What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD
I have a PhD in aerospace engineering.<p>I loved grad school. Loved loved loved it. I wouldn&#x27;t give up the worst day I had in grad school for almost anything. And I love having the skills it taught me. I am a much better engineer and researcher than I could possibly have been had I taken almost any other route. I was given freedom in grad school that just would not have been present in most industry jobs. I was given a hardware project - a submersible robot - that I was completely in charge of on day 1. I had to teach myself machining, how to do electrical and electonicd works, how to do embedded programming, how to tune a PID loop. How to work with other students. How to give a persuasive presentation. How to come uo with my own ideas, how to convince other people that they were worth pursuing, how to quickly become an expert in a topic.<p>That being said, I am not under any illusions about the financial loss I experienced. I spent ten years making a pauper&#x27;s wage, when if I had chosen to go into industry I would have been a software engineer... in the Valley... in 1993.<p>I also was in a remarkable lab in grad school. It made top-ten lists of “coolest college lab”. And that wasn&#x27;t hype. The caliber of student and of professor was off the charts. And they were not only smart, the vast majority of them were good people. A lot of places aren&#x27;t like that. And as the srticle correctly said: a toxic graduate school environment is worse than most toxic work environments. In any practical sense, students don&#x27;t have HR protections. If you can&#x27;t get your advisor to write you a recommendation, getting into a different program is nearly impossible. You can be worked 100 hours a week. You can be blackballed for getting sick, for taking vacations, for taking maternity or paternity leave (even if it is - and it almost certainly will be - unpaid).<p>The key is to find an advisor who is doing good work and who is sane and moral. If you can find that you&#x27;re golden. If you can&#x27;t you may be completely screwed.