for retirement, I'd like to go into science again. Just for fun. I would probably be happy to move to some crazy place and get an intern's salary if the project was interesting and meaningful. Alas, that doesn't seem possible in the academic system.
- riedel 5y ago
  Actually it gets harder and harder to pursue an academic 'career' if you actually obtain your PhD inside the traditional system later than the age of 30 (e.g. in Germany), if you are not willing to change the academic system to circumvent recent rules of 'academic age' associated with a lot of newly created tenure positions. Funnily it will actually be quite easy to get a professorship at one of our universities of applied sciences if you come from industry with a track record and have a PhD (even obtained at 60). At the same time salary of a professor (at least for his work at the uni) will be more comparable to junior staff in other parts of the industry/world. The academic job market is very strange. General recommendation: don't do your PhD if you care mostly about this part and do not want to take a huge risk.
- Handytinge 5y ago
  This bizare notion that university exists for the purpose of getting jobs is fairly recent throughout most of the world, and should be stomped. Outside of a few specialised fields (medicine, law, etc), the purpose of university was to learn, challenge and grow. This crazy concept that everyone should go there to get a degree for their career is just degrading the institutions and fleecing students of their money.
martingoodson 5y ago
After hiring many industry researchers at MSc and PhD level, I think the ones with PhDs are better researchers. The knowledge they gained of their niche subject is not that important but their ability to do research is very important. If you need to do complex multi year research projects (e.g. developing new machine learning algorithms), a PhD is useful. It teaches you how to plan research, break through research blockages and communicate with others to a degree very difficult to gain in any other way.
ComradePhil 5y ago
Clearly to tell everyone about it. I hope it was worth it.
sjg007 5y ago
This is so awesome! I like to think it’s our life experiences that really bring a lot to science. So much of it is interdisciplinary these days and there’s so much opportunity to explore and be creative.
yrgulation 5y ago
As soon as i reach retirement age i am undertaking a phd in a space related field. Edit: or as soon as i have enough money in the bank to not care about work.
- lagrange77 5y ago
  That's my plan as well. Let's form a study group then.
- JoeDaDude 5y ago
  Count me in for the study group. I'm looking a enrolling in graduate physics classes, maybe as soon as this Fall.
k__ 5y ago
One way to age gracefully is by learning new things. Getting a PhD at 60 might not help society as getting it at 30, but it certainly will keep your mind flexible at old age.
jccalhoun 5y ago
I got my phd in communication. Some times when I feel restless at my current job I think about a career change but I would never get another phd. Go to school and take some classes? Sure. I've thought about that a lot. But go through the pressure of preparing a dissertation and defending it again? No thanks.
elric 5y ago
Reading articles like this makes me wish I'd pursued a degree. Simply because without a degree, there is no path to a PhD or any postgrad research. Not that those are currently on my radar, but maybe when I'm in my 50s I'll regret not having the option.
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  It's about the journey, not the destination. The inspirational thing with this story is the combination of insight, skill, and hard work. The degree is the reward for that.
- achenet 5y ago
  you can always start now by doing an undergrad. :) I've had students aged above 50 years old in my undergrad degree, and I plan on going back to school myself for another undergrad in an unrelated field in my 30s.
bachmeier 5y ago
> Still, being a part-time graduate student while running a business wasn’t easy. I forgot the meaning of ‘spare time’ for a while, and my company took a financial hit because I could not work as much as I had before, and had to turn down clients. It's somewhat different if you can get a PhD part-time and have the income of a business to support you. By all means, get a PhD on the side if you can make it work.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
limbicsystem 5y ago
Very odd to me to see these two stories (late PhD and 'ed') next to each other in HN. Last night I discovered my great aunt's old notebook from her schooldays and posted it on Insta. https://www.instagram.com/p/Cb3Y6M1sYW-/?utm_medium=copy_link https://www.instagram.com/p/Cb3Y6M1sYW-/?utm_medium=copy_lin... She was, to my knowledge, the oldest person to get a PhD from the University of Edinburgh (starting in her retirement and getting it in her '70s). In the late 1990s she explained to me how she would go in to the University computer labs and write her thesis using 'ed'. Even then I was impressed :)
tzs 5y ago
Although the article is about getting a PhD later in life, many of the comments here have been about the merits of getting a PhD (or a Masters then a PhD) right after finishing undergraduate school. The usual points against are the very low probability of having a successful academic career due to the difficulty of getting a tenured position and the very low chance of actually making a major research contribution to your field, and when you then give up an an academic career and get a job in programming or finance the opportunity cost of the say 6 years you spent not doing that job. It is true that the longer you delay starting that programming or finance career, the farther the gap in income and wealth between you and your fellow undergraduates who went straight into programming or finance. It's like a rocket race in a Newtonian universe. If we have identical rockets capable of constant 1/10 g acceleration and have lifelong race but you get a 6 year head start, the farther we get into the race the bigger the distance between us. In that rocket race after 5 years you'd be 0.4 parsec farther along than me, and you'd be moving away at 0.52 c. After 10 years, you'd be 1.3 parsecs ahead of me, and going 0.64 c faster than me. After 15, the gap is 2.3 parsecs, and you are going 0.65 c faster than me. At 30 years, you are 5.1 parsecs ahead of me, and going 0.68 c faster than me. At 50 years, you are 8.9 parsecs ahead of me, and going 0.72 c faster than me. But in terms of time at 10 years you are 6 years ahead of me. And at year 50 you are still 6 years ahead of me. Anyplace you reach I reach 6 years later. Both of us are going to make so much money that unless we have unusually expensive tastes and hobbies we are both going to be quite well off when we retire even if we retire at the same age, able to continue to live our preferred lifestyles. That 6 year head start of yours largely just means you'll leave a bigger estate when you die. I think this takes a lot of the force out of the opportunity cost argument. On the pro-PhD side on the other hand, at least for STEM PhDs, is that it is ~6 years where are getting paid to learn and research something of great interest to you. And if you turn out to be one of the rare people who actually can have a successful academic career this is the only way you are going to find that out. And don't forget the regret cost in not doing it. I didn't seriously consider graduate school because I was sure I would end up programming anyway. But I didn't lose my interest in math and physics. Many a PBS Space Time episode makes me wish I had a much deeper understanding of physics than I do now. It is possible to learn much of that on your own, but it is a lot harder and slower than it would have been had if I had went to grad school for it.
MrMan 5y ago
I am going to go back to school and get either a chemical or electrical engineering b.s., and then maybe go on to phd, at 51. then we will see about graduate level. I know lots of people still working at 75, so 20 - 30 year for my final career is longer than I spent at any previous career so far.

135 points by breck 5y ago

As much as PhD students are often "funded" by their university, they're only really surviving at best. I'd like to do a PhD more than almost anything. However, at 41 and well into a career with each job paying higher than the last, the opportunity cost is becoming more and more prohibitive. Stepping back from earning (and saving!) for five years seems like a kiss of death to me and a virtual guarantee that I won't be able to retire comfortably. These kinds of articles, while well meaning, really irk me. They come across as completely tone death and inadvertently cast a fair bit of light on the author's personal financial situation (or perhaps their lack of awareness of it).

creakingstairs 5y ago
Doing a PhD later in my life is also my bucket list and I suspect I probably won’t be able to cross it off unless I really prioritise it or get lucky. That being said I think you are being a bit unfair to the author. They do acknowledge that you need to have an opportunity. > My advice is: if you have the opportunity to dive into a new field, take it Also, you are 41 and I would definitely agree that doing one when you are in your 40s would be almost impossible due to things like career, kids and mortgages etc. But the author around 60! I don’t think it’s “tone deaf” to suggest that one may be able to find some freedom to squeeze in a phd while working part time after working till 60. Edit: I will acknowledge that having a good job and being able to comfortably retire or cut income around 60 is a privilege that many people unfortunately won’t have. But I don’t think its unachievable though.
- Beldin 5y ago
  If you can free up one day per week from your regular job, you can pursue a PhD in part-time. It would likely be unfunded, take a little longer, and there may be expenses involved, but still, the option is there. Moreover, this dramatically lowers the opportunity cost.
whathappenedto 5y ago
I'm wondering if you would define a higher than median US salary to be "surviving at best", as most CS PhD programs are at that amount plus health insurance. But certainly far from a FAANG salary, and I agree that there are disciplines usually with smaller programs that are "surviving at best."
- wh313 5y ago
  The highest stipend I've been offered by a CS PhD program has been 50k. In NYC. Most other offers I had were around the 30k-40k region. The median household income in 2020 was $67,521 [1] [1]: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-273.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27...
  - myle 5y ago
    At ETH in Zurich it is around 60k.
    - Matumio 5y ago
      Of course there is also cost of living, and, quoting the AVETH survival guide (2012): "It is common in many departments to reduce the amount of payment from 100 percent to 80 percent or 60 percent. However, you are still expected to work full time. Make sure you know what you are about to sign."
  - swimfar 5y ago
    That's not the correct comparison. Household income often includes two incomes, which is going to bring the value up. Your same link says the median earnings for a male individual is $61,417. Not significantly less, but this distinction is often important.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > The median household income in 2020 was $67,521 Median personal income is around $36k. [0] Annualized median earnings of the full-time employed are around $52k. [1] Households often have more multiple income earners. [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N [1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t01.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t01.htm
dagw 5y ago
At least here in Sweden it is not uncommon for employers to help sponsor employees getting their PhD. The basic deal is you split your time 50/50 between work and study and your research has to be something directly relevant and useful to to company and what you do there. Often you will be directly applying the research you do at the university to a project you have at work, and your work project will be the 'platform' on which your research is tested and evaluated. In exchange the company will pay you 50% of your salary plus a stipend so that your total take home salary doesn't drop off too much. Does such a thing exist where you live?
- triyambakam 5y ago
  Wow, det visste jag inte. Det är jättekul!
  - dagw 5y ago
    Yea, it's called "Industridoktorand" and many of the larger engineering/tech companies (say 1k+ employees) I've been involved with had 1 or 2 people doing it.
- achenet 5y ago
  we have a similar thing in France, called CIFRE :)

GianFabien 5y ago

I started my PhD in software engineering at 51 after decades of work in IT. The point is that if you value money over knowledge and unique experiences, then by all means keep doing what you love the most. Some of use are prepared to build up our savings and then live frugally on less than ramen noodles stipend whist pursuing making a tiny dent in the universe of knowledge in a specialized field. At my university there were dozens of mature age PhD students doing research in a broad spectrum of fields. None of whom I met were rich in materialistic terms.

NonEUCitizen 5y ago
Which university is this (that seems open to mature age students)?
- R0b0t1 5y ago
  And as a follow up to this, are there any that are open to nontraditional students with an interest in research? Stopping everything you are doing for a minimum of 4 years is a complete nonstarter for the majority of working people, some of which would be great at research.
- 019341097 5y ago
  I'm a mature student returning this year. I'd say a lot of universities in Ontario are very open to mature students, and they've really made the process easy. I can't speak to other places, but I've been very pleasantly surprised.
- Shorel 5y ago
  Which aren't?
- GianFabien 5y ago
  In Australia, all Group 8 universities (most are in the World Top 100 rankings) will accept mature age students. It's not your age, it is your research proposal that earns a place. Typically you need a prior research Masters in a related field and bring a substantial amount of industry experience and connections. Universities are encouraged to increase their collaborations with industry. In order to prepare a successful proposal you need to read 20-100 recent papers in the field and cite at least 10 of them. Going to conferences is good for social networking, but you will only get a briefest summary of the research being conducted. The purpose of a presentation at a conference is to raise sufficient interest for some of the attendees to read the presenter's paper(s).

TedShiller 5y ago

boredom, counterintuitively, can be a powerful motivator

brutus1213 5y ago

Here is a possibly unpopular opinion. I have a Phd (got it when I was young). In some areas of computing (e.g. OS, Systems) work gets obsolete fairly quickly. I suspect my PhD topic was useless about 4-10 years after I finished the thesis. Of course, I got a few hundred citations, and this suggests that perhaps more enduring work was done based on mine, but in any case, I don't buy the dent in the universe argument for some fast changing fields (e.g. Deep Learning today). My wife was reading the life story of Louis Pasteur to our 6 year old, and it was remarkable what a dent his contribution made. Most people I knew who finished Phds did not do much of note (and this is fairly elite tier). One person has an algorithm named after them but it is also a bit obsolete (e.g. happened to a lot of classical CV and NLU algorithms post DL). I was talking to a theoretical Physics PhD at a conference recently, and even he was quite jaded (he switched to CS post PhD). It was obvious that this person was wicked smart and had quant knowledge. So if you want a PhD for transferable skills, go for it! A masters might be faster though. Do what makes you happy at the end.. it is sort of nice I can drop in the fact I have a PhD and it was probably good for me on the whole .. but if you are thinking of getting a PhD in CS, consider attending top conferences in your field before committing (e.g. SOSP for OS/Systems, CVPR for vision, CHI for HCI,...). I just had no clue what I was getting into and I actively wish someone had given me this sort of info before I got into it. A PhD has a huge opportunity cost.

beambot 5y ago
Whenever anyone asks about pursuing a PhD, I usually tell them it only makes sense if one of more of these hold true: (1) You want to pursue a career in academia or research where the credentialing will matter; (2) You want access to equipment or material that is otherwise difficult to obtain; (3) You want the freedom & flexibility to pursue random interests for another couple years; or (4) You have a deep affinity for a specific topic at the frontiers of human knowledge. The PhD definitely isn't required if your goal is to maximize learning & earning, apply research to commercialization, or to make a huge dent on the world -- the latter is just exceedingly rare statistically speaking.
light_hue_1 5y ago
> In some areas of computing (e.g. OS, Systems) work gets obsolete fairly quickly That's a very surprising statement. The number of advances in systems in the 21st century is.. embarrassingly low. It feels like a stale dead field. People keep pumping money into what is basically a dead body at this point. > consider attending top conferences in your field before committing (e.g. SOSP for OS/Systems, CVPR for vision, CHI for HCI,...). I I don't think that this is good advice. Certainly I would never suggest it to my own students. It's hard to see what they would gain. So you go to CVPR or NeurIPS, you see hundreds of posters per session and talk after talk. Maybe you stick around for workshops to interact with people. So what? This gives you zero information about what you will be doing as a PhD student or how useful your PhD will be. The way to figure out if you want to do a PhD is simple: do research first. Spend a summer in a research lab related to some topic you like and figure out if you like it. > I was talking to a theoretical Physics PhD at a conference recently, and even he was quite jaded (he switched to CS post PhD). Speaking of dead fields... I know many postdocs who come from physics into ML because many areas of theoretical physics just don't seem to be going anywhere anymore. Not a good sign!

refurb 5y ago

If your goal is actually “pursue scientific advances” rather than “put food on the table”, “make sure I get a job when I graduate” or “make my PI look good”, then doing it at 61 makes perfect sense.

dagw 5y ago
My aunt did her PhD after she retired. Through working for decades in her field she had developed a hunch and a personal theory about the best way to do a thing, and she basically just wanted to see if she was right.
- philshem 5y ago
  I would like to read about your aunt!

jarenmf 5y ago

I think there are actually many advantages to doing a PhD at an older age. Especially after having a fairly long work experience and if you can bring that to another field say Biology.

mgaunard 5y ago

3 years working an engineering job will teach you much more than doing a PhD.

pjmlp 5y ago
Depends pretty much if the company is doing real engineering, the one accepted by the Engineering Order, and not putting an "engineer" label on coders out of boot camps.
nikanj 5y ago
It will teach you more about engineering. Most jobs aren’t pushing the boundary of CS knowledge, or doing important discoveries
captainmuon 5y ago
I learned a lot in my PhD that I wouldn't have learned in my subsequent engineering job: Public speaking with confidence, how to be proactive in your job, how to apply for public funding, teaching experience. How to present results, and how to write. I had exposure to what (at that time) were rare computing resources, which is useful now with in the cloud era. And I learned a ton about my specific field of course - which is probably not monetarily useful, but was a lot of fun and you can't learn it in such depth anywhere else.
dagw 5y ago
They teach entirely different things. My first 3 years working taught me a lot about the real world practicalities of writing useful software, as a team, that you can charge money for. It taught me very little about doing research or the cutting edge of my field. I suspect a PhD would be the exact opposite.
physicsguy 5y ago
The biggest difference between working and research is that you're free to just try things out without so much pressure.
- sdk16420 5y ago

exdsq 5y ago

It’s never too late if it’s something you want to do :) Hell, I have a friend who’s 20 years into his DPhil taking it at a snails pace, but gives him accommodation when he’s in town for the pub. People talking about how much of a dent you’ll make within your PhDs field… almost definitely zero! Your thesis will probably be read by you, your supervisor, and viva board. You’re still a student and it’s a course on how to do research. It could be fun to dig deep into a subject and that’s a totally awesome reason to do one, making a significant change to your field is very very very unlikely.

bo1024 5y ago

Funny, the article explains “how”, but I don’t see any discussion of “why” at all.

voxl 5y ago
Because the "why" is always going to be personal. A PhD in CS is never going to be a sane financial choice, and it has heavy risks if you find yourself with a bad advisor. Anyone who has thought about doing a PhD critically knows that there is no reason to tell someone else to do one, and that their reasons for doing one likely only apply to them.
- bo1024 5y ago
  Well, it's funny (haha and peculiar) because of the title.
- Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  It depends on the area of CS. Eg: a PhD from a good group in NLP/CV or ML generally can get you a fantastic well-paying position in industry that would be out of reach without the PhD. Same for, e.g., cryptography.

captainmuon 5y ago

The funny thing is that while it is possible to get a PhD at an advanced age, it is probably impossible to land a scientific job at that age. Sometimes I think when the kids are grown up and I've saved enough for retirement, I'd like to go into science again. Just for fun. I would probably be happy to move to some crazy place and get an intern's salary if the project was interesting and meaningful. Alas, that doesn't seem possible in the academic system.

riedel 5y ago
Actually it gets harder and harder to pursue an academic 'career' if you actually obtain your PhD inside the traditional system later than the age of 30 (e.g. in Germany), if you are not willing to change the academic system to circumvent recent rules of 'academic age' associated with a lot of newly created tenure positions. Funnily it will actually be quite easy to get a professorship at one of our universities of applied sciences if you come from industry with a track record and have a PhD (even obtained at 60). At the same time salary of a professor (at least for his work at the uni) will be more comparable to junior staff in other parts of the industry/world. The academic job market is very strange. General recommendation: don't do your PhD if you care mostly about this part and do not want to take a huge risk.
Handytinge 5y ago
This bizare notion that university exists for the purpose of getting jobs is fairly recent throughout most of the world, and should be stomped. Outside of a few specialised fields (medicine, law, etc), the purpose of university was to learn, challenge and grow. This crazy concept that everyone should go there to get a degree for their career is just degrading the institutions and fleecing students of their money.

martingoodson 5y ago

After hiring many industry researchers at MSc and PhD level, I think the ones with PhDs are better researchers. The knowledge they gained of their niche subject is not that important but their ability to do research is very important. If you need to do complex multi year research projects (e.g. developing new machine learning algorithms), a PhD is useful. It teaches you how to plan research, break through research blockages and communicate with others to a degree very difficult to gain in any other way.

ComradePhil 5y ago

Clearly to tell everyone about it. I hope it was worth it.

sjg007 5y ago

This is so awesome! I like to think it’s our life experiences that really bring a lot to science. So much of it is interdisciplinary these days and there’s so much opportunity to explore and be creative.

yrgulation 5y ago

As soon as i reach retirement age i am undertaking a phd in a space related field. Edit: or as soon as i have enough money in the bank to not care about work.

lagrange77 5y ago
That's my plan as well. Let's form a study group then.
JoeDaDude 5y ago
Count me in for the study group. I'm looking a enrolling in graduate physics classes, maybe as soon as this Fall.

k__ 5y ago

One way to age gracefully is by learning new things. Getting a PhD at 60 might not help society as getting it at 30, but it certainly will keep your mind flexible at old age.

jccalhoun 5y ago

I got my phd in communication. Some times when I feel restless at my current job I think about a career change but I would never get another phd. Go to school and take some classes? Sure. I've thought about that a lot. But go through the pressure of preparing a dissertation and defending it again? No thanks.

elric 5y ago

Reading articles like this makes me wish I'd pursued a degree. Simply because without a degree, there is no path to a PhD or any postgrad research. Not that those are currently on my radar, but maybe when I'm in my 50s I'll regret not having the option.

jillesvangurp 5y ago
It's about the journey, not the destination. The inspirational thing with this story is the combination of insight, skill, and hard work. The degree is the reward for that.
achenet 5y ago
you can always start now by doing an undergrad. :) I've had students aged above 50 years old in my undergrad degree, and I plan on going back to school myself for another undergrad in an unrelated field in my 30s.

bachmeier 5y ago

> Still, being a part-time graduate student while running a business wasn’t easy. I forgot the meaning of ‘spare time’ for a while, and my company took a financial hit because I could not work as much as I had before, and had to turn down clients. It's somewhat different if you can get a PhD part-time and have the income of a business to support you. By all means, get a PhD on the side if you can make it work.

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limbicsystem 5y ago

Very odd to me to see these two stories (late PhD and 'ed') next to each other in HN. Last night I discovered my great aunt's old notebook from her schooldays and posted it on Insta. https://www.instagram.com/p/Cb3Y6M1sYW-/?utm_medium=copy_link https://www.instagram.com/p/Cb3Y6M1sYW-/?utm_medium=copy_lin... She was, to my knowledge, the oldest person to get a PhD from the University of Edinburgh (starting in her retirement and getting it in her '70s). In the late 1990s she explained to me how she would go in to the University computer labs and write her thesis using 'ed'. Even then I was impressed :)

tzs 5y ago

Although the article is about getting a PhD later in life, many of the comments here have been about the merits of getting a PhD (or a Masters then a PhD) right after finishing undergraduate school. The usual points against are the very low probability of having a successful academic career due to the difficulty of getting a tenured position and the very low chance of actually making a major research contribution to your field, and when you then give up an an academic career and get a job in programming or finance the opportunity cost of the say 6 years you spent not doing that job. It is true that the longer you delay starting that programming or finance career, the farther the gap in income and wealth between you and your fellow undergraduates who went straight into programming or finance. It's like a rocket race in a Newtonian universe. If we have identical rockets capable of constant 1/10 g acceleration and have lifelong race but you get a 6 year head start, the farther we get into the race the bigger the distance between us. In that rocket race after 5 years you'd be 0.4 parsec farther along than me, and you'd be moving away at 0.52 c. After 10 years, you'd be 1.3 parsecs ahead of me, and going 0.64 c faster than me. After 15, the gap is 2.3 parsecs, and you are going 0.65 c faster than me. At 30 years, you are 5.1 parsecs ahead of me, and going 0.68 c faster than me. At 50 years, you are 8.9 parsecs ahead of me, and going 0.72 c faster than me. But in terms of time at 10 years you are 6 years ahead of me. And at year 50 you are still 6 years ahead of me. Anyplace you reach I reach 6 years later. Both of us are going to make so much money that unless we have unusually expensive tastes and hobbies we are both going to be quite well off when we retire even if we retire at the same age, able to continue to live our preferred lifestyles. That 6 year head start of yours largely just means you'll leave a bigger estate when you die. I think this takes a lot of the force out of the opportunity cost argument. On the pro-PhD side on the other hand, at least for STEM PhDs, is that it is ~6 years where are getting paid to learn and research something of great interest to you. And if you turn out to be one of the rare people who actually can have a successful academic career this is the only way you are going to find that out. And don't forget the regret cost in not doing it. I didn't seriously consider graduate school because I was sure I would end up programming anyway. But I didn't lose my interest in math and physics. Many a PBS Space Time episode makes me wish I had a much deeper understanding of physics than I do now. It is possible to learn much of that on your own, but it is a lot harder and slower than it would have been had if I had went to grad school for it.

MrMan 5y ago

I am going to go back to school and get either a chemical or electrical engineering b.s., and then maybe go on to phd, at 51. then we will see about graduate level. I know lots of people still working at 75, so 20 - 30 year for my final career is longer than I spent at any previous career so far.