Executive summary: The author analyzes the pros and cons of pursuing a PhD, concluding that it is the optimal path to impact for a minority of people due to the opportunity cost, financial constraints, and mental health challenges.
Key points:
PhDs can provide valuable research skills, credentials, and access to impactful work, but have high opportunity costs of 3-5+ years.
PhDs typically pay much less than industry jobs requiring similar credentials, limiting finances.
PhDs are unnecessary for many careers and can scare away employers.
Lack of PhD structure can negatively impact mental health.
Signalling benefits mainly come at the end, creating inertia to leave.
Ensure no better impact opportunities, good supervisor/project fit, and entrepreneurship positioning before pursuing a PhD.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, andcontact us if you have feedback.
As much as I love the summaries from the summary bot, I think this one missed the mark. The reason why we talk with people 1 to 1 about whether they should do a PhD is because there is so much nuance and variation depending on personal fit, career goals, industry circumstances, impact goals, etc. This summary does a bad job at conveying these nuances.
For example, point 2 mentions that doing a PhD limits finances, which is a short-sighted way of putting it, especially considering that over a lifetime, PhDs make back the earnings that they lose over the time that they are doing a PhD, and jobs requiring a PhD are often much more highly paid.
Point 3 feels pretty blanket-statement-y about scaring away employers when really there is only a minority of employers who are scared away (they probably won’t be if you’re willing to take the pay that they’re offering).
Point 6 also feels too strongly worded – I don’t think you can ever know if there are no better impact opportunities. Also, not everyone wants to go into entrepreneurship so this last consideration wouldn’t apply.
I know this summary is AI-generated but I think a more nuanced and less strongly worded summary could be created.
Executive summary: The author analyzes the pros and cons of pursuing a PhD, concluding that it is the optimal path to impact for a minority of people due to the opportunity cost, financial constraints, and mental health challenges.
Key points:
PhDs can provide valuable research skills, credentials, and access to impactful work, but have high opportunity costs of 3-5+ years.
PhDs typically pay much less than industry jobs requiring similar credentials, limiting finances.
PhDs are unnecessary for many careers and can scare away employers.
Lack of PhD structure can negatively impact mental health.
Signalling benefits mainly come at the end, creating inertia to leave.
Ensure no better impact opportunities, good supervisor/project fit, and entrepreneurship positioning before pursuing a PhD.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
As much as I love the summaries from the summary bot, I think this one missed the mark. The reason why we talk with people 1 to 1 about whether they should do a PhD is because there is so much nuance and variation depending on personal fit, career goals, industry circumstances, impact goals, etc. This summary does a bad job at conveying these nuances.
For example, point 2 mentions that doing a PhD limits finances, which is a short-sighted way of putting it, especially considering that over a lifetime, PhDs make back the earnings that they lose over the time that they are doing a PhD, and jobs requiring a PhD are often much more highly paid.
Point 3 feels pretty blanket-statement-y about scaring away employers when really there is only a minority of employers who are scared away (they probably won’t be if you’re willing to take the pay that they’re offering).
Point 6 also feels too strongly worded – I don’t think you can ever know if there are no better impact opportunities. Also, not everyone wants to go into entrepreneurship so this last consideration wouldn’t apply.
I know this summary is AI-generated but I think a more nuanced and less strongly worded summary could be created.