EE Ph.D. or IBM job?

juillet
Sun, 24 Feb 2013 17:05:07 +0000

If you’re not sure that you actually want a PhD and a research career in electrical engineering, then take the job. If you work for a few years and decide that you still want a PhD, graduate school is going anywhere. And you’ll be a few thousand dollars richer - you may even find that IBM will fund some graduate study for you or hire you back once you have completed the PhD.

It is definitely harder to start a PhD and see that it isn’t for you, then have to start the job search all over again, than it is for you to work for a year and then see that you really want a PhD. Compared to job searching in a tight market, applying to graduate school is easy. And a year of working as an engineer will only help your application, whereas if you start job searching after a year in a doctoral program you will have to explain what you were doing in a year and why you want to leave.

The “advancing the field” argument is kind of shaky. A lot of students think they want to advance the field because they don’t realize the reality of doing research as a scholar. But even if you did, there are a lot of ways that you can advance the field without a PhD and being a researcher in academia. A company like IBM is surely advancing the field, and their BS-level engineers are likely a part of that even if they aren’t directing the research themselves.

If you are happy, and decide that the job is great for you, that you’ve made good friends, love the city that you live in and you have good pay with good benefits - and decide not to go back for the PhD for those reasons - I fail to see how that is a problem. After all, isn’t that the goal of getting a PhD anyway? If you can get all that without having to get a PhD, why bother?

And as far as having “more opportunities than you’ll care to know” in 5-6 years with a PhD, please check out these two articles:

[The Ph.D Bust: America’s Awful Market for Young Scientists?in 7 Charts - Jordan Weissmann - The Atlantic](The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists&mdash;in 7 Charts - The Atlantic)
[The Ph.D. Bust, Pt. II: How Bad Is the Job Market For Young American-Born Scientists? - Jordan Weissmann - The Atlantic](The Ph.D. Bust, Pt. II: How Bad Is the Job Market for Young American-Born Scientists? - The Atlantic)