It’s important to consider marginal costs rather than strictly absolute costs. For example, perhaps the question shouldn’t be
What is a waste of time? What is a great use of my time?
but should rather be
What is a waste of time relative to what I would otherwise be doing with that three-to-six year chunk of time? What is a great use of my time?
When I got my B.S. it seemed pretty obvious that my options were either to get a job doing something I knew I wouldn’t enjoy or to go to grad school and continue learning and doing vigorous intellectual work. In grad school I was lucky enough to fall in love with my research area. Grad school was the right choice for me because there was pretty much nothing better I could have realistically been doing with that period of time.
I think when people talk about grad school they are really talking about one of (roughly) four distinct things.
1) “Engineering” grad school: A graduate degree in engineering of almost any kind will probably pay off in spades. You will get promoted faster and you will get paid more.
2) “Hard science” grad school: In the modern world, a Physics B.S. qualifies you to go to grad school. A Physics PhD. qualifies you to be a physicist. Replace “physics” with any other science and this pretty much holds true.
3) “Soft science” grad school: Generally speaking, this sounds like a poor life choice if your goals include financial and career stability.
4) “Professional degree” grad school: e.g. med school or law school. It seems like these fields saturated with competition but plenty of people still manage to make a living good here. I don’t personally know any young doctors and the young lawyers I know, even those from top law schools, are not doing very well.
So, you really want either (1) or (2), but bear in mind that neither of these options guarantees that you will have a free hand in your own research until you are maybe 40 years old and have established yourself as a researcher. You can always choose to be an iconoclast, but remember that the problems that interest you are not necessarily going to be the problems that people will pay you to solve.
In answer to your enumerated questions:
1) There’s nothing to stop you from publishing well-written and well-researched blog posts and publishing your most important findings in peer-reviewed academic journals where they will have a high impact and be taken seriously.
2) As my advisor always said, “It’s not the intercept, it’s the slope.” Having a graduate degree makes available career opportunities which would otherwise not have appeared. This fact is difficult to quantify.
3) All our jobs will be replaced by computers on a long enough timeline, so pick something that at least interests you.
4) Answered tadrinth. To some degree, when you get a graduate degree, you disqualify yourself from certain jobs. For example, if you get an engineering PhD, no one will hire you as an entry-level grunt engineer anymore, because you are overqualified.
2) “Hard science” grad school: In the modern world, a Physics B.S. qualifies you to go to grad school. A Physics PhD. qualifies you to be a physicist. Replace “physics” with any other science and this pretty much holds true.
3) “Soft science” grad school: Generally speaking, this sounds like a poor life choice if your goals include financial and career stability.
Note that for the purposes of the information being presented here, economics qualifies as a “Hard science.”
Does neuroscience or cognitive psychology qualify as a hard science? I’m not interested in “soft” psychology. In neuroscience research, is there jobs that pay >$40k/annum? Is the field hyper-competitive? I would like to know because this is my primary interest.
I am currently in my second year as a grad student, focusing in theoretical/computational neuroscience. Here are my observations on the matter:
1) Neuroscience is a hard science, but as in many things, there’s a continuum. The computational folk are at the hardest part, while the fMRI researchers are considered the softest. In general, the larger the structure you study, the softer it is. Exceptions exist, and within the field there are controversies as to how solid some of the theoretical frameworks are for even the most rigorous parts of the profession.
2) My own observations on average time spent on the job is about 50 hours a week, with some fairly extreme flexibility. Almost all my work is reading and programming, so most days I don’t have to I don’t even have to come in (I do, but that’s because I’m more productive in an office). People on the biology side of things do not have quite that flexibility. If you take human subjects, particularly hospital patients instead of college students, then your life will revolve around them.
3) My program has no requirement to TA, which is a huge time suck. I’m unsure how prevalent TAing is in neuroscience. My general impression is that the better your program, the less likely you are to have to do it. Similarly, if you go to a primarily graduate university, you will spend less time teaching. If you can find a program that lets you avoid that, then do so. Being a TA seems to be the leading cause of misery in grad school.
4) Currently, my pay is $29K/year as a grad student, and post doc pay tends to be in the $40Ks. Full professorship pay (at least in computational) is >80K. As to how likely a full professorship is, see my comments on job prospects. Obviously, location is going to make a difference. My stipend means I live very well in Houston. If I studied at NYU, which has a comparable stipend, I would effectively be much poorer.
5) If all you want is $40K/year, then you’ll be fine. You can be an eternal post-doc and manage that. That being said, I suspect you will revise your estimates up. It can be really hard to see your friends getting other professional degrees with the same or less work and raking in substantially more than you. It’s also hard knowing that you can quit at any time and make substantially more money within a year or two of education. As much as it sucks, knowing about opportunity costs can really dampen your enjoyment of life. You have to resist that, but it takes effort. To keep up with the engineering/M.D./business Joneses, you have to advance in the ranks.
6) High level job prospects in academia: Yeah, you know this isn’t great. Neuroscience fairs better than most sciences because there is so much low hanging fruit, but still, you’re facing an uphill battle. You have to be fully willing to move around until your 40s, possibly to other countries. Many signs point to a decrease in governmental funding and an increase in competition. Business is not picking up the slack. Tenure is going away. I’m aiming for this, and my heavy computational focus has better odds than most, but I have backup plans.
7) High level job prospects outside academia: Better than academia, but depends a lot on how fast the field progresses. You’ll reach your prime around 15 years from now. Neural prosthetics might (that’s a big might) come online by that time and be a big industry. Some types of neural enhancements will hit the market within 30 years, so it could be very profitable if you position yourself right. Integrated computer chips based on neural architectures are beginning to be mass-produced now, so knowledge of existing and highly functional architectures (brains) might make you very valuable. You will become very knowledgeable about people, decision making, and modeling if you do the theoretical branch, so I don’t see much difficulty spinning that into business and stock consulting, especially if grab an MBA. Medical equipment design is always lucrative. Medical consulting is a possibility. Also, the better the industry outside of academia, the easier academia gets (more funding/ less competition)
8) Neuroscience is cool. Don’t underestimate how nice it is to have people want to talk to you about your subject of study. Being an engineer, mathematician, physicist, etc. can really suck sometimes. Subjects like that are really difficult if not impossible to get people interested in. I mention neuroscience in passing, and a huge number of people are interested in what I do. You do have to put up with stupid comments (“What if like your brain is a particle and a wave and collapses the universe, man?”), but I’ve done physics. Socially, dealing with stupidity is easier than obscurity. Economics might be similar, but because of its relationship to politics, it breaches the mindkiller zone and I suspect it would be much less fun to talk about.
I’ll answer any other specific questions you might have too.
I don’t really know. I know about econ because I’m doing a joint PhD in it and statistics. One useful consideration is whether there’s a large non-academic job market for the field. This pushes the salaries of academics up and makes the academic market less competitive, all else equal, because of the outside option.
One additional point—I think it has been made above, but it is good to emphasize: If you want to do any biological science at a high level, focus on hard subjects in undergrad. It’s still difficult to learn organic chem or neuroanatomy in grad school, but it’s much more difficult to add mathematical skills to your repertoire if you’re doing time consuming wet lab work in grad school. Mathematics/Engineering/Physics will get you into better schools, and bio programs will be happy to have you. Every time I talked to a professor, they became much more interested me when they learned of my physics background.
My own history is majoring in physics, psychology, and philosophy. Neuroscience fell out of that for me. If you really want neuroscience, and a head start will really help with a career, then I would suggest a similar undergrad course—some hard field paired with psychology or neuroscience. Make friends with a professor in the softer field, and do lab work there. That will look good on the resume, and it will let you know if you actually like the day to day work. The softer field also helps with point 8 below, which I wish I knew earlier in college.
It’s important to consider marginal costs rather than strictly absolute costs. For example, perhaps the question shouldn’t be
but should rather be
When I got my B.S. it seemed pretty obvious that my options were either to get a job doing something I knew I wouldn’t enjoy or to go to grad school and continue learning and doing vigorous intellectual work. In grad school I was lucky enough to fall in love with my research area. Grad school was the right choice for me because there was pretty much nothing better I could have realistically been doing with that period of time.
I think when people talk about grad school they are really talking about one of (roughly) four distinct things.
1) “Engineering” grad school: A graduate degree in engineering of almost any kind will probably pay off in spades. You will get promoted faster and you will get paid more.
2) “Hard science” grad school: In the modern world, a Physics B.S. qualifies you to go to grad school. A Physics PhD. qualifies you to be a physicist. Replace “physics” with any other science and this pretty much holds true.
3) “Soft science” grad school: Generally speaking, this sounds like a poor life choice if your goals include financial and career stability.
4) “Professional degree” grad school: e.g. med school or law school. It seems like these fields saturated with competition but plenty of people still manage to make a living good here. I don’t personally know any young doctors and the young lawyers I know, even those from top law schools, are not doing very well.
So, you really want either (1) or (2), but bear in mind that neither of these options guarantees that you will have a free hand in your own research until you are maybe 40 years old and have established yourself as a researcher. You can always choose to be an iconoclast, but remember that the problems that interest you are not necessarily going to be the problems that people will pay you to solve.
In answer to your enumerated questions:
1) There’s nothing to stop you from publishing well-written and well-researched blog posts and publishing your most important findings in peer-reviewed academic journals where they will have a high impact and be taken seriously.
2) As my advisor always said, “It’s not the intercept, it’s the slope.” Having a graduate degree makes available career opportunities which would otherwise not have appeared. This fact is difficult to quantify.
3) All our jobs will be replaced by computers on a long enough timeline, so pick something that at least interests you.
4) Answered tadrinth. To some degree, when you get a graduate degree, you disqualify yourself from certain jobs. For example, if you get an engineering PhD, no one will hire you as an entry-level grunt engineer anymore, because you are overqualified.
Note that for the purposes of the information being presented here, economics qualifies as a “Hard science.”
Does neuroscience or cognitive psychology qualify as a hard science? I’m not interested in “soft” psychology. In neuroscience research, is there jobs that pay >$40k/annum? Is the field hyper-competitive? I would like to know because this is my primary interest.
I am currently in my second year as a grad student, focusing in theoretical/computational neuroscience. Here are my observations on the matter:
1) Neuroscience is a hard science, but as in many things, there’s a continuum. The computational folk are at the hardest part, while the fMRI researchers are considered the softest. In general, the larger the structure you study, the softer it is. Exceptions exist, and within the field there are controversies as to how solid some of the theoretical frameworks are for even the most rigorous parts of the profession.
2) My own observations on average time spent on the job is about 50 hours a week, with some fairly extreme flexibility. Almost all my work is reading and programming, so most days I don’t have to I don’t even have to come in (I do, but that’s because I’m more productive in an office). People on the biology side of things do not have quite that flexibility. If you take human subjects, particularly hospital patients instead of college students, then your life will revolve around them.
3) My program has no requirement to TA, which is a huge time suck. I’m unsure how prevalent TAing is in neuroscience. My general impression is that the better your program, the less likely you are to have to do it. Similarly, if you go to a primarily graduate university, you will spend less time teaching. If you can find a program that lets you avoid that, then do so. Being a TA seems to be the leading cause of misery in grad school.
4) Currently, my pay is $29K/year as a grad student, and post doc pay tends to be in the $40Ks. Full professorship pay (at least in computational) is >80K. As to how likely a full professorship is, see my comments on job prospects. Obviously, location is going to make a difference. My stipend means I live very well in Houston. If I studied at NYU, which has a comparable stipend, I would effectively be much poorer.
5) If all you want is $40K/year, then you’ll be fine. You can be an eternal post-doc and manage that. That being said, I suspect you will revise your estimates up. It can be really hard to see your friends getting other professional degrees with the same or less work and raking in substantially more than you. It’s also hard knowing that you can quit at any time and make substantially more money within a year or two of education. As much as it sucks, knowing about opportunity costs can really dampen your enjoyment of life. You have to resist that, but it takes effort. To keep up with the engineering/M.D./business Joneses, you have to advance in the ranks.
6) High level job prospects in academia: Yeah, you know this isn’t great. Neuroscience fairs better than most sciences because there is so much low hanging fruit, but still, you’re facing an uphill battle. You have to be fully willing to move around until your 40s, possibly to other countries. Many signs point to a decrease in governmental funding and an increase in competition. Business is not picking up the slack. Tenure is going away. I’m aiming for this, and my heavy computational focus has better odds than most, but I have backup plans.
7) High level job prospects outside academia: Better than academia, but depends a lot on how fast the field progresses. You’ll reach your prime around 15 years from now. Neural prosthetics might (that’s a big might) come online by that time and be a big industry. Some types of neural enhancements will hit the market within 30 years, so it could be very profitable if you position yourself right. Integrated computer chips based on neural architectures are beginning to be mass-produced now, so knowledge of existing and highly functional architectures (brains) might make you very valuable. You will become very knowledgeable about people, decision making, and modeling if you do the theoretical branch, so I don’t see much difficulty spinning that into business and stock consulting, especially if grab an MBA. Medical equipment design is always lucrative. Medical consulting is a possibility. Also, the better the industry outside of academia, the easier academia gets (more funding/ less competition)
8) Neuroscience is cool. Don’t underestimate how nice it is to have people want to talk to you about your subject of study. Being an engineer, mathematician, physicist, etc. can really suck sometimes. Subjects like that are really difficult if not impossible to get people interested in. I mention neuroscience in passing, and a huge number of people are interested in what I do. You do have to put up with stupid comments (“What if like your brain is a particle and a wave and collapses the universe, man?”), but I’ve done physics. Socially, dealing with stupidity is easier than obscurity. Economics might be similar, but because of its relationship to politics, it breaches the mindkiller zone and I suspect it would be much less fun to talk about.
I’ll answer any other specific questions you might have too.
[Edited for clarity]
I don’t really know. I know about econ because I’m doing a joint PhD in it and statistics. One useful consideration is whether there’s a large non-academic job market for the field. This pushes the salaries of academics up and makes the academic market less competitive, all else equal, because of the outside option.
One additional point—I think it has been made above, but it is good to emphasize: If you want to do any biological science at a high level, focus on hard subjects in undergrad. It’s still difficult to learn organic chem or neuroanatomy in grad school, but it’s much more difficult to add mathematical skills to your repertoire if you’re doing time consuming wet lab work in grad school. Mathematics/Engineering/Physics will get you into better schools, and bio programs will be happy to have you. Every time I talked to a professor, they became much more interested me when they learned of my physics background.
My own history is majoring in physics, psychology, and philosophy. Neuroscience fell out of that for me. If you really want neuroscience, and a head start will really help with a career, then I would suggest a similar undergrad course—some hard field paired with psychology or neuroscience. Make friends with a professor in the softer field, and do lab work there. That will look good on the resume, and it will let you know if you actually like the day to day work. The softer field also helps with point 8 below, which I wish I knew earlier in college.