What made you do it? What was the motivation?
I had wanted a phd since I was little. I found a sixth grade report where I wrote about getting a phd someday.
Specifically, in college, I was a bio major with lots of premed students. I never wanted to be an MD, but loved being in a academic research lab. I knew it was what I needed to do.
Grad school was some of the happiest time in my life.
My dad had one, and I thought it was just what you did after undergrad. I definitely wasn’t ready for the “real world” yet when I graduated.
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
No real reason? Like employment?
I went to college planning to be an English teacher, but found I liked my psychology classes better than my literature classes. You need a PhD to be a psychologist, so off I went to grad school. It seems a bit far-fetched now, but I was young and brave. 
I wanted to be a professor, like my dad.
At the time I wanted to be in academia and a terminal degree was an entry ticket.
Peer pressure. I went for my MA and loved it, but everybody in the MA program was going on for a PhD. Knowing so many people who had gone beyond the MA, I got competitive and couldn’t resist the challenge.
I’m glad I did it, but I wish I’d been a bit smarter at the time about the process and the reasons to do it, and the financial aspects then and now.
ETA: Many of the people I admired for going beyond the MA never finished the PhD, or did finish but aren’t working in the field. Go figure.
Not for me, really. It just seemed like the next step at the time after a Bachelor’s, since I liked my field. (I went straight for a Ph.D. without getting a Master’s first.) But getting one because of your own interests is a “real” reason, maybe more so than getting it purely as a job qualification.
But I wasn’t ever all that interested in an academic position. I’ve never had one, but the Ph.D. has been useful for other jobs.
Inertia, mostly. I was on track for a teaching position and actually thought hmmmm… Professor Gagundathar. Then, I came to the conclusion that I genuinely hated teaching, so I went with Plan B. Since I had essentially put myself through school writing software that sounded like a good idea.
So far, so good.
Besides my research project of prolonging adolescence beyond all previously known limits, to badly quote Tom Lehrer?
At MIT lots of people went to grad school, and it was a far more desirable place to go than the job offer I got. Once I got there, I found I loved it. I also got to work on a field I fell in love with my senior year, which helped. Soon after that, I came up with an idea that I really wanted to implement. It took me a good number of years, but I did it for my dissertation, which was very satisfactory.
I never went into academia, but I’ve managed to have at least one researchy project going on ever since. I think it is genetic, since my daughter has the same drive to work on a particular area as I have. She’s in the process of getting a PhD also, and loves it even more than I did.
If it is not too personal, please post your field of study for doctorate.
When in doubt, we can always PM a PhD for quick answers.
I’m a PhD dropout, Chemistry.
When I finished my undergrad studies ('94), official unemployment in Spain was 24%. That figure does not include people who’d gotten a degree (any kind of degree) in the last two years. I’d seen posters in my school advertising MIT’s graduate school, researched a bit and discovered that the stipend for a Chemistry TA could actually be enough to live on. Get paid to get an additional degree? Awrighty! Yeah, there is a ridiculous amount of Spaniards my age who have postgrad degrees, and a very large amount got them abroad and paid for them by TAing. Mine is the generation that made it normal to spend a few years abroad and come back, whether those few years were spent in London or Dublin washing dishes (a popular option for people from the Humanities or with vocational degrees), or in the US, Germany or New Zealand working on a postgrad. I did not go to MIT, ended up someplace else (mind you, MIT had this combined Master’s in Business and Chemistry which still makes me salivate, but I couldn’t see any way to pay for it).
The dropout part is a very old and very common story: my advisor published an article which was 75% mine without my name, in order to “trap” me into staying in his lab for as long as he could tie me there. I don’t react nicely to blackmail, insults and people stealing my work. I got an MS without thesis, he got let go at the end of his 7 years* instead of getting tenured, the other professor who’d been part of the scheme retired for medical reasons.
- The American tenure track is murderous, you get two postdocs, then spend several years being expected to sign up for every commitee and teach your ass off, then you get tenure and, for many professors, tenure means their ass expands to the extent where they can barely be bothered leave their chairs to research or teach.
Interesting story.
I’m just about to start my PhD in Computer Science. I’m doing it because a) apparently I’m good at this and b) academia is probably my best career option. Also, I have family in academia, so it’s not a strange idea to me.
Finally, I enjoy this.
It beat the hell out of working–I like being a student, so I did it until I was sick of it, and by then I had a Ph. D.
I’d always wanted to be a scientist.
But by the time I got to college, I had a lot of uncertainty about this. Being a scientist was no longer a “dream”, but it was still the only thing I could imagine myself doing.
Not really having an idea of what I wanted to do, I kept going in school until I could go no further. It wasn’t for the love of school and learning that kept me going. It was a feeling that I didn’t know enough to go out into the “real world” yet, especially without knowing what I wanted to do in the “real world”.
Deep down, I think I believed getting a Ph.D would remove all self-doubts about myself and I’d have the confidence to do anything. In actuality, it had the opposite effect. But I did get through it and now it seems worth it.
My PhD is in Biology (biochemistry and genetics, specifically).
Thanks.