What career opportunities are available after PhD in Engineering and Public Policy (program at CMU)?

[boneh3ad]

@Mandalorian

A doctorate in Engineering is really geared towards academia. In industry, a ME from a top program would be the most desirable.

I really have to disagree with this advice. Engineering is one of the few fields where PhDs have relatively plenty opportunities, including in academia, industry, and national labs. I ended up in academia, but literally none of the remainder of the PhD cohort from my graduate school within a year or two before or after me have done so. I realize that’s a fairly small sample size, but it’s still pretty telling, in my opinion.

@juillet

this is the wrong way to approach a PhD program. You go to a PhD because you already have a solid idea of what you want to do and you are pretty sure that it requires a PhD, or at least would heavily benefit from one. If you are already wondering what you would do with a PhD after you finish, then you probably shouldn’t get one

This is absolutely the right advice to give here. I couldn’t agree more. If a student’s ultimate career goal doesn’t effectively require a PhD, then there is no point to earning one (and doing so is more likely to be detrimental than beneficial).

@juillet

Also, people who are successful in academia are not people who “don’t mind” it; they are people who are super passionate about it.

I just want to quote this for emphasis. This job will eat anyone who is half-assing it alive.

So, back to @muchstress…

@muchstress

Carnegie Mellon has always been a very attractive school to me because of how active they are in sustainability related fields. They have an Engineering and Public Policy program that sounds like an absolutely perfect fit for my passions, but I don’t know what sort of jobs I could expect to find after (hopefully) completing the doctorate studies.

Erase this criteria from your mind when it comes to choosing whether to do a PhD and picking such a program. You need a much clearer idea of what interests you than “sustainability related fields” when making these decisions. You don’t need to have a perfect grasp of the research you want to do, but you at least ought to have no problem answering these two questions:
[ul]
[]What sort of research field do I wish to study for the next 6(ish) years?
[]Do I want a career in research (whether it’s academic, industrial, or government)?
[/ul]
If you can’t answer something like “fluids” or “materials” for the first question (in the case of mechanical engineering) and you can’t answer “yes” to the second, then you are not ready to do a PhD.

If and only if you have those answers readily available, then you should start looking at programs. The best way to do that, in my opinion, is to ask professors at your current school in similar research fields for advice and/or browse the relevant journals and look for research groups publishing on topics that interest you. Saying you want to be involved in “sustainability related fields” is way too broad for this kind of decision.