| Mine was in theoretical physics. I liked my advisor and the work. But she wasn't a go-getter on grant writing, or on paper writing. Many of my friends left and went to medical physics. I thought of it, but decided against it. This was 20+ years ago. In hindsight, it was a mistake (for me) not to do this. First off: There is no shortage of PhDs to fill tenure track ranks, and there are precious few tenure track ranks available. Unless you are at a top school, with a really special advisor, and your work is getting attention, you should assume that academe is not in your future. Yes, I know this is harsh. I wish someone had said these words to me in 1992-1994. Second: The magic of a PhD is that it is a union card for some jobs, and a good way to open other doors. But know that the time you spend doing it, is time you spend away from economic productive life. Has my now 20+ year old PhD been a boon to my career? I don't know how to answer this. It conveys (via a mal-advised appeal to assumed authority) some intelligence. And maybe it gets me better bargaining ability. Or maybe not. Maybe it typecasts me. I don't have enough data to know. What I do know is, given the benefit of hindsight, I would have done very different things. Third: You always have options, and you always have choices. You need to ask, and answer, a very hard question for yourself. Specifically, what do you want to do with your life? And even if you don't have a hard answer, which is fine, a roughly general sense of what you want to do is a good thing. I decided after seeing the FSU collapse, and the market flooded with fairly senior FSU physicists, that I would focus on learning to be an entrepreneur and business guy. I like working with, and building, supercomputers, and it turned out there was at least some demand there at the time. You need to ask yourself these sorts of questions, and you know, its ok to answer "I don't know". But take the time to figure out what makes you happy. Because YOLO, and its better not to waste time doing something that you won't be happy doing and not making any living doing it. |