Tuesday, July 03, 2007

The Value of a PhD: One Year Later

I have now had my PhD for one year (actually, 13 months), and I've been reflecting on whether I would recommend that someone pursue one. I wanted to wait a year before considering this so that any slings and arrows from the process were no longer so fresh in my memory. Even with that, I'm not sure that I would recommend to anyone that they pursue a PhD. Obtaining a PhD has nothing to do with your intelligence. Rather, it is a purely psychological process, and not a pleasant one. One friend of mine described it as "You need to pay the devil", saying it could be your pride, or your dignity, (or your friends, family, hobbies, ...) but something needs to be sacrificed. From my perspective, being a graduate student is an extremely degrading position. And once you obtain your PhD, you start from scratch - any previous experience, be it in research or management, is nullified. And while there is generally a different pool of jobs that you are now qualified to perform, that pool is smaller than the one you left and the financial rewards are not necessarily any greater than you would have achieved without the PhD. In general, I would not recommend that anyone pursue a PhD. However, if you still think you might want a PhD, I would recommend that you search your heart to ensure that you have the desire and drive to get the degree, because otherwise you will not finish. And you will likely carry the psychological scars from the process forever.

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you for your response. Very good advice i will consider.

2:34 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Wow, I stopped by to check out if you had any more research from the work you were doing in Network Recon. I’m not going to say “Stop pitting yourself” but you have had the chance to work with some people I think or rather find to be very intelligent in a field I like very much. Heck, didn’t Bejtlich blog about you? While I don’t know what you went through or what you had to sacrifice to get your Ph.D., I for one am glad you did and along the way you furthered the work in Network Recon Detection and Identification (you guys were a little weak in the identification department, by the way.)…

Kind regards and keep it up.

4:59 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

IT should be worth more but it isn`t. 3 years later, I consider mine basically a mistake.

5:40 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Well written blog. I'm in the middle of a PhD and might quit. I can feel what you mean.

12:04 AM  

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