Is an engineering PhD right for me?

Graduate School
1

Hoping some of you awesome CCers can offer your wisdom. Apologies in advance for the rambling.

After shifting careers (my BS was in molecular biology), I got a thesis-based MS in Mechanical Engineering from a top 10 school in the field at the age of 27. My thesis and coursework were in the areas of robotics, dynamics, and controls. While obtaining my MS and working on my thesis, I swore that I would never again set foot in academia. Though I loved the material and my research topic, the work eventually turned into a grind. Nearly all of my friends were PhD students, and I’d also seen the toll it had taken on them, in many ways. So, to be clear, I have no illusions of what life is like as a grad student, as I’ve already been there (though not to the extent of being a PhD student).

I graduated and got a job doing less theoretical, more hands-on (compared to research) mechanical design work, which I spent the last couple years on. I enjoyed it at first, but very quickly found myself drawn into doing more theoretical research work at my job, developing mathematical models and writing software to simulate and solve them. I even wrote several thesis-length internal reports. Ultimately, I ended up quitting because there wasn’t much emphasis on R&D at the company and I felt unsatisfied.

Over the last couple years, I’ve grown increasingly interested in machine learning, computer vision, and AI as they pertain to robotics–somewhat relevant to my graduate field of study, but approached from a different angle. To that end, I’ve been trying (unsuccessfully) to break into that industry, which seems to be dominated by PhDs and job postings for PhDs.

Part of me knows the reason I’ve begun considering a PhD is because I’ve been unable to find a job in that particular industry, and I know I shouldn’t get a PhD just in the hope of better job prospects. But it goes deeper than that. My last job showed me that I miss doing research after all. In fact, I thrive on research. And, again, I know I don’t strictly need a PhD to get a research job in robotics/machine learning/computer vision. There are plenty of individuals with MS and BS degrees of varying backgrounds in the field.

But, again, it goes deeper than that. I don’t just want a job. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing a job, or doing just any research job. I want to be at the forefront, on the cutting edge, doing the most interesting work. I want to make some tangible contribution to the state of technology–something lasting. Twenty or thirty years from now, I can’t imagine myself being satisfied without having spent my life tackling intellectually challenging problems. I know a PhD isn’t the only way to accomplish this, but it’ll sure open a lot of doors.

I guess what I’d like to know is: in all my rambling, do you see reasons why I should or shouldn’t pursue a PhD? I’ve only been entertaining the thought for a couple months, now. I’m also worried about age. Assuming I apply for the coming cycle, I’d start next fall at 31. I don’t have a family of my own yet, but I’m discouraged by the idea of living on a stipend and spending the next several years back in school while my friends are moving upward professionally, buying houses, having children, etc. At the same time, if not now, then when? There will be no better time for me to start than now.

2

@AuraObscura - A PhD is a research credential. The purpose of getting a PhD is to train to be able to perform original research and in turn, to make original contributions to the knowledge and state of the art in one’s particular field. If you are truly interested in doing original research in some area of mechanical engineering then that is the reason to pursue a PhD. That said, the vast majority of PhD holders aren’t making cutting edge innovations that completely change the landscape of a technology. In my 25 year career with Bell Labs - which was the largest group of PhDs under one corporate roof- with eight Nobel Prizes to its credit - only a small subset of those PhDs were members of the fundamental research staff doing anything that may have become groundbreaking contributions to technology. Of course, some did - the transistor, laser, microprocessor, communications satellite, discovery of the cosmic microwave background (the present-day remnant of the Big Bang), but for every one of those there were thousands that did not. Many of the PhDs (and engineers with BS and MS) did day to day engineering work to develop the products that kept the former Bell System the world leader in communications.

If you want the chance to produce new technology or make a lasting contribution as you describe, that is a good reason to pursue a PhD. If you get a job after finishing with an organization that has the means of producing such lasting contributions (such as one similar to the old Bell Labs, a university, a national laboratory, one of the major corporations that does fundamental research such as IBM, Google, etc.) so much the better. There have been lasting contributions made by non-PhDs doing what you might regard as ordinary engineering work also. Innovation is not limited to PhDs.

As you also point out, there is a significant opportunity cost. If you go back to school full time for a PhD, you are looking at 4-6 years of no income (other than stipends). You will need a health insurance policy for you and your family (most schools include full time students in their group health plans, fortunately). Economically, you will do far better initially by doing engineering work in industry. Some employers will sponsor you to get a PhD either part time or full time. Bell Labs used to do that, when I was working I started the PhD coursework part time. They gave some time off during the week to attend classes (this is uncommon today, however). In the last year of my research and dissertation, I had a doctoral fellowship from the Labs that allowed me to complete the work full time while still receiving a partial salary. For me, that worked out well.

A friend of mine was a chemist with a major drug company. He had a BS and MS in organic chemistry. He decided that a PhD would help him move into the fundamental research area in his company. He packed up his wife and kids and moved to Illinois, and got his PhD in organic chemistry full time at U. of Illinois after 5 1/2 years - he was 26 at the time (that seemed like an unusually long time for a full time effort though). It was a hardship for him to support his family on the stipend he got for assisting his professor with his research, but as with any investment, he sacrificed in the present for a reward in the future. He is now a department head in the research division of that drug company. While a PhD isn’t a guarantee of employment - there is a not insignificant unemployment rate of PhDs actually - for those jobs that actually require the PhD-enabled research skills it is definitely an important qualification.

If you can deal with the opportunity cost and the hard work needed for a PhD, and your objective is to do original research and produce significant innovation then you have the right mindset. I wish you the best!

Michael, Ph.D., P.E., Senior Member IEEE, Consulting Aerospace Engineer

3

You honestly sound like an ideal candidate for a PhD program, at least in terms of your mindset. Your career goal is essentially research and/or a research-flavored position (whether that is fundamental or applied research is largely irrelevant), and you have come to that conclusion based on your experiences. This seems about as cut and dry as these sort of cases come.

The issue of going back to living on the stipend is real, and is why people rarely go back for a PhD. However, at the very least, there are a lot more fellowships out there available for PhD students than there are for MS students, and your experiences and background in the field likely means you could write a compelling application. That could ease the pain a little bit. It still will be a pretty jarring change, though.

I can definitely say I knew several PhD students while I was in graduate school who did have kids and start a family while still in the program. It isn’t easy (and now that I have a kid of my own, I have no idea how they found the time), but doable if it is important enough to you.

Best of luck.

4

Actually the unemployment rate for PhD holders IS pretty insignificant - the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that it was 1.5% in 2017, the last year they have data for. (https://www.bls.gov/emp/chart-unemployment-earnings-education.htm)

I think it’s all about trade-offs here. You do sound like the ideal candidate for getting a PhD, in that you understand the work involved and the career path for it and you are genuinely interested in more theoretical research. There are ways that you can do cutting-edge research without being in academia, but many (most?) of those roles probably require a PhD anyway. And theoretical research will probably almost always require a PhD, and will in most cases be in academia.

I completed my PhD between the ages of 22 and 28. I’m 32 now, and I couldn’t imagine going back to do a PhD now - particularly not when my peers are actually having kids and buying homes and such. But when I was in the program, I was one of the youngest in my cohort. In my public health cohort, where people tend to get an MPH and work professionally for a few years before going back and getting a PhD, everyone else was between 25 and 35 when they started. And if a PhD is what you really need to get your career where you want it to be, you’ll be getting older regardless of what you decide to do with it.

The thing is, you have work experience. You could always apply for PhD programs and try it for a few years, and if you really hate it and/or can’t reconcile yourself to life as a PhD student or waiting a good 4-6 years before you have a productive and lucrative career again, you can leave. I don’t really recommend that as a course for most students, but you seem level-headed and practical enough to make good choices in that regard.

5

@juillet - The real unemployment rate (overall and in addition to holders of a particular degree) is significantly higher than the BLS numbers. The official unemployment rate reported by BLS excludes people who have been unemployed for more than 18 months, people who cannot find employment commensurate with their skills or education and are underemployed or who leave the job market, part-time workers without benefits, and those whose unemployment insurance has expired. If BLS reported these numbers honestly, it would include all of those as well. The real unemployment rate across the board in the US is not 3.6%, but according to some estimates closer to 9-11%. The BLS has underreported the actual unemployment rate for many years. It is likely safe to say that the real unemployment rate for PhD holders is closer to 5-6% not 1.5%. The rate also widely varies with the particular field. Science and engineering PhDs likely have a lower unemployment rate than humanities/arts PhDs. I know several folks with PhDs in literature, history, English, etc., who cannot get a full time academic job and struggle as low paid adjuncts without any benefits, or are outright unemployed.

6

@Engineer80 Thank you for sharing your experience! I suppose you’re right that not all, or even most, PhDs will necessarily be doing cutting edge work. I hope that being in a field that itself is regarded as cutting edge will help, but I’ll keep in mind that it’s no guarantee.

@boneh3ad I appreciate the encouraging words, glad to know I’m not crazy for considering this. Like you and @Engineer80 said, the opportunity cost and the idea of going back to a stipend are the biggest issues in the con column. I guess I have to weigh the time and money lost against the satisfaction and opportunities over the course of the rest of my life/career.

Which, like @juillet said, comes back to the fact that it’s all about trade-offs. Also, I hadn’t thought about the possibility of starting a PhD, and leaving after a couple years if it seems like it was the wrong choice. Obviously, this would be a worst-case, but it is an out should I need one. Glad I come off as “level-headed” by the way–sometimes, I don’t always feel like it!

Comments about the age and family thing are also good to hear. @boneh3ad Come to think of it, I knew of a couple PhD students who got married and had kids in grad school, as well. Nice to know this isn’t necessarily uncommon or unheard of. @juillet Also nice to hear about the ages.

Thank you all for the advice and encouragement! It’s given me some things to think about.

7

Getting married in grad school is easy. I know tons of people who did that. I only know the one who had kids, though, and he had a very understanding wife. I think she had to talk him into it.

8

OP, you do have a tough decision to make. Put me in the “go for it” camp. You are still young and while living off a stipend isn’t ideal; it isn’t forever and in your case sounds do-able.

9

I doubt anyone can tell you anything you don’t already know. If you already have a MS, you know what grad school is like. Best case scenario you might have a PhD by 35 and it often takes longer than that.

10

Take this with a grain of salt, as I’m not a PhD, or even an engineer.I have a doctorate in a clinical science, optometry.

My take is that the latter statement can be true without the former statement being true. The PhD can allow you to call the shots, or to even have enough basic background to play in the space. My guess is that this is the case for position, navigation and timing. You might not be adding to the body of knowledge in the purest sense, but you won’t be designing the seat for yet another airliner. You’d be doing new, cutting edge, practical stuff, as opposed to science for the sake of science.

Count me in a a “go for it” vote.

11

@AuraObscura - I got married in graduate school, too - at the beginning of my fourth year of my PhD program. The most important thing a married doctoral student needs to remember is to come out of your own head from time to time and attend to your spouse. It’s SO easy (especially in the dissertation phase) to neglect your personal relationships and personal care in general when you’re in a doctoral program, and professors kind of tacitly encourage that behavior.

@Engineer80

The BLS defines “unemployed” as someone who does not have a job but is currently available for work (e.g., not incarcerated) and has actively looked in the past 4 weeks. (https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm). They also have a category for those “marginally attached to the labor force”, which are people who want a job and have actively looked for work sometime in the last 12 months, but for whatever reason not in the last month. (This includes “discouraged workers,” who have stopped looking for work because they don’t believe anyone will hire them.) The BLS estimates that this rate is about 0.9%. A further 1.4% of people say they want a job but having searched in the last year at all. (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/07/employment-vs-unemployment-different-stories-from-the-jobs-numbers/).

I have not seen anywhere that the BLS stops counting people after they have been unemployed for over 18 months - someone has told me this before, but the neither the BLS nor any other government or reliable non-government source has said this. Could you provide a citation for that?

Underemployment is very different from unemployment, which is why it’s not included in the unemployment rate (that would muddle the data). The BLS doesn’t exactly track this, but a common definition from others sources is a person is often counted as “underemployed” if they are working in a job that doesn’t require the highest degree that they hold, as defined by their employer or by the field they’re in (an example: https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/current_issues/ci20-1.pdf) But as this article (http://www.nber.org/chapters/c13697.pdf), which uses the same approach, points out, that ended up included a wide range of jobs - IT specialists, web developers, computer network architects, paralegals, police officers, detectives, professional musicians, actors, and dental hygienists. This article categorizes underemployed workers into five different tiers and shows that the low-skilled service job tier, which is what most people think about when they think “underemployed”, is actually quite small even for recent bachelor’s graduates.

There are very few jobs that actually require a PhD, so I’d imagine that if you used the standard definition of “underemployed” that most PhDs in industry would look “underemployed” on paper - even the ones in highly-paid, highly-skilled careers. For example, by this definition, both I (a user experience researcher at Microsoft) and a close friend of mine (a management consultant at McKinsey) would be considered “underemployed.” I would contend that neither of us are anything of the sort.

So I don’t think we can possibly extrapolate that the “real unemployment rate” is probably 5-6% without some unwarranted speculation and including people who are actually not unemployed. (I also definitely was not limiting my definition to “people who can find academic work,” since many PhDs don’t want academic work and most PhDs won’t get it anyway.)

12

The unemployment rate is not very useful, except as a macro-economic measure. A more useful metric might be what percent of PhDs in the OP’s field end up in the research positions the OP is interested in.

13

@AuraObscura - FWIW, at age 29 I decided to go to law school. I had been a mediocre college student and even with a good score on the LSAT, I could not have gotten into a top-tier law school. So I went to the fourth-tier local school, worked hard and graduated near the top of my class.

I worked in-house for a company for several years and then decided to pick up an MBA from a top-tier university. That took almost four years going part-time. I was ten years older than most of the other students. With that degree, I was able to land a job with one of the top law firms in the US. I was 15 years older than most of the other associates. I hated every minute of my job, but I was able to move from there to a pretty successful career. I also got married and started a family later than most but I’ve loved being a dad. Now, my oldest is starting on his PhD, my second will be applying for a masters degree, and my third is entering his junior year in college.

The way I looked at it at age 29, was that it would be tough being older than my peers, but the alternative was to be 60 years old and regret not having given it all a shot. Do you want to regret not having followed your dreams?

14

@eyemgh - There are many folks without PhDs doing cutting edge work. Innovation is not limited to holders of any specific degree or credential as you point out.

15

OP, so have you only had that one job that you left because you weren’t doing enough research? What have you been doing since then? On the one hand, your interest in research is a good reason for getting a PhD, but on the other hand your one unsatisfactory work experience doesn’t mean by itself that you need a PhD.

16

That is not how I read his/her post at all. It seemed to me that the one job just served to illustrate how @AuraObscura really would benefit from a PhD in order to branch into the sort of work he/she desires. It doesn’t take a large sample size to determine that a person like research.

17

MODERATOR’S NOTE:
The OP’s question is: “Is an engineering PhD right for me?” How this discussion swerved to “Why is a doctorate required to count pills?” is a) off topic and b) insulting to those in the profession. Several posts edited/deleted.

18

@AuraObscura - It seems that you have thought this out clearly and that you have a solid reason for getting into a PhD program. Yes there are sacrifices to be made but as long as you go into it with your eyes open, your age should not be a major impediment. The fact that you already have an MS may let you avoid a couple of years of coursework if you choose a program that facilitates students coming in with work experience and completed coursework. You could very well complete the PhD in less than 4 years. The key is motivation and is sounds like you have it.

19

@HPuck35 Thanks for the yes vote! It is a tough decision, but I feel like it’s becoming easier by the minute.

@roethlisburger Agreed, I think you summed it up quite well.

@eyemgh You may not be an engineer, but I think you’re 100% correct, and those are exactly some of the reasons I began to give the idea serious thought. Thank you!

@juillet I will definitely keep that advice in mind (regarding “coming out of your own head from time to time”).

@Beaudreau Thanks for sharing your story–it’s comforting to learn of others who have been in my position and for whom things turned out positively! That last paragraph, about being 60 and regret not having given it a shot, is exactly what I think about before I go to bed most nights. Nice to know I’m not necessarily being an unrealistic idealist.

@CheddarcheeseMN Valid points. Since leaving my job, which was actually only a couple months ago, I’ve taken some time off to travel. I’ve also been spending most of my free time learning skills and working on personal projects relevant to my field of interest. I’ve continued to look for jobs, just as I was doing before I quit, and I’ve had a couple interviews. However, the more I apply and interview and read job postings, the more I realize that all the interesting jobs require a PhD, and even if I were to, at some point, start my own company, I would greatly benefit from the skills and expertise, not to mention credibility, I would gain from a PhD. I’ve also spent time talking to people in the industry and looking at LinkedIn profiles of people at the types companies I want to work for, doing the type of work I want to do. Invariably, they tend to have PhDs.

More importantly, I think @boneh3ad hit the nail on the head–the one job was enough to show me I will only be happy doing research, and getting to know the industry has shown me I’ll likely need a PhD to do that research.

@xraymancs Thank you for the vote of confidence! I think I have the motivation and the discipline–with a little luck, maybe things will work out very favorably.