&gt; Look, a PhD is for one thing, and one thing only: Teaching you to be a researcher.<p>I disagree - there&#x27;s <i>tons</i> of skills you learn in the process which are useful in other contexts - the most important, in my opinion, is learning how to write well and communicate complicated ideas to others.<p>If you go into industry, then depending on what you studied and what kind of job you have, the knowledge of a given field (networking, graphics, compilers, computer vision etc) can be extremely helpful.