Mechanical Engineering PhD - Student Personality and the Stress Level

juillet
Sun, 15 Mar 2015 00:28:51 +0000

I, for the most part, enjoyed graduate school (my PhD is in public health and psychology, not in engineering - but the process is the same; only the content is different). It was also very, very stressful for me - much more stressful than any weeks in undergrad when I had several things due at the same time. It’s not just the work load - the work in graduate school isn’t difficult in and of itself; it’s mostly the amount of it and the compressed time to complete it that makes it stressful. It’s moreso the atmosphere of graduate school that can get to you. It’s definitely a marathon and not a sprint - but it feels like a marathon you are trying to win, a marathon during which you are running a 6 to 7-minute mile the whole way. The reason is - particularly if you are trying for academia, but even if you aren’t - the research world these days has become very competitive; it’s difficult for people to get jobs after graduation (engineering is far easier, though), so everyone’s trying to get fellowships, publications, and grant funding. In addition to taking classes and exams you are also TAing and doing research and struggling to survive on $30-35K a year (probably less of a problem in rural and suburban areas than where I went to grad school, which was New York). Like I said, I enjoyed grad school in an intellectual sense, but it was stressful and not something that I would ever want to do again, lol.

That said, if he’s a resilient individual he can get through it - and there are ways of managing the stress. By the time I was in my fourth year of grad school I was so used to the stress that I had learned to manage it well and figure out how to arrange projects, and now as a postdoc I don’t even feel stressed when I work on several projects at once. You just…figure it out. The other thing I always remember is that there are lots of stressful jobs, too - lawyers, doctors, investment bankers, high-level CEOs, etc. If your son is a successful individual the career he has is probably going to be somewhat stressful.

Anyway, my main concern for your son is this: does he actually want to get a PhD?

It’s really, really common - in my opinion - for undergraduates to feel positively validated by their professors, and to use those feelings of positive validation to propel them into graduate programs. It’s also really, really common for professors to convince any of their really excellent undergraduates that they should think about a PhD. It’s natural for many of them - we academics are a really weird bunch; we’re intensely invested in our work and we think everyone else should be super excited about it, too, so whenever an undergraduate comes along who is really excellent many of us have the kneejerk reaction to convince them to go to graduate school…just because! But many professors do that without considering the needs and career goals of the student in front of them. It masquerades as altruistic but really comes from an inherently selfish desire to clone ourselves, etc.

With that said - you said that your son never really thought about graduate school, and then these professors encouraged him and things kind of fast-forwarded from there. But does your son really want to be a researcher in engineering? I’m not in the field but all available information seems to indicate that job prospects are very good for BS-level engineers; that MS-level engineers also get great jobs and move into management all the time; and that the PhD is really reserved for those who want to teach at universities, direct research in engineering, and can sometimes narrow the job opportunities for engineers (although not always - PhD level engineers get jobs). I looked at the NSF’s Survey of Earned Doctorates recently, - which PhD students across the country take when they are depositing their dissertations, and if I recall correctly only about 60% of engineering PhDs who were finishing their dissertation had definite plans for their next step. The majority of them were headed into postdoctoral fellowships. (The NSF website is currently down, so I can’t double-check.)

So basically, does your son want to be a doctoral-level researcher in industry or a professor?

Anyway, to answer your last question, he should definitely wait to hear back from the other programs. Your son’s school should give him until April 15 to decide, and the other decisions should come in soon, so there’s no reason not to compare offers unless this school was absolutely his first choice and he knows that he would turn down other offers for it.