PhD: Bad Idea, Terrible Idea or the Very Worst of All Ideas?

[Datepalm]

I don't know that it's a fun hobby, and most of the people I know in that situation seem to be taking a decade to do it, and not by choice, but that tends to be the way it goes here, at least form people I know - ie, it's not a lifestyle change. Maybe that's something that's particular to doing research in planning (or maybe education or a handful of other fields with a practical side) where working in the public or even private sector can often get you insight (and probably data) into the guts of whatever it is you're researching. I've done MA assignments based on my last job (It would have been perfect for a thesis if I wasn't sick of thinking about that project by now,) as have lots of people who's work is relevant. 

[Datepalm]

55 minutes ago, Raja said:

It is indeed - I'm debating doing a MA in either Health Policy & Finance or possibly a MA in public health, this is sometime next year so I have a bit of time to find the right program. The latter includes aspects of the former, so I'm not entirely sure what I'd like to do. 

I know a lot of people looking at Public Health MAs in the next few years, mostly in the developing countries aspects...oddly many of them are quantifiable idiots (love 'em, sure, but would never want to work with them. I recall one dear colleague who was floating for joy when she visited a rural hospital and realized, yes, this is what I want to be doing...just no touching any sick people, because that's gross, ok?) so I hope you find what you're looking for. You're an MD, right? 

I'm really appreciating all the input, though no one seems to have the overwhelmingly negative horror stories I was secretly hoping for!

[sagewich]

What is the market for PhDs in your field?  Here in the US, the only person I know who did a doctorate in geography is now teaching at a university.  It seems to make sense for psychologists to get them here in the Sates.  But if you can do one for the fun of it and get a job in Israel, I would say go for it. Being a student is fun

[Raja]

19 hours ago, Datepalm said:

 

I am indeed!  An MA in Public Health is a pretty popular program among MDs - there are even a few programs with combined MD/MPH degrees. LSE has a Health Policy, Planning & Finance MA program which is pretty much exactly what I want to do but $$. 

My cousin actually had a torrid time with his PhD ( He was in the US at Penn, I think)  - I don't know the details, to be quite honest with you, but it involved his supervisor going on sabbatical to China and leaving him in limbo. He ended up leaving without finishing it and took up a fairly decent job instead. 

[Seli]

3 hours ago, Triskan said:

Surely the possibility of being able to wax about having a Player Hater Degree counts for something.

Meh, overrated (if only because after you finish a large proportion of the people you know have one, and you know how much/little effort goes into one).

It is fun as well as frustrating to do though, if you choose wisely.

[Aemon Stark]

8 hours ago, Raja said:

I am indeed!  An MA in Public Health is a pretty popular program among MDs - there are even a few programs with combined MD/MPH degrees. LSE has a Health Policy, Planning & Finance MA program which is pretty much exactly what I want to do but $$.

One of the residents in my program is doing something along those lines except at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It costs about $40,000... just for tuition!

[Raja]

12 hours ago, Aemon Stark said:

One of the residents in my program is doing something along those lines except at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It costs about $40,000... just for tuition!

I think we're talking about the same program - it's a joint program by the London School of Hygiene and Trop Med & LSE - the tuition is pretty exorbitant! Edit - It's actually 26,000 - so perhaps it's a different one. 

[Jeor]

I'm currently doing a PhD part-time (while I work full-time) and I find that suits me well. Hoping to submit early 2017.

I'm in education. At first I did it out of curiosity but to be honest now I just want to get it over with and get the letters after my name. Thankfully the transition in motivation only happened recently, when I'm fairly close to getting finished anyway. I work as a deputy principal in a fairly cashed-up independent school, so a PhD gives you good cachet with all our high-powered parents as well as various education boards and committees that I'm on. Not that I want to be a principal anytime soon, but education is one of those fields where the PhD remarkably does help job prospects at that level.

Needless to say I've had very little time to work on it, but at least doing it part-time while having a job allows me to avoid the isolation, one-track-mind and financial issues that I've heard can be a problem with full-time PhDs. I wouldn't have left my job to do it full-time. That being said, I'm in my 30s with no kids so doing it in my own time outside of my job was feasible. Not an option for everyone.

[Datepalm]

5 hours ago, Raja said:

I think we're talking about the same program - it's a joint program by the London School of Hygiene and Trop Med & LSE - the tuition is pretty exorbitant! 

I think one my friends is applying to that one exactly next year. The world starts to really shrink at some point. 

[Arkhangel]

I'm not sure about  the urban planning field in particular but for international development generally, from everything I've seen, work experience is much more important than a PhD when it comes to finding a job. A lot of jobs in international development require an MA as a minimum, but once you've got that, additional academic qualifications don't count for that much with many organisations - like, it's a cherry on the cake, but it's probably not going to give you the edge over a similar candidate who spent those years working rather than studying. If you can do it and work at the same time without having the quality of your work suffer and/or going insane, I'd say go for it, but if not then it'd probably be a case of love over (the future potential of) money.

[Angalin]

I've been thinking about doing one on and off this year. The questions for me are, how do I pay for it, support two children while doing it, and would one let me do anything I can't do right now through work? Do I really need one to move forward? And the answer is that if I want to do public health/epidemiology, probably yes. But I also really like getting a paycheque and feeding my kids, and I don't really know if I care enough about that subject. In fact I don't have a subject that I love so much that I really want to work on it for 4 years.

Where I am in the UK right now, doctorates take 3-4 years and are purely research. You might pick up a little teaching on the side to earn some money towards your costs. US/Canadian programs tend to take longer and give you a stipend in exchange for teaching/tutoring work, which is an expected part of the program.

I know people who haven't completed both in the UK and in the US. It's not fun. If your supervisor is useless - and a lot of them are, they phone in supervision because they have to do it to check off their own job requirements when they'd rather be researching - it can be a nightmare and take much longer than it should. I have learned, however, that supervision meetings involving baking go much better than the other kind. (eta: anecdata but true on the whole that people are much happier when holding homemade chocolate chip cookies than not)

[Happy Ent]

Let me comment on this from the perspective of somebody on the other side. (I routinely handle grad school applications, have been head of graduate school, have evaluated graduate programs, etc.)

Nobody can or should help you decide if you want to do this. Graduate school and research will make you very, very unhappy at times, and you need a lot of resilience, other coping mechanisms, and be able to live with impostor syndrome. Surprisingly, very good insight into the life and troubles comes from “Ph.D. Comics.” If you can see yourself in those characters, and keep living that life: perfect. Welcome to the greatest show on Earth. (Which it really is.)

One thing, perhaps helpful, perhaps scary: The system will take care of getting rid of you. That is not your job. Your job is to convince the system that you are worth having aboard. (While keeping the existential angst to yourself, or maybe your favourite message board.) The system’s job is to prevent you from reaching the goal. It will start doing so at admissions.

On 1 July 2016 at 4:00 PM, Datepalm said:

My prof things I should invest in going to a relevant conference (all the way in Portland,) as it's madness to try and pick an advisor/student sight unseen, but it doesn't seem at all clear that that kind of networking plays any role here.

Your professor is correct. A Ph.D. student is a huge commitment for the advisor and the school. Time, money, heartbreak. Not to mention the  hours and hours spent lying awake at night with the responsibility for somebody else’s life and career. The money is enormous, and the school and advisor have to report back to the grant holder about progress or lack thereof. The outcome of the project has real consequences for the department, advisor, school, grant agency, etc. 

Help the prospective advisor to convince him- or herself that you will be a good investment. Understand their perspective. They need demonstrable evidence that you are able to finish this. Perfect grades from a good university are a good proxy, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient. 

(Myself, I work in a cognitively challenging field, so impeccable grades are necessary for me. But disciplines differ on that issue.)

So: trust your professor. He or she will point you do prospective advisor. Talk to that person. Do note that this person (in particular, if he or she just received funds to actually finance this) will meet a lot of people. Talk about research, and be concrete. Then mention in  your cover letter “I talked with Prof X about blabla at bla.” 

In closing, let me repeat: the system will fail you. It does a very good job at that and does not need your help.

[Altherion]

48 minutes ago, Happy Ent said:

One thing, perhaps helpful, perhaps scary: The system will take care of getting rid of you. That is not your job. Your job is to convince the system that you are worth having aboard. (While keeping the existential angst to yourself, or maybe your favourite message board.) The system’s job is to prevent you from reaching the goal. It will start doing so at admissions.

This is one of the big differences between Europe and the US. What you say is absolutely true of European universities. It's true of American ones in that they're also fairly rigorous about admission. However, if you're in and you can find somebody in the department who will work with you, you're pretty much safe. In theory, American universities have a similar set of barriers (e.g. a qualifying general knowledge of the field exam, an oral exam on a more narrow topic, the dissertation defense itself, etc.) and they can actually be fairly difficult to overcome... but unlike in Europe, if students fail the qualifiers or orals, they will be allowed to try over and over again as long as there is somebody who wants to work with them. Likewise, if they're not very good at the type of work needed to get the data for the dissertation, they will usually be allowed to take as long as they're willing to.

[Happy Ent]

Thank you Altherion. Valid points. 

The US market for Ph.D. education is indeed huge, and very varied. Depending on which place you’re in, they may keep you around. But Dates was talking about a selective place like MIT, and I don’t think they have problems with getting rid of candidates.

[Aderyn]

I guess these days most people aim for a PhD out of personal interest (of course this depends on the field, i.e. medical students vs. students of literature). It may be good if you want an academic career but not that useful in many other fields, because nowadays what's important is people skills and practical experience.

I can't say if I'd ever want to try that myself, but on the other hand, it's not even something I should be thinking about in my current situation so I'll leave it at that. A part of me is still intrigued, because I'm an academic soul and whenever I stumble upon interesting dissertations I can't help but feel inspired (i.e., last year I read parts of a dissertation on Tolkien's Legendarium).

[Happy Ent]

2 hours ago, Aderyn said:

I guess these days most people aim for a PhD out of personal interest (of course this depends on the field, i.e. medical students vs. students of literature). It may be good if you want an academic career but not that useful in many other fields, because nowadays what's important is people skills and practical experience.

This is simply false. There are plenty of jobs in plenty of countries where a Ph.D. is a requirement. There are also plenty of very, very attractive jobs where people skills are largely irrelevant. (All jobs? No. I make no such claims. But the idea that “nowadays” a sterling academic degree is irrelevant is more false than ever.)

I design educations, I have meetings with representatives of the labour market. When push comes to shove they always prefer a Ph.D. in physics to people skills. A thousand times over. (Of course, they’d love to have a rare unicorn with both a Ph.D. in physics and people skills. At the conversation always begins with them telling me they want people skills. But after 10 minutes they admit that to be false, and not worth a single curricular change.)

In particular, from the point of view of deciding on an education, the idea of “people skills” is a dangerous chimera. Nobody can teach this to you, and you can’t make an informed choice of “going to people skills school.” 

A Ph.D. degree, on the other hand, you can choose to get, and the system can provide that product.

If you make educational choices guided by a vague notion of “people skills” then you will end up flipping burgers. Actually, you will stare longingly at the robot flipping burgers.

(Caveat: there are plenty of utterly useless Ph.D.s, just like there are useless academic programs. Nowhere do I make the (false) claims “every Ph.D. degree is useful” or “there are no jobs that need people skills.”)

[Theda Baratheon]

This is sort of related but is it even worth doing a history MA because I have a Bachelors in ancient History and I'm going back to do an MA in Celtic Studies but I don't want to do that and it make absolutely NO difference to potential employers, but I'm mostly doing it because I love the subject, think it deserves more in depth research and study and have a personal interest in learning more about the celts as I'm cornish and Welsh and live near a lot of old burial monuments and places of interest which would aid me in my degree. 

[Aderyn]

5 hours ago, Happy Ent said:

This is simply false. There are plenty of jobs in plenty of countries where a Ph.D. is a requirement. There are also plenty of very, very attractive jobs where people skills are largely irrelevant. (All jobs? No. I make no such claims. But the idea that “nowadays” a sterling academic degree is irrelevant is more false than ever.)

I design educations, I have meetings with representatives of the labour market. When push comes to shove they always prefer a Ph.D. in physics to people skills. A thousand times over. (Of course, they’d love to have a rare unicorn with both a Ph.D. in physics and people skills. At the conversation always begins with them telling me they want people skills. But after 10 minutes they admit that to be false, and not worth a single curricular change.)

In particular, from the point of view of deciding on an education, the idea of “people skills” is a dangerous chimera. Nobody can teach this to you, and you can’t make an informed choice of “going to people skills school.” 

A Ph.D. degree, on the other hand, you can choose to get, and the system can provide that product.

If you make educational choices guided by a vague notion of “people skills” then you will end up flipping burgers. Actually, you will stare longingly at the robot flipping burgers.

(Caveat: there are plenty of utterly useless Ph.D.s, just like there are useless academic programs. Nowhere do I make the (false) claims “every Ph.D. degree is useful” or “there are no jobs that need people skills.”)

Thank you for correcting me. I admit that my comment was definitely against better knowledge, it was coming out as a "gut feeling" as you probably guessed, not as actual knowledge or experience on the topic. I'll take this one as a humbling moment. 

[IheartIheartTesla]

On 7/1/2016 at 1:57 PM, Datepalm said:

Apparently, in the US, PhD completion rates - up to the 10 year mark - hover somewhere around the 55% mark, according to a 2008 study. http://www.phdcompletion.org/resources/cgsnsf2008_sowell.pdf Lower in the humanities and social sciences, higher in medicine and hard science. UK is substantially higher though, it seems (close to 80%.) 

The Atlantic just came out with an article (http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/07/why-do-so-many-graduate-students-quit/490094/) about this, I suggest you peruse it if you plan to pursue a Ph.D in the US.

Having said that, one thing about US universities (not sure about Europe, so wont comment) is that they value diversity not just as a matter of demographics, but also in terms of 'life experience'. Therefore, I would not underplay your field work when it comes to applications. Most of the applications the committees will be looking at will be pretty cookie cutter, and yours may stand out because of your unique experiences.

Also, urban planning is something of an oxymoron in US cities, most of them grew through some organic process resulting in a lot of sprawl. There are also many interesting racial aspects to it.....I think there might be a lot of good ideas for a thesis there somewhere.

[Happy Ent]

2 hours ago, Aderyn said:

I'll take this one as a humbling moment. 

In that case I apologise for my tone, Aderyn!