Having a graduate degree somehow makes my resume look less attractive than just having an undergrad.
In many cases you have to pay PhDs more. If you can find someone who can do the work who doesn’t have a PhD, you save money by hiring them. In many fields, there is much more need for people to do Masters level work than to do PhD level work, so there are more jobs available at the Masters level.
grad or professional schooling can be more time/effort/work than it’s worth.
A PhD in biology in the program I mastered out of involves working anywhere from 50-80 hours a week, takes 5-6 years, and typically pays around $30k a year at best. If you could have instead made $50k at a real job, graduate school has an opportunity cost of $100-120k.
Graduate school is bad for you. Most of my friends are in graduate school and they are noticeably less happy and more crazy than they would be otherwise; one friend is going gray at 27 from stress. I was chronically depressed almost the entire time I was in graduate school, and it only went away when I graduated.
One of my fellow teaching assistants last semester was a first year graduate student, taking two graduate level core curriculum classes, trying to start up his research, and also trying to be a teaching assistant for biostatistics when he had never taken any statistics. Both of my fellow teaching assistants this semester are just getting Masters, but they’re both taking two classes, TAing biostatistics, and trying to finish their Masters theses.
Do undergraduate research first before making any decisions about graduate school. PhD programs are almost entirely research. You take some classes at the beginning, which weeds out the idiots, and then the entire rest of the program is research. If you don’t thoroughly enjoy research, you will hate graduate school.
My standard advice is to not do a PhD unless you have to (because the career you want requires one).
As far as I know, there is no law (in the US or Canada) that requires you to mention your graduate degrees on your resume. It isn’t fraud, it is merely incomplete (like every resume is necessarily). For instance, I attended various community colleges while in high school, but only list the university I graduated from on my resume.
If you go straight from undergrad to a PhD program, you won’t have a Masters on record, which means you’d have to drop all the way down to applying for bachelor’s level positions.
Plus which, if you’re not going to leverage the PhD, why would you spend an extra four years of hard work and low pay to get it? Just get a Masters instead.
In a lot of fields having a Masters without a PhD signals that you couldn’t handle the demands of getting your PhD, and is worse then not having a Masters at all. Or, as they say “If at first you don’t succeed, cover up all evidence that you tried”.
I’m in a PhD program and this is a bit worse, but similar to my own experience, however, there’s significant variation along the personality axis. If you’re the calm and collected low stress type, then grad school probably won’t affect you nearly as much.
To reinforce tadrinth’s comment: even if a PhD were to offer to work for a BS salary, employers would have to ask why. Is it because the PhD knows their work quality is that far below their peers? Is it because they just want a job to “tide them over” while they search for a better paying offer elsewhere?
On an unrelated note:
When planning for the future you need to consider stupid central planners as carefully as smart computers/robots. PhD employment rates have seemed happily immune to the present economic troubles, but the next round of trouble is going to come when government budgets revert toward equilibrium, and that process may be particularly hard on jobs which closely depend on government funding.
In many cases you have to pay PhDs more. If you can find someone who can do the work who doesn’t have a PhD, you save money by hiring them. In many fields, there is much more need for people to do Masters level work than to do PhD level work, so there are more jobs available at the Masters level.
A PhD in biology in the program I mastered out of involves working anywhere from 50-80 hours a week, takes 5-6 years, and typically pays around $30k a year at best. If you could have instead made $50k at a real job, graduate school has an opportunity cost of $100-120k.
Graduate school is bad for you. Most of my friends are in graduate school and they are noticeably less happy and more crazy than they would be otherwise; one friend is going gray at 27 from stress. I was chronically depressed almost the entire time I was in graduate school, and it only went away when I graduated.
One of my fellow teaching assistants last semester was a first year graduate student, taking two graduate level core curriculum classes, trying to start up his research, and also trying to be a teaching assistant for biostatistics when he had never taken any statistics. Both of my fellow teaching assistants this semester are just getting Masters, but they’re both taking two classes, TAing biostatistics, and trying to finish their Masters theses.
Do undergraduate research first before making any decisions about graduate school. PhD programs are almost entirely research. You take some classes at the beginning, which weeds out the idiots, and then the entire rest of the program is research. If you don’t thoroughly enjoy research, you will hate graduate school.
My standard advice is to not do a PhD unless you have to (because the career you want requires one).
As far as I know, there is no law (in the US or Canada) that requires you to mention your graduate degrees on your resume. It isn’t fraud, it is merely incomplete (like every resume is necessarily). For instance, I attended various community colleges while in high school, but only list the university I graduated from on my resume.
A six-year gap in your resumé will look funny.
If you go straight from undergrad to a PhD program, you won’t have a Masters on record, which means you’d have to drop all the way down to applying for bachelor’s level positions.
Plus which, if you’re not going to leverage the PhD, why would you spend an extra four years of hard work and low pay to get it? Just get a Masters instead.
In a lot of fields having a Masters without a PhD signals that you couldn’t handle the demands of getting your PhD, and is worse then not having a Masters at all. Or, as they say “If at first you don’t succeed, cover up all evidence that you tried”.
Does that include biology? If so, I will be rather annoyed that no one warned me.
I polled three Ph. D. biology students and they had mixed opinions.
I’m in a PhD program and this is a bit worse, but similar to my own experience, however, there’s significant variation along the personality axis. If you’re the calm and collected low stress type, then grad school probably won’t affect you nearly as much.
To reinforce tadrinth’s comment: even if a PhD were to offer to work for a BS salary, employers would have to ask why. Is it because the PhD knows their work quality is that far below their peers? Is it because they just want a job to “tide them over” while they search for a better paying offer elsewhere?
On an unrelated note:
When planning for the future you need to consider stupid central planners as carefully as smart computers/robots. PhD employment rates have seemed happily immune to the present economic troubles, but the next round of trouble is going to come when government budgets revert toward equilibrium, and that process may be particularly hard on jobs which closely depend on government funding.