Why bother going to grad school? You should be able to come up with your own reasons, for sure. The common denominator is usually that you want to do something new and non-trivial that has not been done before.
But what counts as new? And how different or how big does it need to be from what the field has already seen? Those answers depend a lot on your own temperament, taste, and appetite for ambition and risk.
Let's go over some of the costs and benefits of choosing graduate study.
- Time commitment: usually more than five years, often during some of the most youthful years of your life. Income, work-life balance, and relationships can all take a hit. Do you want that?
- Failure is normal: it is exciting to study previously uncharacterized problems, but there are reasons they have stayed unsolved for so long. It is not unusual to be deep into year four and still be stuck, or to have someone else solve it first.
- It is a competitive field with limited resources.
- You get to think deeply for a long time: that is a huge plus if you are intellectually wired to chase the unknown and contribute something meaningful.
Things to consider while deciding
- Location: read Paul Graham's Cities and Ambition. You may first be drawn to visible things like parks, museums, or restaurants, but cities also have their own mind and style. Most fields have a few cities where academics and industry cluster together. In those places, you are more likely to meet people with the same interests, or people who have already achieved what you want.
- Field: some fields are more "hot" than others at a given moment, and that affects funding, citations, and attention. You have to separate noise from signal, but the reputation and future of a field matter. If a field keeps attracting talent, money, and energy, it probably has solid problems worth solving.
- PI: the lab, its past record, the mentoring style, and the overall culture matter a lot. Your experience will be shaped heavily by the PI and the lab you join, so it is worth probing the culture before committing. It is also wise to make sure there are at least two or three PIs at the institution whose work genuinely interests you. Things can go wrong with a primary mentor, and it is always better to have options.
Some sources
- A Survival Guide to a PhD by Andrej Karpathy
- So You Want to Be an Academic? by Anand Bhattad
- You and Your Research by Richard Hamming
- Modest Advice for New Graduate Students by Dorsa Amir
- All about PhD Applications by Lily Gebhart
- A curated list of tips on various topics by awesome-tips