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Is Graduate School Useful in Today's World?
An anonymous reader wonders: "gradschoolstory.com has an entry on the Top 10 Reasons to go to Graduate School in the Modern World. Why did Slashdot readers go to graduate school and what did they get out of it?"
Interesting contacts, a job closer to my interests, and higher pay. Not so bad a combination, I think.
I wore scruffy clothes and thought mind blowing thoughts. I ended up with some great stories and nothing of any value for my resume. This happened to 90% of the folks who entered with me. All of us had to go reinvent themselves and take jobs that they could have gotten without a PhD. All of us work alongside people with bachelor's degrees and one even works for a man who dropped out of his undergraduate college to study calligraphy. Unless you have a real desire to study one particular subject, I think you should run as fast as you can away from graduate school. It's great fun if you're already sure of what you want to study. But if you're going to tread water, do it in an office where they pay you a real salary. The universities are filled with professors who make $200k/year, presidents who make $1m and grad students who make $10k. Plus, it's a terrible ponzi scheme. Remember that the professors need warm bodies to do the work that brings in the grants. They don't get paid until you get there. But once you graduate, you become competition. So they want you to check in and never leave to be a success.
My $0.02 anyway.
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Graduate school is definitely an asset in the software engineering industry. At my company, people in positions with the most responsibility, such as software architects and managers, primarily have graduate degrees. Software architects, who are tasked with coming up with a framework under which 10-50 engineers develop within, typically have PhDs in Computer Science or Mathematics. First-level people managers typically have a masters in Computer Science, or occasionally an MBA. Second-level people managers, known as directors here and many other places, nearly always have an MBA.
I've been doing quite well at my company with a simple bachelors in Computer Science, but it will take me much longer to become an architect without a graduate degree in CS. It would also be very difficult to obtain director status without an MBA. I'm not saying it's impossible for me to obtain these roles, but having an advanced degree gives one substantial credibility, even if it is undeserved.
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Somebody has to do basic research. Somebody has to teach the next generation. Both of these require advanced studies, of which graduate school is the standard means. If you're smart enough and dedicated enough and masochistic enough to hack a PhD, go for it.
With a masters degree on the other hand you will have specialized somewhat and be ready for independent work in your field, whereas with a bachelors you will be well prepared for entry level work.
Another reason is that with the economy perpetually on the verge of collapse, your investment in a masters degree will stand you in good stead when competing for nearly any job.
To answer your secondary question, I went to graduate school because I was afraid of the real world. I don't recommend that reason. It turns out nobody out here has much more clue than I do.
In Hindu tradition, a person's life from age 5 through 25 is supposed to be spent in the pursuit of education.
The people who thought this up must have had some motive :)
They did however impose celibacy on the Brahmachari. The idea's obviously not going to be popular now.
'tis but a scratch.
Many times the department which you are working in offer some sort of assitantships - usually in the form of teaching or research that help out with tuition. Often, your whole tuition (or nearly all) is paid for by the school when you take these things up... it really depends on the school that you are going to. (UC Berkeley, I know provides a grad. student's entire tuition, at least in the Coll. of Chem. ... but other ones I'm not particularly sure of).
... a graduate degree is a great thing. It opens doors to jobs which simply would be shut otherwise (e.g: DARPA now only hires Ph.D.s to be program managers) and you can expect a healthy salary premium for those jobs. That said, it takes a particular kind of personality to do well in grad school and to excel at those jobs which require graduate level degrees. If you're in it just for the money, do an MBA, because you are likely to be miserable (and, incidentally, also make the people in your classes miserable) otherwise. Expect to put in 5 to 8 hours of projects and studying in per hour of lecture if you're serious about succeeding. If you aren't comfortable working with theory and concepts at a highly abstract level, you also need to seriously reconsider your motivation for pursuing a graduate degree. If you lack the intellectual curiosity and discipline to seek answers out for yourself, you have no place in grad school. The program that I went through hit the theory hard very early on (mostly as a way of weeding out candidates, the department's philosophy was generally to let most people in and let the core classes separate the wheat from the chaff) and the projects were designed to really emphasize the interface between theory and practice.
In summary: if you're the sort that does well in an R&D environment, then a graduate degree is going to open a lot of doors. Otherwise, you're going to want to steer clear.
Most places, at least in science and engineering, will pay most people's way. I'll be at U Wisc, and they are paying my entire tuition and giving me about $13,000 over the school year. In return I'll TA a class or two. There are also research assistantships (RAs) that pay a bit more. Most places offer better deals than that to at least their top acceptances; a friend of mine will have a stipend of about $18,000 I think.
It's not much, but it's (barely) enough to live on I figure. Plus, at least some people go get internships over summer even in grad school; something like that could double at least my income. $25000 is a lot of money when you're a single person just coming out of undergrad.
(One catch is I don't know how loans work; I suspect they'd delay payment until after grad school, but I don't know for sure. If not, that could make those figure look not very appetizing at all.)
> If you really think the majority of professors make $200k, you're nuts. At the school where I work, incoming assistant profs make ~$40k, associate profs with tenure about $55k and the full professors clear about $90k.
Clearly it depends on the school and the professor's field, but those numbers are way low for computer science.
Check out the Taulbee Survey. Scroll down to Table 34, examine the median and mean for tenure track salaries, and take note of the fact that that's a 9-month salary for someone who just put their foot on the stair.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Graduate Assistantships are usually your best bet for making it through graduate school. As a GA, I made around $1500/mo, which is peanuts for an engineer, but it took care of living, food, and the bills; my tuition was also paid for in full because of the position. At some of the larger, more prestigious universities, it's common to have professors with $1M+ grants that need research assistants. Granted you'll be a bitch boy for the professor, but he or she will often take care of your expenses in return, especially if you do a fair amount of work. Fellowships are also fairly easy to come by if you have a fairly decent GPA, GRE scores, and work/research experience. Applying to UCF, I was offered a $10k/year fellowship beyond a GA position.
The Gov't also has what's called a Palace Acquire program, for civilian employees, where you work one year, then go off to school for two years, then work an additional year. During those 4 years total (or 3 if you only take 1 year to complete a masters), you are paid a steadily-increasing salary, along with free tuition up to a certain dollar amount (you couldn't expect $150k for MIT). The only catch is that if you already have one technical masters, you cannot use the program to obtain a second one or work toward a PhD. In this case, most people use that to obtain an MBA, or a similar degree, to go off into the private sector and become upper-level managers.
I went for two reasons.
First, I read the course descriptions of the Masters program, and drooled. Most of my peers recoiled in horror. I say, go with your gut on that one. You're not going to have a chance to get that education as easily.
The second one won't apply to you. I had to decide in 1999 whether to try to get a job or go into a post-grad program, before the pop. However, I fully expected it to occur, and I figured after two years things should have settled down. As it turns out I was wrong and it was still pretty tough going even in 2002, but I wouldn't have been any better off outside of school. At least they paid me to go.
As for whether it will be useful outside of school, I am a firm believer that if you start from the assumption that your schooling was worthless, you will never even realize how wrong you are; you'll encounter certain hard problems, and waste time hacking out partial solutions when you could have actually solved the problem better and in less time if you used your schooling. Having a Master's level education ups the problems you can attack with confidence even further. However, if you are stuck in the "school is useless" ideation, then for goodness' sake don't waste another two years of your life in it. You need some real experience to evaluate your position better. You might end up coming to the same decision that more school isn't for you, but you'll be making that decision on a much firmer basis.
Again, not really true in more cases than you would think. I have a PhD in chemistry. My grad school advisor is one of the giants in his field. Brilliant dude, tons of awards, member of the National Academy of Sciences, etc. Full professor at Stanford. He should be making a mint, right?
Well, no. He's a theorist. To the best of my knowledge he doesn't hold a single patent: he certainly never applied for one in the 5 years I worked for him. Many professors tap grants, but theorists don't get big grants for the most part. He's certainly not hurting for cash but he's not exactly buying yachts either.
For folks in marketable fields, yes, you can get some patents. But many university scientists don't really work in areas like that. Most of my friends worked for a guy who did ultrafast laser spectroscopy. Another really really smart dude, but again, no patents that I know of. He didn't do any outside consulting or own a company either.
On the flip side, a few folks I knew worked for Dick Zare. Now Zare is the guy you're talking about. Or others who worked for Barry Trost. (Google the names if you're curious) Trost made a mint consulting for all the big drug companies: my Dad ended up working with him a few times while he was a Merck. Then again, only a few folks are good enough to get these kinds of gigs, and Trost is awesome.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
While the Taulbee Survey has very reliable information, it polls only CS departments which grant PhD degrees. CS faculty who teach at four-year colleges and universities, who spend more time teaching and less time bringing in their body weight in gold grant monies, earn substantially less than Taulbee numbers.
Better to
My Ph.D. has allowed me to largely do my own thing in 2 major corporations.
That's pretty much it. If you've got a bachelor's degree in CS, you're always doing somebody else's thing.
That's why I'm back in school, along with:
1) Business programming (which is mostly what's available) turns your brain to mush.
2) I want to teach.
Free advice that's actually worth something: get as much schooling done as you can all at once. It's hard to quit your job, sell a house and a car, and move into a tiny two-bedroom apartment. (You can believe me, because I did it, and it was only supreme desperation that made it possible - along with my wife's support, which not everybody can count on.) That's pretty much what's required. Almost nobody is capable of getting a graduate degree while sticking it out in a full-time job.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
"Sucking it up" by foregoing partying and vacations might do it for bachelors.
"Family" was obviously not one of the things on your list.
I've plenty of friends who've tried to go back to grad school while keeping their full-time job.
Many of them gave up at some point.
For most of the others, it took them 5 years to get the degree, and they said they did not have the time to enjoy it at all.
The way to succeed with this seems to be to wait with working full-time, and work part-time until you complete your MS.
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Generally, I'd agree with you that a graduate education in software engineering shouldn't be required for most jobs. On the other hand, accredited software engineering undergraduate programs distinct from computer science or electrical engineering are fairly new. I graduated with a B.S. SE in 2004, and that was the first year that ABET accredited programs in Software Engineering, and there were only 4 such programs. Yes, I graduated from one of them. Yes, I've gone on to grad school.
Having met and worked with many people with conventional computer engineering or computer science degrees, I can say with some certainty that many such programs are still graduating people who have never been asked to study at least some (though rarely all) of the following: software process, project management, requirements engineering, software validation, or software architecture at a level above basic design patterns, such as quality attributes. About the only software engineering specific topics I can count on nearly all recent graduates to know are OO design, design patterns and maybe a little verification.
I think these are all important topics to someone who wants to be a software engineer and many of my aquaintances who didn't study them in school have been deep-fried in them by industry, but they were done a disservice by not being asked to study them in school. Once undergraduate programs start teaching them, the need for graduate school in SE will be reduced, but until then there are plenty of otherwise qualified CE and CS people who could benifit from graduate studies in SE.