If doing a PhD will bring no career benefits, it gets harder to submit to all of the limitations on one’s life that come with going back to a degree program.
I took a break after I got my MA in a humanities field. I eventually planned to return for a PhD, but then two things happened in the intervening years: 1) I was already able to write up journal articles and successfully get them published, because in double-blind peer review all that mattered was the strength of my research and my familiarity with the literature, and no one knew or cared that I had only an MA; and 2) I got used to traveling a lot and having a very flexible schedule, because as my day job I established a remote freelancing career.
Now people are interested in my research and inviting me to come back and do a PhD, but I’m not sure I can ever go back to having to wake up early in the morning, sit in a boring seminar, be pressured to take on teaching duties, and not be able to escape to a warm country in the cold winter. (That’s me, others may want e.g. more time to spend with their families.) I talk to my colleagues and get the impression that I have more time for research than they do, because anyone in a formal position is saddled with bullshit administration duties.
I realize that I am lucky to be interested in a humanities field. I know that in hard sciences, you cannot meaningfully contribute to the field without access to a lab and other such infrastructure, and therefore you have to go back to a university position.
Maybe reaching out to international faculties in your field could be an idea?
E.g., in Germany you get the entire spectrum from “be a professors slave for 6 years with minimum pay” to “I don’t care where you are - but the publications count”.
I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that there are quite a few professors in Europe who would be willing to guide you through (the relatively light weight bureaucracy) PhD process as long as you create and publish high quality research.
Usually a PhD process requires SOME formal training (e.g., attending a fee seminars), peer-reviewed publications and a cumulative summary over your research.
Personally I respect somebody who “freestyled” his way through PhD as measured by research output a lot. E.g., quite a few women take that route along with maternity leaves; which is great because of flexibility without compromise on quality.
I mean, in CS, engineering, physics, there are plenty of areas where you don’t need a lab per se but can just simulate etc. I must admit that depending in the field interaction with fellow PhD students can be super great an valuable (that’s just gonna make life harder for you if you don’t take advantage of it).
> E.g., in Germany you get the entire spectrum from “be a professors slave for 6 years with minimum pay” to “I don’t care where you are - but the publications count”.
Yea... I wanted to start PhD this year. Unfortunately it turned out that the only thing that counts, are my previous and future publications. Any work experience seems like a disadvantage. They value more someone with no experience, but with a couple of, usually not very inventive, publications.
I have over 18 years of work experience. I used to make more complicated things at work, than you can find in many published papers or even PhDs. So I asked a professor about how to start it.
It turned out that: the pay is much below the minimum salary + I will be thrown away if I won't have one publication in a good journal after the first year. If you also think that after sending a paper to a journal, they usually reply in six-nine months with a rejection or a list of comments to fix... it turned out that I have to start my PhD with a bunch of papers already written. And to have them count, they need to be exactly about the same topic as my PhD.
So, after rethinking all this, I stopped dreaming about a PhD. I can publish my paper on arXiv without all the academic fun.
This feels basically exactly like my experience too this year and last. I even had a professor tell me straight up when I emailed him that I basically wouldn’t get in since he already had prospective students with publications in the exact area reach out to him. I’ve kind of realized that without a string of publications ahead of time you’re basically out of the game before you even try. It’s like you have to have done PhD level work before you can do the PhD. It’s left me totally lost on what to do from here, getting a PhD has been a life dream for me so it’s hard to ditch the idea. I guess we might be in the same boat.
Don't despair. PhD life looks good from the outside because all parties involved (students, professors, administrators) have incentives to make it look good. The reality can be much different.
Besides, you've got to think how would you use this degree after you finish. Inside academia, you will be locked in a job with a mid-low salary with scarce options to advance. Outside of academia, PhD is less valued than most people think. I know quite a few people who do great research in the industry with only a BSc degree.
> I know quite a few people who do great research in the industry with only a BSc degree.
But what kind of recognition do they get? I know somebody who worked at some really good labs for ~10 years and did great work. He co-authored a couple of Nature (?) papers of which he did most of the work and writing. But ultimately with a BSc you're just a lab tech and nobody takes you seriously.
OTOH, that person just finished his Ph.D at Harvard but this is pretty much the end of the road for him--I don't think he's keen on navigating the cut-throat world of academia or commercial research.
It's kind of a lose-lose. If you love basic research, no recognition and you're stuck following orders. If you want recognition and some autonomy, you're stuck playing politics.
This is something that definitely weighs on my mind, I think. I've got an MSc, but I feel intense self-doubt and feel like I can't be an expert until I've gotten a PhD. In that sense maybe I've internalized the idea, and telling myself I'm not "qualified" to speak on issues of science in my field. And not to mention, doing a PhD brings the benefit of several years of being able to devote full time to learning and development. A full-time job can (should) be a growth environment but one's work will always be subordinate to business needs (most often applying knowledge you have rather than learning new things), and take most of the time of your week.
The quest for autonomy and recognition is rough, it's a very tough game and it's not easy to stay motivated at trying to make progress.
They get paid well. Most of the stuff they do cannot be published due to intellectual property reasons, so they indeed miss out on academic recognition. This is a trade-off one has to make.
Sad to hear the story of that person. Ideally, you should not start a PhD unless you have a burning question to answer and need ample time to study it. Given that a career post-graduation is not guaranteed, it's best to hedge your bets and study something that has immediate applications and/or gives you transferable skills.
The big draw for me is to be able to actually invent and innovate and not just implement old ideas over and over in a boring corporate space. All the exciting research jobs I see in my field (NLP) require a PhD, so I feel like I'll hit a career ceiling at some point and be implementing boring corporate solutions for the rest of my life and never really innovating.
But as you say, appearances can be deceptive and it's like the grass is always greener, so maybe I need to broaden my horizons somehow. It's definitely hard to find that path at the moment though.
Edit: Oh and I do have to admit the fancy title that lets me feel like I'm truly educated and learned, and satisfies credentialism in the world is a draw too... Peer pressure is a hell of a drug
Companies explicitly requiring a PhD is an unfortunate consequence of having too many PhDs being already out there and additionally produced each year. If you have done some interesting work and can get in touch with a recruiter, you can probably challenge that requirement in your case.
If you don't have a PhD, you do have to compete with everyone who has it. But it is still possible to gain an edge on them by simply studying what your prospective employers need. For PhD students, it is actually harder to do that unless their PI is doing something closely related.
Just a hypothesis: that professor would have abused you as a working slave. And he knew that no person in his right mind with significant work experience and “above minimum pay” could be Ok with it.
I suspect it had nothing to do with your qualifications - rather he probably wanted to avoid saying “sorry, but I wont be able to abuse you enough”.
At no institution in Germany have I head of “if you don’t publish in a year, you are out”. Usually you work 2 years as a slave with no context what your research is and after the first couple of years, you are allowed “to think loudly about a topic”.
This encounter is not “normal”... Keep looking. And yes: Academia knows that industry works on hard shit. And they often don’t want “outsiders to take a look under the rug”... They create a fake world to justify themselves more often than not...
>Personally I respect somebody who “freestyled” his way through PhD as measured by research output a lot. E.g., quite a few women take that route along with maternity leaves
Nitpick: You may want to change "his way" to the gender neutral "their way" especially since you use women taking maternity leave as an example. :)
> I know that in hard sciences, you cannot meaningfully contribute to the field without access to a lab and other such infrastructure
Well, that's not quite true I guess, because in most areas of math, or theoretical physics, you certainly don't need much beyond pen, paper, and (usually) a reasonable computer.
In physics, I suspect the value of collaboration is a major effect keeping research bound to the universities and national labs. Single-author papers are quite rare. The big experimental groups infamously have 100- or 1000-author papers, but even in theory, a 10-author paper is no longer particularly surprising.
I don't know of any (halfway-reputable) independent researchers in theoretical physics, though. I'm not sure if the above reason justifies that. The more important thing may be that's it's just impossible to get funding without a university/lab appointment.
Actually --- that's a good question. Where does your income for your lovely warm-weather travel come from? Is somebody paying you for research, outside of the strictures of universities?
That’s certainly possible if you start the PhD after finishing a career like the author, and in some fields of research too. I just wanted to point out that more broadly speaking, an advanced degree usually brings financial benefits. The Fed recently published statistics on this that completely surprised me: in the U.S., people with advanced degrees earn on average about 50% more than bachelor’s degree holders, and 3x more than non-degree holders. I had no idea the average difference was that high until I read the report. https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/revie...
Comparing the field of people with PhDs to the field of people with BSs isn't exactly comparable to comparing PhDs to people with Master's degrees who are already doing all the relevant academic work and receiving academic acclaim in the field.
There may be financial benefit, maybe not. There's also the opportunity cost of giving up your career income for four+ years to get a grad student stipend (if it's a program with stipends at all).
I understand you were broadening the point, but I think "first-career PhDs" vs. "second-career PhDs" are the topic under discussion, and broadening it to "bachelor's" is too broad.
Super fair point, you are right. And FWIW, the source I linked to does not differentiate between PhD and Master's, IIRC. I do assume there's a positive benefit, but I'd have to see whether that's supported using some other source. And the GP comment is right as well, regardless of financial benefits; going back to school will come with some limitations and difficulties. I imagine that's true even in the post-career scenario.
Supposing a PhD earned 20% over a masters and it takes 3 years, then it could be a net negative return unless you have 15 years or more of career left after returning to work. That is a valid point and something to consider before going back. The Fed report I linked to is actually arguing that recent trends have changed the balance of opportunity costs when getting degrees. (Though I happen to think the report leaves out some important details and thus frames things in a misleading way.)
Even though I brought up financial side, what I dislike about boiling it down to financial opportunity cost of attending school is that tends to frame the entire outcome as a financial decision, and ignores the opportunity cost or future value of a life getting to do research. In my mind it's better to do the PhD because you want to rather than for the money, and I suspect that people who care more about the research than the money tend to fare better as a byproduct. (That's pure speculation though.)
Yes you're right, and I mentioned it depends on field of research. I did assume this discussion could be talking about MD or JD degrees as easily as a PhD in general - not for the GP comment, but for the average person thinking about going back to school.
The averages aren't that misleading though, since they represent the average choice of degree. If you know you're going to study history, then yes the numbers are too high for you, but the averages are correct for the average person.
You're right that a non-trivial number of professional advanced degree holders making more than $1M/yr. There are also many scientists and engineers and business people doing the same. People making more than $1M/year are statistical outliers, as are history PhDs in the U.S.
Not everyone who could get a PhD does. Compare those number to the 75th or 90th percentile of non-PhD Bachelor's holders, before, uh, getting your statistics PhD.
> but I’m not sure I can ever go back to having to wake up early in the morning, sit in a boring seminar, be pressured to take on teaching duties, and not be able to escape to a warm country in the cold winter
This really isn’t what a PhD is like. A PhD is a research degree - you do research in your own time. You don’t have to be in seminars if you don’t want to and you don’t have to teach (unless you need the money.) Think of a PhD more like a sabbatical to focus on your own research. There’s a goal you need to achieve but freedom in how you get there.
No, this differs from field to field and from country to country. There are only a tiny handful of departments dedicated to my subfield worldwide, and I know that they all require, at the very least, attendance at a weekly seminar so that you can share with your fellow students what you have been up to. In some places, the department can demand that one teach in order to hold a PhD position, or that one take part in the editing of publications produced by the department (which can be so much work that it distracts from one’s own research).
Not trying to say Mediterraneo10 should get a PhD, but PhD life probably sounds very nice to many people in the world without the kind of freedom and financial stability Mediterraneo10 describes. Credit to him/her in achieving such enviable life circumstances!
There isn’t much “fun” about PhD. People who “do it on the side” without “university housing, pay and support” are borderline masochists.
Doing so on your own motivation without family/peer-pressure has my respect. In a First World country generally you don’t have any benefit from a PhD... Much different in “not first world”.
I mean, that ignores the Master's requirement. All PhD programs I've ever looked at have a Master's as part of them, which has all the coursework.
For example, a political science PhD at Columbia (including the Masters) requires a full 12 courses, as well as teaching for at least a year (more if you receive a fellowship, up to 20 hrs/wk).
And you can't do your Masters somewhere else first and then just do the PhD part at Columbia, that's not an option.
Of course. But I was responding to GP which claimed "you don’t have to be in seminars if you don’t want to" as a blanket fact about PhD programs in general. For many (most?), you clearly do, despite there being exceptions of course.
> This really isn’t what a PhD is like. A PhD is a research degree - you do research in your own time. You don’t have to be in seminars if you don’t want to and you don’t have to teach (unless you need the money.)
At least in france there are some minimum legal hours of seminars you have to attend and classes you have to teach during your phd.
In the US the first two years of a PhD are heavily focused on classwork, with a research component; the latter years are the "sabbatical to focus on your own research." People who quit after the first two years are often granted a parting Master's degree, because that's basically what a Master's is - the two years of graduate coursework that kick off a PhD.
From my possibly outdated research, it might be because you don't normally leave university with Master's degree in the USA, just the Bachelors, and there is no "normal" Masters program - essentially you do mastery as part of PhD and then get "moved over" automatically to PhD.
Of course you can leave with Master's degree at that point, it's just that it seemed to me that USA generally didn't got for MSci style degree, not in CS related areas at least.
> but I’m not sure I can ever go back to having to wake up early in the morning, sit in a boring seminar, be pressured to take on teaching duties, and not be able to escape to a warm country in the cold winter.
Oh yeah. I went to med school after having an actual career. Going back to a heavy-handed bureaucracy whose primary intention is to herd a mob of people with the least benefit of doubt is incredibly infantilizing. It's hard to endure the first time, when you're in uni, but after you've already been an adult?
Working on my 2nd master degree on my 60 and found it not worth it. The problem is my interest even if coincide with the course the details are not the same. I would like to use my IT knowledge and my understanding of may philosophical fields ... but who cares about these in those seminars lecturer and classmates (all are seniors) are busy on digging the materials very narrowly. Guess I just quit and do my own knowledge research it would be better. But one thing I would miss is the need to study things which I have no interest - in my case (I am on Philosophy one a Greek guy and a Chinese guy before 500 BC) which work out very useful for my pursuit. Hence, still wonder.
An alternative: one of my lecturers (and a great one) was not a PhD. Full-time faculty member, researcher, lecturer, but somehow wound up there without a doctorate.
OK you don't want to teach, but I suppose my point is if people are already 'interested in your research' which is peer-reviewed & published etc. then maybe they'd consider hiring you without that formal training. Maybe, not like I've tried it.
>as my day job I established a remote freelancing career.
Sorry, I know this is a tangent. Do you have any blog posts about this, or advice you can give now? This would be my dream but I wouldn't even know where to start finding work.
> Now people are interested in my research and inviting me to come back and do a PhD, but I’m not sure I can ever go back to having to wake up early in the morning, sit in a boring seminar, be pressured to take on teaching duties, and not be able to escape to a warm country in the cold winter.
I understand that this may be specific to your sub-field, but this is absolutely not the case for many students. It varies heavily with university and country. I believe it makes a big difference whether you're considered to be a staff member or a student. In the UK you're a student, in Germany, you're staff.
We have several part-time PhD and Masters students in our department and I think the requirements are generally relaxed for them. Most of them work remotely. Many of them also have other jobs, families, etc. One is a sci-fi author!
Here, teaching is something that students occasionally do to earn a bit of money. It's rare though, usually it's only lab supervision or grading - we pay lecturers to teach. So this is absolutely not the case for a lot PhD positions. In the US and other European countries this is different and requirements will vary.
Our lab's core hours are 10 AM - 4 PM. When you go into work is mostly dependent on your supervisor. In the majority of cases they're laid back and as long as research gets done, they're happy. I routinely arrived at midday and left at 6-7PM during my PhD (and I do the same in my postdoc). Similarly nobody cares if you need to take the morning or afternoon off for personal reasons. That said, I know some people who have more traditional supervisors who treat their group like a sweat shop.
Students funded by research councils here get around 8 weeks of holiday a year. I don't think anyone counts though and it's rare for anyone to actually book that much time off. As a postdoc, I get 30 days, plus up to 5 carried over (and that doesn't include forced closures over Christmas). Staff can accrue up to 35 I think. Winter sun is definitely an option. I knew someone at Oxford (mathematics) who took 3 weeks off and just shrugged when we asked if his boss knew where he was. I confess to taking the odd week off, forgetting to tell anyone, and having to call into an unexpected telecon from my campsite.
We do make PhD students attend seminars, but that's mostly to get them involved in research, asking questions, etc. Boring is I guess a matter of opinion - you're expected to hear what other people in your field are doing. On the plus side, our seminars are either on Wednesdays, followed by subsidised dinner with the speaker; or they're on Fridays and followed by pub in the evening.
> I know that in hard sciences, you cannot meaningfully contribute to the field without access to a lab and other such infrastructure, and therefore you have to go back to a university position.
Well this is definitely not true, unless you deal with instrumentation or experimental work. You need infrastructure for sure, but unless you're actually doing practical work that can be remote access. Most students here log into our cluster to do work.
> I talk to my colleagues and get the impression that I have more time for research than they do, because anyone in a formal position is saddled with bullshit administration duties.
This bit is unfortunately true. The higher up you get, the more admin you need to do. And once you go permanent, teaching does become a necessity in most departments.
You mention eight weeks of holiday, and taking three weeks off at a time. That is no different than any non-remote office job in the EU, and it is nowhere near close to being able to leave cold Europe for the entire northern hemisphere winter. I realize that I am fortunate to have found a day job where I can work fully remote (though remote work is fairly mainstream now in my own country), but once you enter this lifestyle, it is really hard to ever go back.
> Boring is I guess a matter of opinion - you're expected to hear what other people in your field are doing.
Obviously anyone interested enough in a field to do a PhD, is going to be interested in the work all the other people are doing. However, that would preferably be done by reading, where one is free to schedule that reading at the times one sees fit, and one is free to skim (which I know everyone does, because otherwise it would be impossible to keep up with the volume of publications). If you have to attend a weekly seminar, you’re on someone else’s schedule, and then you’re stuck there for the entire time of the seminar.
Honestly, I think most institutions would be accommodating to your requests - particularly for mature students who have lives outside the university. Most places aren't going to kick you out if you don't turn up to the weekly seminar, but some people might frown upon it because it would be seen as not integrating. We also encourage PhD students to both give talks and to ask questions at seminars. Ultimately your PhD is not granted on the basis of your attendance to some talks.
I think the deciding factor is probably where your money is coming from. In the UK if you're paying for your tuition, you can usually demand whatever conditions you like. If you're being funded by a specific grant, that might confer some additional requirements defined by the department.
This may not be the case in your particular sub-field, but we have plenty of fully remote students and staff. I know several academics who work half the year in one institution and half in another - though usually that's due to family, not being unhappy about the weather!
I took a break after I got my MA in a humanities field. I eventually planned to return for a PhD, but then two things happened in the intervening years: 1) I was already able to write up journal articles and successfully get them published, because in double-blind peer review all that mattered was the strength of my research and my familiarity with the literature, and no one knew or cared that I had only an MA; and 2) I got used to traveling a lot and having a very flexible schedule, because as my day job I established a remote freelancing career.
Now people are interested in my research and inviting me to come back and do a PhD, but I’m not sure I can ever go back to having to wake up early in the morning, sit in a boring seminar, be pressured to take on teaching duties, and not be able to escape to a warm country in the cold winter. (That’s me, others may want e.g. more time to spend with their families.) I talk to my colleagues and get the impression that I have more time for research than they do, because anyone in a formal position is saddled with bullshit administration duties.
I realize that I am lucky to be interested in a humanities field. I know that in hard sciences, you cannot meaningfully contribute to the field without access to a lab and other such infrastructure, and therefore you have to go back to a university position.