<p>I am in an ece department and I wanted to get an MS in circuits and compE for diversity. From junior year, these fields become weirdly different and the double MS would cost me 8 college years. That is the same time a phd in only circuits would cost me. i really love phd because most scientists with noble prizes have phds. i don’t really know what makes phds do more research than masters. which route should i go?</p>
<p>The reason Ph.D.s do more research is that the Ph.D. is a degree which trains you to do research. A masters is nowhere as deep if even it has a research component.</p>
<p>Before making the commitment to do a Ph.D., you need to think about whether that is what you really want for your career. You don’t earn a lot during that time and the additional income over a Masters does not really justify the loss of ~4 years of work. </p>
<p>If you do decide that you want to do a Ph.D., then why get 2 Masters degrees? Sometimes, in certain fields, they want you to have one but two is simply a waste of time. By the time you have completed a Masters, you should be able to study new subfields in your major and learn about them on your own, no courses necessary. This is even more true of a Ph.D.</p>
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<p>Then you are doing this for the wrong reason. You don’t go to graduate school for diversity. You do it to specialize.</p>
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<p>You mean 8 years total from the start of the BS to the finish of these two MS degrees or 8 years on top of your BS? There is no way it should take you more than 4 on top of a BS to do this if you really decided you wanted to do it. On the other hand, a PhD should not take you 8 years after a BS, but will, 90% of the time, take you more than 4 years after a BS.</p>
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<p>I hate to break it to you, but no one with an engineering degree has ever won a Nobel prize. At any rate, the reason that most Nobel prize winners have a PhD (really, basically all modern winners do) is because the whole point of a PhD is to learn how to conduct research to generate new knowledge. That happens to be how you earn a Nobel prize as well.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that you can’t view the situation as getting an MS by just taking some extra courses after your BS and then a PhD by some more additional courses after your MS. Some MS degrees work that way, but the PhD is a whole different animal. You only go that direction if you want a career in research.</p>
<p>no way, nobel prize winners in physics like john bardeen had engineering degrees and more others</p>
<p>Yes, his undergraduate degree was in EE but his Ph.D. was in Mathematical Physics and his career at Bell Labs and at University of Illinois was in a physics department. The point that @boneh3ad is making is that no Nobel Prize has been given for research in Engineering. The Nobel Prize is in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, etc. It may be that an engineer wins it but for research in one of the above fields. At the Ph.D. level, there is a lot of fuzziness in what field a research is working in.</p>
<p>Bardeen’s PhD was in mathematics an he was a professor of physics at his various universities. His research was in solid-state physics.</p>