The PhD
What is the PhD?
At its core, a PhD is figuring out what research area most excites you, spending multiple years trying to output meaningful research in that area, and finally tying all your contributions together in a dissertation. Classes and TAing and all of those things are secondary, if you enjoy research, you will enjoy the process of getting a PhD. Grad school (in my experience) feels much more like a job than a schooling experience. As a PhD student, you will have an office, weekly meetings with your advisor, long-term goals and deadlines, etc. Your life changes much less between semesters (compared to undergrad, where your daily schedule was pretty much governed by which classes you took). My program (CS at UPenn) is 5 years long - the first two years are spent taking classes - we have to choose 4 quals courses out of 8 courses in the CS dept, and then we choose 4 seminars, which can be any class from any department. We also have to TA 2 semesters.
Career Motivations
I did three software engineering internships and didn’t love them. I didn’t enjoy daily standups, working with a massive codebase, or coding for the majority of my working hours on something I had 0 say in. It felt like too much of a chore, and I disliked how uninvolved I was in the designing/marketing process of the products I was making as a software engineer. I did undergrad research and really enjoyed it, so I turned down my full-time software engineering job offer and decided to go to grad school! In terms of career, there is a clear-cut path to being a professor. You would get a postdoc degree and then apply for faculty positions. You can also go into industry research. For CS PhDs, most large tech companies hire graduates to work in their research departments. I would say that the main door a PhD opens is freedom and autonomy in your career. With a doctorate, you are much more likely to find a position where you are your own boss, in the sense that you control what work you are doing day-to-day and you have the ability to explore and pursue things that excite you
Research vs. industry - in my experience (3 summers at Microsoft), my takeaway was that you don’t really have any say in what you code. Some people really enjoy the software engineering process, but I didn’t love the aspect of adding a tiny feature to a massive codebase. My experience was specific to a large tech company, but I found that you rarely get to see a feature end-to-end. A lot of the time, the code involved is so complex that you only contribute a small part to the larger story. Even though my research involves a considerable amount of coding, it’s not the main focus - in research, your work centers around your contribution to the field and the impact it will have, not the code you write. My work is also grounded in social science and psychology, so a lot of it involves extending existing machine learning research to have applications with positive social impact. This ability to make contributions that go beyond pushing code to a massive codebase, and be intellectually challenged in a much more open-ended way was what drew me to research over industry.
Costs and Considerations
I am privileged enough to have parents who I know will be able to support me financially if I am struggling. My dad also has a PhD, so I always saw it as a viable option for me. These two things definitely played a huge role in my decision to go to grad school, because I had my family’s support in postponing my career by 5 more years. A PhD definitely won’t cause you to go deeper into debt, because you get a stipend that should cover all your living expenses. But if you have debt from undergrad, you probably won’t be able to start paying it off until after you are done with grad school. That is definitely something to consider - if you need to support other people besides yourself with your income, then a PhD might put too much financial strain on you and your dependents.
Taking the duration of your career into perspective, when you work for 40+ years from graduating undergrad to retirement, taking 5 years of that time to go to grad school won’t stop you from achieving any professional goals in the long run. But be prepared to watch your friends make actual money and get promoted while you are still in grad school, because that will definitely suck at times. Just remember you aren’t “behind” professionally or financially, you just chose to go down a different path!
Admissions Advice
100% do undergrad research if you can. You won’t have the knowledge or skills to undertake your own research project, but being part of a lab and attending lab meetings will give you so much exposure to the world of academia and help you figure out if a PhD is a good fit for you.
Talk to current PhD students at your institution! Ask them about their experience and how they decided they wanted to go to grad school. A lot of the time, current PhDs will be able to give way more relevant information than professors, simply because they were in your shoes such a short time ago + they’re way less busy.
Check out REUs - they’re like summer internships but for research, and they’re geared towards students without any prior research experience! And if your school offers any type of undergrad thesis, definitely do that. The experience of meeting with a professor as your advisor and perfecting your paper does really closely match what PhD research is like.
A lot of people I know decided to take 1-2 gap years after graduating undergrad to focus on research and grad school applications full-time. This is also a super viable option! Especially if you are not 100% set on grad school by fall of your senior year