When I graduated with a BSME, I figured I was done with my education and went out into the working world. But I actually got a little bored, and by the time the next fall rolled around, I enrolled in a night-school Master’s program. It took five years of one-class-per-semester night school to finish my Master’s. In researching my Master’s thesis, I stumbled on some engineering education literature, and the idea of working in academia started to sound attractive. While I liked what I did (at work) at the time, it looked like the career paths available to me were either jumping into management (which I really didn’t want to do) or getting shunted into a back office and accepting smaller pay raises and less respect. Going into academia sounded like a way out of the dilemma.
In the meantime, the company I worked for was painfully changing over from a defense contractor with a heavy development emphasis to a commercial manufacturer with little engineering and essentially no development. After a couple rounds of layoffs, the writing was on the wall: I’d be leaving the company sooner or later, so I’d better jump ship sooner. That made the decision to go back to school easier, because I had to do either a job search or apply to schools, and what the hell, I might as well go back to school.
I eventually decided not to go into academia, but that’s the answer to another question. I did find I liked the research, though, and I have done some adjunct teaching, so I’m not at all unhappy with my choice, despite not following through with my initial idea.
As others have said, wanting to be a scientist. I grew up in the cultural fallout of WWII, which scientific advances played a big part in (not just the atomic bomb, but also radar, calculating bombsights, and the like). On top of which, the almost simultaneous Physical Sciences Study Committee and the launching od Sputnik pushed the US into a big pro-science education mode. As Pepper Mill says, my generation was “space babies”, raised on intensified science education at school, in entertainment (movies, comics, lots of educational television), at the World’s Fair. I grew up on hand-me-down Chemistry and Eloectronics kits and the like, and I seemed to be good at this stuff.
I lucked out and got into MIT, where I found that I fit in pretty well, and was able to make contributions. My bachelor’s thesis (MIT still required one) was parlayed into a journal article and a piece in Scientific American. Naturally, I wanted to continue. A Bachelor’s only gets you so far, and there was plenty more to learn. The R&D guys where my father worked were all PhDs. It seemed a natural choice.
It turned out to be harder and a much longer path than I’d expected, due to unforeseen circumstances, but I’ve never regretted it. The degree opened doors and opportunities that an MS would not have. There’s some unfairness there, I think. I’m still the same me, who would do the same things to research a topic, whether i had the degree or not, but having gone through all the effort demonstrates that you do indeed have the skills to follow up a line of endeavor and the persistence to follow through. But I knew lots of candidates who had family obligations or money difficulties, or who were overwhelmed by the work and coukldn’t finish the degree work, yet I think most if not all of them were capable of it.
I sort of fell into it, as a means of getting a permanent employment contract (tenure track) - otherwise it was just a series of one-year contracts at the university.
And then found that I really enjoyed (and was good at) research in my field. It also fitted in well with the stage of family life I was at - I could define my own research and working hours and that made life very flexible for those years. It was definitely the most fun I’ve had so far (professionally).
I’m in my first year of a molecular biology program.
In undergrad, I worked in a genetics lab. It was a lot of fun, I was good at it, and for some strange reason someone was willing to pay me to play around in a lab all day. I like solving puzzles, and biology has some of the most devilishly complicated and interesting problems (IMO). So I decided to make a career out of it.
I started as a research technician, and had a lot of fun there. But that’s a very entry-level job, short term, without much room for advancement. The next step is a PhD.
Now, a PhD does not guarantee you the career of your choice. Frankly there’s a glut of PhDs in many fields. Most don’t end up as tenured faculty. A substantial portion don’t even end up working in the same field. If you search around, there’s a lot of depressing statistics about job prospects.
I considered all of this before applying, and figured that getting a PhD was worth it even if I couldn’t get my ticket in the tenure-track lottery. And here I am… ask me again in five or six years.
Ph D history – wanted to be a professor from when I was quite young. I didn’t go into teaching straight away after I got the degree (long story); have been hacking my way back into things on my own, a bit difficult in some respects as my advisor, thinking I’d ‘disappeared’ published my research as his own. Good times.
Anyway, I have been professoring for seven years now, and apparently I’m about to make a big jump to another school where I will have more opportunities to advance.
ETA – I wanted to do a history PhD so I could happily hide in a library/archive doing research; that’s what I do when I’m not teaching, so that’s worked out quite well as heck yeah, it requires a lot of self-discipline, but the pay off means I’m alternating on two research projects, one on the Kinks and one on Nero’s mum Agrippina the Younger, so yeah, it’s all right.
I earned my BS from a small, rural, southern liberal arts college and had rosy visions of being a professor at a small, rural, southern liberal arts college. That takes a Ph.D., of course. I was headed down that path when life intervened.
My post doc fell through and I took a job in R&D with the idea that I’d do that for two or three years and then transition to academia. The pay was better than I could make as a professor, we liked where we were living, I was adjunct at a local university that (with my employer’s blessing) let me teach one course a year. Making the jump back to academia didn’t make much sense economically and I was happy with the research and teaching.
Then my employer closed our facility and merged it with a sister lab. Rather than take the reassignment, I looked elsewhere and I’m now in forest management in North Carolina. I like what I do, but it’s not at all what I thought I’d be doing at this point in my career.
After undergrad, I got an engineering job based on my physics and math degrees. That led to a downward spiral of worse and worse jobs. I decided that I needed a change, so at age 34 I went to grad school for statistics.
I was only planning on getting a masters degree then getting a job. After I got my masters, I couldn’t find a job right away. I had an offer to continue for a PhD with an attractive research assistant position, so I took that. Then I kind of fell ass-backward into a good dissertation topic.
Not really. Looking back on it, there was actually very little thought about it – everyone asked “where are you going to go to grad school,” not “do you want to go to grad school,” so I took a couple of years off after finishing undergrad and then, well, went to grad school.
Did academia for a few years (one-year gigs), realized I wasn’t going to get a tenure track job, decided I wasn’t willing to try to cobble together an life on temporary or part-time jobs, so left the biz. That was 25 years ago, and my career path since has had virtually nothing to do with my degree. (One of my main gigs these days is covering higher education as a writer, but that’s semi coincidental.)
I don’t regret having done it – I got to spend five years thinking about some extremely interesting shit – but it turned out not to have much to do with my life, personally or professionally. Other than freaking people out when they find out, which can be amusing.
twickster, BA, religious studies; MPhil, PhD, sociology of religion
Took lots of Bio Psych courses in college, also a lot of Photography… not a lot of jobs in 1983 in freelance photography, so took a Government job (read: forced by my dad who worked for gov’t and was tired of me sleeping late in his house)… no better motivation to want to go to grad school than working with “lifers” in the gov’t so I applied to, and was accepted into, a MS program which happened to receive approval to start a PhD program while I was there… thus, I became part of the first PhD cohort at my University… now, 14 years into an academic position, having been tenured and promoted.
I’m currently working on a PhD in biology. I’ve been a biologist for as long as I can remember. I’ve always been fascinated with the subject, and couldn’t imagine doing anything else. I was also the son of a PhD professor, and just kind of grew up with an understanding that my dad’s life was normal. I was really pissed when I worked in the real world and discovered that some people are expected to work during the two weeks around Christmas.
Anyway, after I got my bachelor’s, I worked in the field for about six years, where I discovered that having a BS in biology gets you the kind of jobs (and pay) that you can get with a high school diploma in most other fields. Any kind of real career requires a PhD. I eventually got my shit together and moved on.
I occasionally wonder if it’s worth it, but I don’t want to go back to the kind of job I was doing before, so onward I press. I cannot recommend doing grad school in your mid-30s, with a family, though.
The short version is that they paid me to get a degree, so I thought “why not?”. I didn’t know what else to do with myself after I finished my post-Bachelor’s fellowship. I figured grad school would at least pay me until I decided and if I took too long to figure it out, I’d end up with a degree.
Along the way, I found out that I really love the academic environment. It’s great being surrounded by such curious, intelligent, interesting people. It’s far from perfect, but I feel like academics is the best fit for me. And I just landed a faculty position, so I guess they like me too!
Growing up in Los Alamos, both my parents had PhD’s as did the dads of pretty much all my friends, so it wasn’t until fairly late in life that I learned that they were acutally pretty rare. Being a smart guy on an academic track, and from a school that provided no marketable skills on graduation (Reed college): A doctorate program was the next logical step. I applied in mathematics, but by the time I got there I was pretty sure I wanted to do statistics, and so made a smooth transition into that department after my first year.
For me, Computer Science, particularly Computer Architecture. In 1980 getting a job wasn’t an issue. There were only 168 of us who graduated that year.
I wanted to be a scientist from a very early age. I still remember when they “finally” let us into my elementary school library as a first grader. I ran right to the astronomy section and grabbed a book with a title like: “What is a Star?” About the same time I was given a National Geographic book, “Wild Animals of North America”. My parents thought I’d like the pictures; I memorized it.
When I applied to colleges, I was torn between physics and biology. My dad, a biologist, said it was easier to go from physics to biology, than the other way around (because the math and physics credits would transfer to biology, but not the other way). I was hooked from my first quantum and relativity course. It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t make it, probably because my dad, most of his brothers, my mom’s dad (and his dad!) all had them, so it just seemed like the natural progression.
I am not a professor, like my dad and great-grandfather, though. I had too many kids (3) the year I graduated.
I was always crazy about science and when I got a chemistry set, well that was the coolest thing. In those days (late 40s, early 50s) chemistry sets had real experiments with things like potassium thiocyanate that would never be allowed today. So when I went off the college, I expected to study chem. But along the way, two things happened. First I discovered that I found lab work boooring (I had a job as a lab tech in a biochem department) and second, one of the graduate students in that lab took a course in modern algebra and I discovered I really loved that. So I majored in math. I still loved it, so I went to grad school to learn more, then somehow wound up with a PhD (no master’s). Back in the early 60s, there were plenty of jobs and professors had a lot of autonomy. I wouldn’t advise anyone to do that today unless they were absolutely obsessive about the subject. Vanishingly few jobs in math and professors are considered mere employees of the institution.
I hated my first job after finishing college. My dad had a Ph.D. (not a professor though) and some of my undergrad professors suggested that I might like grad school, so it seemed like a reasonable thing to do.
Initially I’d planned on becoming a professor when I was done, but now that graduation is looming I’m not applying to any academic jobs.
Computer Science, B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. (expected 2012)
My PhD is in organic chemistry - that’s a field where the PhD is not particularly differentiated as an academic pathway (versus industry). If you want to lead a research team in industry or academia you need a PhD. So this simplifies the decision a bit - I loved chemistry, knew I probably wanted to be a chemist, so the PhD was an obvious step. Wasn’t certain about industry or academia, but pretty early into it aimed at the academic track - I’m now a chemistry professor in the UK.
