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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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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.
> 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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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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