Ask HN: Is PhD the only way to be able to enter research?
A PhD is usually where you learn what research _is_ and how it is done, that&#x27;s the reason why it is usually a &#x27;minimum requirement&#x27;<p>If you plan to spend some years in reading and implementing papers to become a researcher anyway.. You can probably go back to school and get a PhD, this will be way more efficient than randomly reading without guidance.<p>Furthermore, a researcher do not spend his days to implement state of the art algorithms, he tries to push science a little further in very small steps, implementing is just part of the process.<p>Even when you have a PhD, pure research jobs are pretty rare but from your description you are more looking into innovative startups that implement SoTA papers (more R&amp;D than research), this is more common and most of the jobs in robotic require some experimental setup and &quot;research&quot;. In those startup the PhD requirement is often flexible !<p>But this &quot;research&quot; is often very different from the research done in academy.<p>Try to clarify what kind of research you want to do so that people can give you more precise advices :)