My husband is working on his Ph.D. in clinical psychology, and he’s more miserable than I’ve ever seen him in my life. He has a nervous break down about once every two or three weeks, weeping, gnashing of teeth, the whole deal. On the other hand, his peers feel more positively than he does, so it’s not awful for everyone.
Do they hire them into tenure-track positions? Especially with the job market the way it is, schools are tending to hire their graduates into other roles to keep them from abject unemployment. Or Penn and social work may just be an exception to the norm.
Dunno. I will say that they don’t only hire academics into academic positions. The admissions director is a Penn MSW, my field liaison is a Penn MSW, and one of the current MSWs was previously on staff for years before she applied. One of my professors is a Penn MSW who also has some affiliation with Wharton but I’m not sure how. Another of my Professors is a Penn JD. I couldn’t say if this is a current trend, some weird anomaly, or what.
Seriously, this stuff breaks my brain. I really want to make a wise decision. It just seems like it’s impossible to predict the outcome of any career choice nowadays.
ABD dropout here. I loved the PhD program - I got to study really interesting stuff with really interesting people, read deeply, and discuss at length.
I hated the politics. At my institution, they started the day you walked in the door. I’m no good at that game.
I had to take a terminal masters for personal reasons, not political ones, and I’ve often thought about going for a PhD elsewhere. However, I can’t afford that much time not earning money, or contributing to my retirement accounts. And in my field, jobs are few and far between.
Talking to my peers, none of the ones who finished the program are in academics. They do tend to have jobs in thinktanks and the like, and do a lot of writing and thinking. They seem pretty happy, except for the ones who were focused on academics, and are angry and bitter that they are never going to do what they planned/wanted.
I would say that if you KNOW what you want, go for it. If you just don’t know what to do for the next 4-10 years, don’t bother.
I get the impression that politics is a big issue for many PhD students. It certainly is for staff and students who lecture or tutor at my uni. I wonder how much my being in heaven doing my doctorate is the fact that the scholarship is almost enough to live on, because we own our house and have off-loaded the kid (she’s all grown up). I do some work, but it is outside the uni. So most of the politics just flows over me and I take almost no notice of it other than the odd scrap of gossip.
So the reaction of a PhD student with time, financial security and no need of future tenure, is going to be much more positive than the norm.
Thanks to this thread, I am appreciating my position even more!
I find it really interesting that some of you (CalMeacham and lynne-42) are doing something so different from your respective fields. I always thought I was extremely odd for considering studying in something like Classics just because it seemed fun, even though I’m a scientist so it’s good to know there’s a place for that!
Thanks for all the responses. Keep them coming. Definitely good to hear some of this stuff. 
I had a totally different experience from most of you since I was born in the middle of the Depression. This meant that there was only a little competition (in 1962 there were only about 250 PhDs in math in the US) and dire need to educate the boomers. Someone said that that demand from UCal was for about half the PhD’s minted in every year. Jobs were easy and I actually got one totally unsolicited job offer. The phrase “tenure track” didn’t exist since there were only a few high prestige 2 year limited named instructorships (now called assistant professorships since the rank of instructor has disappeared) and regular positions. Of course, not everyone got tenure, but most did. And the tenure reviews were pretty informal.
So, yes it was worth it, but I don’t know if it would be worth it today. I certainly enjoyed grad school. Spent most of my time playing Go and Bridge. Finally got serious enough to write a thesis in two months and another two to get it typed (by my mother and me).
What would I do today? Maybe still get the degree (what, skip all that fun?) but probably not look for an academic job. My ideal would be something like Microsoft Research.
You have to have lived through my era to see how much easier it was for us. And, oh yes, I almost forgot to mention. Being a professor today is also very different from what it was when I started in 1962. The university administrations have grown like purple loosestrife and they seem to spend most of their time constricting the autonomy of the professors. My colleagues have to announce a grading scheme the first day of class and cannot vary from it. We are not allowed to even tell a student caught cheating that we have caught them. We have to document everything, not say a word to the student and inform the associate dean. We cannot give a test during the last two weeks of the class, even if it is in lieu of a final. And students can appeal everything.
My answer is about the same. In my field there are few things to do with a PhD aside from teaching, realistically, and there are few teaching jobs, so grad school was awesome but the post grad school trauma was really something else (finally found something this year-- 4th or 5th (don’t want to think about it too hard, shudder) year on the market). Was a really self-esteem-, ego- and soul-crushing period of time. So if you’d asked me this one year ago when I was starting to doubt that I’d ever land a job in the field and was just looking at a lot of time and money spent. . .
Question for the people who are not happy: what is your relationship with your adviser? I had a great adviser the first place I went, and when he died suddenly I moved to a school with someone who was doing what I was interested in. I probably would have been miserable if I had stayed. Both had enough clout so I didn’t have to worry about politics. I can imagine that having an adviser without any clout or one who doesn’t give a crap about your research could be a problem.
Ph.D. in math here.
Was it worth it? Absofuckinglutely.
It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and I wouldn’t advise someone to get a doctorate unless they really, really want it. And the credential itself ultimately didn’t wind up being that big a help in the field I finally wound up in.
But I gained a huge leap forward in my ability to think things through clearly. Maybe there are easier routes to this, but there’s nothing like trying to figure out whether you’ve actually proved a result this time, or whether you’ve overlooked something in your proof yet again, when there’s no answer in the back of the book because nobody’s proved this particular result before, and even your advisor doesn’t know the ins and outs of the material as well as you do, so you’re it.
The experience is so embedded in my bones that I can’t really compare me with the doctorate, versus a hypothetical me without it; I’d be a very different person if I hadn’t gone through that particular experience.
That the market for academics was pretty crappy when I finished up in the early 1990s, and I wound up teaching at a very small college for five years, with low pay and too many courses to teach. Since then, I’ve been a government statistician, and the doctorate enabled me to start as a GS-11 rather than a 9, which made about a $5000 difference in my pay for a couple of years. So the direct remunerative benefits of the doctorate have been pretty modest, and certainly not enough to make up for five years’ difference between a graduate student stipend and what I might have been making as a community college professor instead.
So the credential, as such, hasn’t exactly paid for itself. But I still don’t have a moment when I wish I’d not done it. It’s an important part of what I’ve become, and I’d hate to be without that part of me. But I really, really wanted to go this route in the first place, and if I hadn’t, I would have surely fallen by the wayside before getting my doctorate. And I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who didn’t really have a deep desire to go that route.
Well, I’m not one of the unhappy PhDs, but I can comment on this. My adviser, while a great scientist, had alienated a substantial number of the department faculty. He was also not from the right “academic pedigree” for the field. I didn’t realize this or understand its implications when I joined the lab. It did make my degree harder. Publishing when you aren’t in the in-crowd can be difficult. I feel we were held to a higher standard than other labs in the field.
Luckily, the other faculty realized that they couldn’t take their resentment with my adviser out on us. In fact, I think we got more attention than students in other labs. Mostly, they were trying to steal us away. It could have been very bad if they did take it out on us. Remember, you’ll have classes, committee meetings, etc. with the other faculty too.
In the end, I’m glad I chose the lab I did. I’m a much better scientist for his training. However, it looks like a really dumb choice in hindsight. And I can’t really rely on my “academic pedigree” to get me in. Instead, I have to rely on my own awesomeness. 
My PhD (in a biological science) was under one of these MDs who wants to have a lab in his spare time. He had three weeks of lab experience, and no idea how science worked; the lab was a hobby.
It was miserable. There were five PhD students before the other four quit lab pretty early on. My project was working, so I stuck it out. He was abusive, had no clout, no idea how to publish, no concept of how long it took to do a given experiment (“what you don’t have the data from that experiment we discussed yesterday morning?”) and our time ended with legal action and him losing his lab altogether. You have to be pretty awful for the other scientists to rally around your graduate student against you!
That said, I’m a great scientist because of it. I had to learn how to do everything completely by myself. I picked up a huge breadth of techniques and learned how to come up with a hypothesis and see it through all by myself. The bad is that I’m pretty bad at collaboration, because it was never something that we did.
In retrospect, I’m glad I got my PhD, as I have a great career going now, but it was quite touch and go. For those unaware, in the biomedical sciences, the PhD time to graduation average is around seven years these days, followed by at least a four year postdoc period (but usually closer to another seven) before you’d even be considered for an academic post. Only something like 5% of graduate students will ever get that, and most have to consider “alternative” careers. I don’t think I would recommend it to my kid.
I ended up in an evil company, and I couldn’t be happer.
I’m a happy PhD graduate, even though I didn’t end up getting a job in academia as I had hoped. My career ended up taking a non-traditional path, and the PhD definitely opened doors along the way.
When I applied to grad school, I had several years of lab experience and was certain that I enjoyed research, but I didn’t understand that in the 90’s the U.S. federal government was funding the training of way more biology PhDs than the number of academic jobs available. I went to a top-3 school in my field, where pretty much everyone went in thinking they wanted a job in academia, but the reality turned out to be that only a handful of those students ended up actually getting jobs in academia. Of course there were other good jobs available in industry, government labs and many other places.
I agree that finding the right fit with an advisor and lab culture is extremely important. Even if your advisor is famous, “pedigreed” and well-funded, you will still have to deal with politics amongst the lab members, in your department and on your thesis committee. Also, I would advise against choosing an advisor who does not yet have tenure. When I went to grad school, if your advisor failed to make tenure while you were a student, you were faced with the decision to move with your advisor to another university (possibly far away), or find a new advisor within the same university, which usually required finding a new thesis project. Luckily this didn’t happen to me, but I did see it happen to a few others.
Personally? Yes. My field is a huge part of my identity. I love being a folklorist.
Professionally? Sort of. I’ve been working solidly since before I finished. I’m a good teacher and find it a very rewarding job and I’ve had great experiences among my professional colleagues worldwide, but tenure-track is looking increasingly unlikely after 7 years. My current employer, the Cal State system, is essentially laying me off (along with many, many other lecturers) next fall, so I’m researching how to transition out of academia now.
Financially? No way. That’s a combination of my ignorance in my 20s (in my program, only about a third of the students were fully funded, so I thought it was normal and took out loans), and the field I chose.
People here who are saying they had jobs with ‘‘low pay’’ … can we define ‘‘low pay?’’ Salary, benefits? What does a non-tenure track job make? What’s reasonable for someone fresh out of graduate school?
I’m sure it varies by location and discipline. I know two people who were in non-tenure track positions at 2 different major universities and they each made less than a public high school teacher in the same geographic area. For them it was a liveable wage with health benefits; I’m not sure about retirement or other benefits.
I don’t mean to sound discouraging, but non-tenure track positions are sometimes temporary. In the two cases I know, the instructors had to carry heavy courseloads and teach the less desirable courses. Independent research was not part of the position and it’s difficult to do scholarly research and writing in your spare time. For the two friends who followed this path, they had hoped that the non-tenure track position would turn into a permanent or tenure-track position at the same university, but that did not happen. YMMV of course. I hope that others have more optimistic information to share. You might get more answers if you started another thread.
Yeah, I know how much job prospects suck, which is why I’m really trying to understand the risks involved with this choice. My problem isn’t that I ‘‘don’t know what to do for the next 6 years’’ and want to ‘‘put off living in the real world’’ (having lived in the ‘‘real world’’ most of my life, that one gets a :rolleyes:), my problem is that I know what I want to do but have no way to quantify the risk involved in pursuing a Ph.D. I’m not hung up on teaching, just on doing something macro and research/outcome-based and important. And I’m afraid to turn down the opportunity and regret it later. When you have someone sitting there saying, ‘‘Hey, wouldn’t you like an Ivy League Ph.D.? I really think you’d be fantastic!’’, well, who the hell wouldn’t be tempted to think of it as a ticket to financial security? It’s very difficult to think rationally about the probable outcome, especially in the absence of concrete data.
The way I look at it, there’s three reasons to get a PhD: somebody will pay you for your knowledge, somebody will pay you for your research, or somebody will pay you for simply having a Ph.D. All of these are very field-specific.
Simply having the knowledge meaning having a job seems to be most closely related to politics, justice, or law. Being paid for research is most often in the sciences and tenure-track teaching positions (you’re out of luck if your field doesn’t do normal scientific research, like the humanities.) Some jobs, like college administrators, simply need the degrees. It doesn’t really matter in what subject.
So, to decide whether to get a Ph.D or not, I think it’s really dependent on your field. If your prospects improve with a Ph.D., it’s a worthy endeavor. If there’s not much difference, it’s not.
One case I’m familiar with is the Ph.D. in education. If you plan to be a classroom teacher at a community college, high school, or lower, there’s no advantage for getting a Ph.D. In fact, it may hurt you in the long run, as the extra amount you get for a shorter period of time doesn’t make up for the time you spent earning the Ph.D. However, if your goal is to be a college professor, teaching other teachers, that’s the only way to do it.
I agree that it’s impossible to analyze with any mathematical certainty, but I have some suggestions of factors I considered in making my decision. These are just things to think about.
How would you pay for the PhD education - would you and your husband have to incur any debt? Think about your combined educational and consumer debt load for undergrad as well as grad school, including living expenses. You can use a debt calculator to help estimate what monthly payments would be after you graduate. Even if you aren’t incurring any debt, are you foregoing income and retirement savings for the number of years you would be in school? How will this affect your decision-making on things like buying a house, starting a family, and saving for retirement?
Do you know where you want to live after you graduate? It’s a good thing to think about for cost-of-living reasons, and you can focus your career-path research on kinds of jobs that are actually available where you would want to live.
I would encourage you to find out about careers in academia if that interests you most, but also do some research about other careers that would interest you and use the skills you would learn as a PhD student. Just off the top of my head, that might be something like working for a non-profit, or as a government researcher, or for an FFRDC like RAND, or for an organization like the Bazelon Center or Carter Center. Does your school have a program that allows you to network with PhD alums and learn about their careers? If your grad program isn’t much help in researching “alternative” careers (mine wasn’t) you might want to try checking in with the career services offices of other schools at Penn, e.g., the law school should have information about careers in public policy.
I wouldn’t say that an Ivy League PhD is a ticket to financial security, but it can certainly open doors and can be a pathway to an interesting career.
I have a friend in a totally different field (social sciences, I was humanities) who was working on her PhD at the same time. She finished, I didn’t. She doesn’t know yet if it was worth it. I think it will be. She isn’t working in her field at all, but having a PhD has really made her stand out, and opened doors for her with her current employer that she didn’t even know existed before she finished. On the other hand, it took a lot of time (=years of lost earnings) and was a soul-destroying experience, because of departmental politics.
Another friend who finished and is working in academia, in a tangentially related field, says it was worth it. Her husband is a very highly regarded research scientist with tenure; she is the trailing spouse. She says that before she got her PhD, no one took her seriously at all. Now, she may be doing exactly the same thing - a mishmash of different part-time jobs at the university, some teaching, some random other stuff, a lot of stuff with non-traditional students, which is a program that pretty much has zero prestige - but she is treated with a different level of respect. She said that it has changed the questions that she gets asked at meetings (from “can you do the leftover work” to “what do you think we should do in this program”) and the way she is treated by other faculty members, including her husband’s colleagues. She also thinks it was a good thing to do, because of the example that it set for her daughters. (Yes, this thread prompted me to call and ask.)
I wish I had been able to finish, for a lot of the reasons RT Firefly outlines above, but it simply wasn’t possible. I agree though, that having done the work makes you a different person.
Politics are hell. On various grad student fora, and places where grad students gather, it’s the number one topic of conversation. Unfortunately, before you are in the program, you have no way of knowing how the politics work. And even then, you may be screwed and not know it until way, way too late. Punishing grad students for their adviser’s misdeeds is the norm, from what I heard and experienced.