Comment by dagw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dagw | Hacker News Reader

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PhD isn't worth it if you've already decided not to follow the academia path

I know a least a dozen people with PhD's in science, medicine or engineering and only one of them is following the academic path, and he gets regular offers of big bags of money to work for various commercial companies. The only PhD's I know who are 'stuck' in academia are people with PhD's in 'softer' subjects like architecture or social anthropology.

the facts are that they expect you to follow the academia path

Again this varies a lot from advisor to advisor. I know at least one guy (and know of several more) working at a company started by him, a classmate and their advisor during his PhD program. I also know other people who's advisor happily used their contacts in industry to place their students in great jobs.

These are the opportunities that I'm still trying to explore.

Even though my PhD would be in basic science, there are lots of potential applications. In fact, the program I'd be at has very, very strong links with the medical school. I'd probably be able to use some of these techniques on clinical populations and doing some translational research (i.e., stuff that has direct applications). For example, using machine learning with fMRI has some potential in mental health diagnostics.

The big question for me is if these things will take off in the next few years. Currently, I haven't seen any companies really growing in these sorts of areas (though I look at it and think the potential is immense).

the facts are that they expect you to follow the academia path

The bad news here is that while my potential advisor is really great (and probably okay with people not becoming professors) the people that haven't jumped into the post-doc route haven't had any of these sorts of outcomes. The few that haven't gone the academic route have become staff scientists or gone into government (though, those individuals graduated 5+ years ago, and my work would possibly be more technical since the lab has gone down the machine learning path).

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