When deciding to do my PhD I did so under the assumption that I wouldn't work in academia afterward. I evaluated it like a any other job offer at the time and decided that the tax free pay, coupled with the freedom to run my project how I wanted and work on what I wanted (within reason) for a fixed period of time was a better offer than a grad scheme with BAE, Nissan, Seimens etc.
Doing a PhD built a large array of skills that I didn't have from my undergrad and allowed me to learn practical skills in a fairly low risk environment and explore other avenues. It let me realise that I wanted to start a business, it taxed me mentally like nothing before, it prepared me to hold myself accountable and that if I don't do the work then it doesn't get done and gave me the breathing space to work out what I wanted to do that my undergrad didn't.
As the article says, I don't think a PhD is only valuable for a career in academia, it can be an excellent bridge to industry if you are prepared for that at the end.
This is basically the same thing I did, except that I worked as a programmer at a startup before going back to school for a PhD.
It was better than doing a startup by a stupidly huge margin. Startups are all about risk-minimization and risk-mitigation, since risky things mostly fail, and so use up your runway without moving you closer to success. So in a startup you are highly incentivized not to take big risks -- and research is always a risk. So you are driven to take an engineering mindset, where the apex of skill is to solve a new problem using only old, entirely proven techniques.
In contrast, after my first project as a PhD student, my advisor straight-up told me that I needed to shed the engineering mindset to succeed. Inventing new techniques was the goal, and so you need to adopt a mentality of confronting problems head on (rather than designing the system to avoid confronting them).
Basically a PhD puts you in an environment where you can take on big, poorly-understood and poorly-defined problems and attack them over and over again. Going from a blank sheet of paper to a solution (or clear failure) in six months 10 times over is an amazing way of improving your skills, and IME it's really hard to get this experience in industry (even though it's really valuable to have this experience in industry).
Wow. I'm a few months into a PhD after having worked at a startup for a number of years, I just completed my first project, and just a few weeks ago my advisor had the "you need to stop thinking like you're building a product" talk with me. It's definitely tough to make that mindset change.
>In contrast, after my first project as a PhD student, my advisor straight-up told me that I needed to shed the engineering mindset to succeed. Inventing new techniques was the goal, and so you need to adopt a mentality of confronting problems head on (rather than designing the system to avoid confronting them).
If you have the mindset for this type of work, then a PhD is an amazing experience. There are only a select few places that give you that much freedom.
If you don't have this mindset, a PhD will make you very angry, and you'll feel like you've wasted several years of your life.
I'd never thought about it quite like that but that really matches my experience. Most of what I tried didn't work but I got to keep trying other ways without some yelling about why attempts 1, 2 and 3 failed. Great fun looking back, glad I'm not still in academia though.
> the freedom to run my project how I wanted and work on what I wanted (within reason) for a fixed period of time was a better offer than a grad scheme with BAE, Nissan, Seimens etc.
Don't know where you're doing your PhD (based on your comment about tax-free pay, I gather you're not in the States). That's not how things work in most places. You enter grad school with a vague idea of what research you want to do, and in 9 out of 10 cases you'll be doing something entirely different. The research you'll be doing is whatever your advisor has funding for. It's not "your" project at all, it's your advisor's, and your job is to produce the deliverables that he promised as part of his grant proposal. Consequently, you have very little freedom about what you're doing and how you're doing it.
The department had a CASE (I think that’s right, it was 7 years ago since I left) award which funded the fairly broad topic of resilient electronics over multiple years and I was able to carve out a segment of that for high temperature energy harvesting (no point developing high temperature sensors if you can power them). I decided the direction, I determined what the project needed and so long as it worked towards high temperature energy harvesting I was good to go. My supervisor was amazing, on day 1 he said “I have two aims. 1: to get you passed and out the door in 3 years and 2: make sure you could do my job at the end of those three years” as a result of point 2 we were given a lot of breadth on self management and point 1 meant he was always around if we needed him - I never had to wait more than 6 hours to see him unless he was on holiday
I'd guess UK and in my experience your description is correct - people can only have a very vague idea when they start a PhD and you've got to work out the detail of what exactly you are doing with your supervisor over the first 6 months to 1 year.
Wow what? Is the US? I def got taxed -- and audited because the funding agency screwed up some paperwork -- on my PhD income, while on federal fellowships no less.
Doing a PhD built a large array of skills that I didn't have from my undergrad and allowed me to learn practical skills in a fairly low risk environment and explore other avenues. It let me realise that I wanted to start a business, it taxed me mentally like nothing before, it prepared me to hold myself accountable and that if I don't do the work then it doesn't get done and gave me the breathing space to work out what I wanted to do that my undergrad didn't.
As the article says, I don't think a PhD is only valuable for a career in academia, it can be an excellent bridge to industry if you are prepared for that at the end.