| I'll give the US perspective. You don't forego anything if you choose not to do a PhD right now. You can always do it at a later age - even in your 40's. Red flags: You don't love studying. You don't love the process of research. You have loneliness concerns (loneliness is a reality for most PhD students). You don't want to think about sitting in the office reading papers all day. I can assure you - reading journal papers is boring - they're often not written to be read easily. Don't worry about not being bright and it being a huge intellectual challenge. Many/most students feel they're not bright enough, and whether it will be a huge challenge depends heavily on the topic and your advisor. Worrying about not being able to do interesting work: While I do think a PhD makes it easier to find interesting work, I think largely that's a separate skill in itself. I would wager that most PhDs do not find particularly interesting industry jobs if they do not learn the skills to find such jobs. Merely going through the motions of acquiring a PhD will not help too much in that regard. And if you do develop those skills, chances are good you'll be able to get interesting jobs with your MSc. If you have a view that academia is about doing fun problems, the truth is yes and no. The "yes" is obvious. The "no" is that very, very often the reality is papers/conferences are the currency of academia, and the typical professor these days is more interested in optimizing that metric. So there's a good chance you'll end up publishing work that is dubious, or end up doing hacks to get more papers (e.g. republishing the same stuff with minor tweaks). Definitely do not go into academia with the assumption that people there are more intellectually honest or have more integrity than in industry. |