<p>I’ve been reconsidering whether or not I should go for a PhD recently. My ideal goal is to do my own research and development. However, I don’t want to do it because I enjoy it necessarily, but simply because of what I hope that research may achieve. Also, the product I wish to develop is much more interdisciplinary than any one PhD program and would easily require PhDs from 5+ disciplines. Also, I don’t want a desk job my entire life and don’t really want to slave away until I’m 65 doing research. Therefore, my question to you is:</p>
<p>Given the product would likely be developed at a government/military lab, would it be better to go for the PhD or go for something like a MBA or even join the Navy and go at it from that approach? More or less, which type of person ends up as a project director at government labs? If I wanted to start my own company one day, which path would you suggest?</p>
<p>If this isn’t clear, let me give an example: let us say I want to design rail guns. I don’t want to spend years researching new barrel materials or electromagnetism, I want to do applied research just on railguns. If possible, lead a team of people who do have PhDs to research it.</p>
<p>Joining the Navy wouldn’t help - the vast, overwhelming majority of staff at the Naval Research Lab are civilians.</p>
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<p>What do you mean, “applied research just on railguns”? Research on railguns is about barrel materials and electromagnetism, among other things. Different research teams with different sets of expertise may be working on different parts of the problem - physicists on the magnetic stuff, metallurgists on the barrel material stuff. Big problems get broken down into smaller ones.</p>
<p>It sounds like you want to put the cart before the horse. Nobody’s going to hire you to “lead a team of people who do have Ph.Ds to research it” if you don’t have any experience actually researching. Nobody working for you would respect you.</p>
<p>This makes it sound like you’re being too broad. If you want to do research, you’re going to have to pick a research area and specialize. Wanting to develop a product or a prototype product is a bit different from what is referred to as research in general.</p>
<p>If you in charge of the overall project, you’ll likely not be involved in any of the research work on the individual sub-problems. Is that all right? </p>
<p>In any case, if you wish to be the lead on a team of highly educated and specialized people, it will take a very long time to get there. There’s a relatively small number of engineering PhDs out there, and an order of magnitude fewer managers for them. That means it’ll take a long time to rise through the ranks to that level. You may have to rethink not wanting a desk job till the age of 65.</p>
<p>Another option would be to specialize in a certain area of research that can be applied to one aspect of the product you’re interested in. IE, if you’re interested in railguns as whole, you specialize in material science, and you develop new materials that could be used for the rails that potentially improve the maximum velocity of the projectile. You could even build a prototype using your advancements. Of course - it’ll just be a proof of concept and it won’t ever go to production.</p>
<p>So for government labs, they look for PhDs to run the labs. What about industry labs? I don’t mind not doing any of the actual research myself, I would much rather supervise and coordinate others than research for someone else and not have control over what I do. Also, because of the changing trends in research, I wouldn’t want to get a PhD only to have my research area stop getting funding. From a manager’s perspective, I would be able to work on whatever was current.</p>
<p>Also, I find it hard to believe people would not respect me if I did not have a PhD. Leadership is about respect and credibility. Having a PhD in one field would say nothing about my knowledge in other fields, let alone how well I could lead and motivate others. There are many CEOs and politicians who don’t have PhDs, but they seem to lead people alright.</p>
<p>You might not need a Ph.D, but you’ll certainly need to get some some real-world research experience as a lab assistant, and probably at least get a thesis-based master’s degree, if not a doctorate. How do you expect to supervise and coordinate an intensive, complex and cooperative activity that you have no experience with?</p>
<p>More to the point, why would any employer hire you when there are plenty of Ph.D-holding candidates who do have that research experience?</p>
<p>CEOs aren’t leading research teams, they’re leading a business - and nobody gets hired as a CEO without extensive experience in business.</p>
<p>Also, I find it hard to believe people would not respect me if I did not have a PhD.</p>
<p>In a RESEARCH setting, you are not going to be able to manage a large research project unless you have a PhD yourself in a related field. We’re not talking about general management; we’re talking about the day to day management of a research center with multiple grants in a specialized area. CEOs and politicians do day to day business management, financials, that kind of thing. If you wanted to do THAT, you can just get an MBA. If you want to do actual research supervision and coordination, you are either going to need a PhD or an MS + many years of experience.</p>
<p>So really, this depends on what you mean by “management.” If you want to be overseeing the parts of the research that are important to you - results, quality, IRB, development, whatever - you’re going to need a PhD. In some cases you can be a research coordinator or research associate with an MS plus many years of experience, but you would have to work as a grunt first, and more and more of those jobs are going to PhDs who don’t want to do bench work. Particularly if you want to work in government or military research, expect that you will not only need a PhD but a few years of postdoctoral experience. This field isn’t easy; you can’t just slide in and think you can do high-level research with millions of dollars’ worth of expensive equipment without putting in the time, much less managing people. How are you going to manage the day to day work of research when you don’t even know what your employees are talking about?</p>
<p>But if you want to do the <em>business</em> or <em>financial</em> side of the managing, then yes, you can just get an MBA for that.</p>