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JoshuaFox comments on Grad Student Advice Repository - Less Wrong
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Only do a PhD if
If all these are true, go for it! You can live the student life and have fun becoming the best in the world in something.
Background: I did a PhD in Harvard and am now working in something else. All four conditions are true for me. As far as I can, I would have done no worse or better in this career if I had gone straight into it from my BA.
All of these are true for me (or could be true if I applied to grad school again, and this time accepted offers like ones I rejected this time), but I am not going to get a PhD, because an MS in my field (computer engineering) is sufficient to get the high paying jobs I want, so I can start making lots of money for effective altruism sooner.
Your experience isn't just true "for me", it's true statistically. A Master's degree in most STEM fields (IIRC) is an investment, and a better investment than you can find in the market if you're smart enough. A doctorate in most (all?) fields is partly a consumable - it leads to higher expected starting salaries, and even higher salaries than one would have had by spending those PhD years accumulating job experience, but not enough higher to make up for the lost income during those years.
Of course, a PhD is valuable in more ways than just income, and I don't regret mine despite some delays which make the above economics worse. But everyone should know what they're getting into.
Sure, the PhD is on the whole an income-reducer, whether because of the opportunity cost for those years, or because of the reduced income afterwards.
It's only worthwhile if you enjoy it enough that the reduced income doesn't bother you.
Do you know of a way for estimating this? Every research problem (and the entire PhD itself) might look much easier before you start working on it (you don't have an outside view perspective before starting).
Nothing is guaranteed, but a good adviser and good personal focus should allow you to finish it off.
Again, no guaranteed answers, but if a given problem is too big, you can redefine your thesis to a narrower part of the problem.
What do you do if you want to do a PhD, satisfy all the other criteria, and DON'T have other career options available?
I can't imagine that doing a PhD is worse than sitting on your ass unemployed, but if you have ideas about this I'd be interested to hear.
OK, assuming that those criteria are satisfied, then you can start the PhD and drop out with an MA -- which is paid for, unlike most MA's.
Where I got my PhD, you could drop out after one year, simply having completed the courses of that year, and you'd get the MA.
If you're in a top program in physics or similar hard sciences, you can use this approach as a stepping stone to finance jobs.
This is true for my program too, although one year wasn't enough time for me to figure out other things I wanted to do.
I hear this regularly, but I still don't understand how it works. Does this come from networking that happens at top schools, or are there finance companies actively recruiting PhDs? What qualifies as a "top program"? A department well respected in the field or a university famous for other reasons? Is a famous adviser at a poorly-known school better or worse than the reverse?
I am not familiar with the details myself, but I understand that the top schools would include MIT, Harvard, and maybe 4 or 5 more. Physics is apparently the top program for this, though math and others might qualify.
Also, I read that the demand for physicists etc. has gone down, now that Wall Street has realized what math is actually needed to be a quant. The math is pretty simple, and can be learned specifically for the purpose rather than in a PhD program.
Then create some career options for yourself. A PhD is unlikely to be the way to do so, however.
I may agree with you, but that doesn't give me constructive advice for people who are in or considering PhDs and not interested in much else.
That seems surprising. What career is it?
Software