| HI, Thanks for your reply 1: Regarding PhD Programs, Getting in a good PhD Program wouldn't be that much difficult for me (I have a decent GRE score 1380) coupled with demonstrated research interest (via publication and paper). However I have closely looked at life in the Academia (all my undergrad friends are doing PhD). And the Advisor problem is really terrible, since a lot is determined by your choice of advisor alone.
Finally regarding working in a Lab of Google/MSFT/ or Academia is what I am trying to avoid. I have this personal theory that I should couple my technical knowledge with Managerial one to obtain a position where I could solve practical problems.
Research, Conference and Publications are fun, but over the years I have been amazed at large amount of publications that are hardly implemented in real life (if at all they are implementable).
The other Post-PhD issue is that my stipend (with 50% saved) wont be enough to completely pay of my loans (my parents have enough money but I somehow dont wish to burden them), Also the current Visa rules do not allow me to start a Startup post PhD so The employment issue remains.
At best I can hope is to get an Associate level jobs or Qunat ones at consulting firms Post-PhD. Regarding your comment about Quant jobs being dry (conscientiously), sure they are but they are also exciting in a way You can literally see performance of your algorithms in term of monetary value. Regarding my publication they were in a journal which is considered top in my field and published by an American non profit academic body, with its first issue being published around 100 years ago.
About my programming skill, well I can tell you that I can understand and write code. Its hard to give out any information here without compromising my privacy. Regarding 29 months figure, if i have a job for say 2 years I would be able to earn enough to pay most of the debt plus would gain enough experience required for a B-School. That how i did my mental calculation though it is likely wrong. To summarize 6 years into the future I want to work at a position where I could be making significant decisions that would affect products / Services / lives of people.
A perfect example would be Program/Project Mangers at Google or Facebook. |
You're right that a PhD is probably not for you and MBA later on might in fact be what you want.
So I'd suggest you maximize your chances of getting into a good company right now that you could see yourself in for a few years, which would let you get into a good B-School.
Also, since you need the money to pay for loans etc., joining a startup is not for you either. Most startups will not pay a high salary for employees, and the visa issue will remain. Also, unless you start a company yourself, I'm not sure how much of a management role you'd get, since typically the founders will be the ones directing the major decisions.
I can't really say much else as this career path is quite different than the ones I know best, but I wish you all the best.
P.S. Regarding research being implementable -- it depends a lot on the field you're in within CS. A lot of graphics advancements do in fact get picked up by industry, and fairly fast as well (6 months to an year). However, in general the commercialization of research happens in one of three ways:
1. A researcher is at a research lab (MS/Goog/etc.) and passes it to a dev team at their company. Examples are PhotoSynth at Microsoft or Adobe's Seam-Carving paper.
2. An academic researcher starts a startup with their research to commercialize it. Example: google.
3. Some company seeks out and implements promising papers they see from academia. This is rarest, but for startups could provide a huge competitive advantage.
I think it's unrealistic to assume that other academics should implement and/or commercialize their research -- it's a very time-consuming process and that's generally not how they want to spend their time. Coming up with new ideas is their job, and naturally they will try to optimize for that.