I think there are a lot of super smart folks who pursue a Phd in one area and end up working in another. There are lots of industries (including but not limited to management consulting) where being a great thinker and writer are attractive to potential employers.
I have worked with many of these type of people and they are often really great problem solvers as well. Sometimes, they have unusual technical knowledge and sometimes they just have the tenacity to dig deeper and find a solution.
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Hereās a story of how a PhD researcher behind the mRNA technology that COVID vaccines are based on was treated by UPenn and others before the technology became a household name. She worked in obscurity and was even demoted by UPenn to an adjunct position in 1995. Thankfully, we still have lots of people like her devoted to science despite the lack of recognition financially and otherwise.
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D is a college soph who is wants to pursue a PhD in neurosci. She jokes that she knows she will poor but that she really believes she will be able to support herself. She loves the research sheās doing already and just sees herself doing interesting research as a career. Sheās double majoring in neurosci and a foreign language (just for the love of the language and culture), minoring in econ (that minor is mostly to appease me. She finds it easy but boring). I keep pushing the āyouād be a great consultantā. Spouse and I both were biz majors in different disciplines and had biz/finance careers. But after one HS summer in an office internship, D said āI would hate to do that my whole lifeā and canāt see herself doing anything ābusiness-relatedā. When I was her age I had no idea what Iād be doing as a career. Still, I worry constantly about her never being able to live a secure life financially if she pursues a PhD. Sheāll finish undergrad with no debt, fortunately. Iāve told her to focus on fully funded PhD programs. Itās hard to encourage your child to pursue her dreams when you donāt want her to have to have a 2nd job as a barista at age 30 to pay her bills.
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She doesnāt sound like the type to be unemployed/underemployed. She sounds more like the type who will have multiple offers in multiple fields. 
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PhD programs worth attending should be fully funded, although the funding level can vary from barely sufficient for local living expenses to being somewhat more comfortable in the context of local living expenses.
What may matter considerably is her spending habits. A frugal person can live comfortably on an income level that a spendy person can find very insufficient. That means that a frugal person has more choices in following their interests and passions, even if they lead to lower income than if they just went for the most money.
But she does need to take a look at the research job market in her field and consider what alternative directions she would be satisfied with, if it is highly competitive where most PhD graduates ābustā.
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The idea behind college is to gain marketable skills. This way, kids can be functional adults, and parents donāt have to keep supporting them. āElite or bustā is a logical contradiction, because if, in fact, the student was gaining marketable skills, that statement wouldnāt apply. We told our daughter that if you want to pursue a career like fashion modeling, thatās wonderful, but you need a steady source of income first. If nothing else, study what you want, but get a teaching certificate.
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Daughter was a chemistry major and is working for a major research institute. Pay is enough to live frugally but comfortably with BF and college teammate in Boston, sharing a 2brm. All three were STEM majors and are employed in STEM positions. Working a couple of years has helped her focus her career interests and has allowed her to make valuable connections both in the basic research world as well as private industry, be a co-author in a couple of research publications, and set her up to be accepted into several top fully funded PhD programs for this fall. I think working a couple of years in a relevant field before making a decision to spend 5-7 years on a PhD is a wise thing to consider for a variety of reasons.
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Great points.
Thanks for sharing this perspective.
There are three career paths from a PhD in neuro. One is to join the industry, perhaps in a drug company. The second is an MD/PhD which is intended for people going into academia but has a fallback of being able to practice medicine.
The last career path is of course as an academic. If that is what your daughter intends, please review my post 78 in this thread, posted on January 1st. The post is about a very talented neuroscience student who received her PhD about 8 years ago but has yet to get a tenure track position and is now on her second post-doc. As before, I donāt want to publicly out that person but can give you details via a PM.
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Thanks for your insight. She definitely does not want to do MD/PhD (she knows a few in her lab and has one as her mentor). She sees herself in industry or maybe doing research for a government entity (like NIH). I think she might want to do some type of post doc fellowship but no, she does not seem to aspire to be a PI, run a lab and teach at a research university, from all she has said (as a 19 yo who has acted a decade older than she is since birth but stillā¦she is only 19 yo). This neurosci PhD plan has been her mindset for about 5 years now. I told her early on there was virtually no likelihood of her being a college professor some day so that if she wanted to get a PhD, she needed to have an alternate plan to that, having read enough myself about the future of the tenure track, the plight of adjunct professors, etc. just in general news articles over the last decade. Stillā¦I worry that sheās spend 6 years more on education without a clear path for supporting herself. But she feels getting a PhD is the only real path to being the best research scientist she can be and I donāt know enough to know if sheās right.
@2ndthreekids I work at a university, and I echo the advice you got above. PhDs are a dime a dozen in academia, and they pay adjuncts pennies and string them along with the hopes of a tenure track that never materializes. My D is doing cancer research internship right now, surrounded by postdocs, and sheās come to the realization that she doesnāt want that life. Sheās leaning toward engineering now, purely for the employability and income potential. People need to look at college as an investment and choose a major with a good ROI.
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Thanks for your informed feedback, I appreciate it. Had a conversation with my D again about career paths last week. She absolutely loves the research she is doing currently. She says she doesnāt want to be in academia, but would hope to get a job as a research scientist. I told her to hit up the career office this summer and figure out what that type of job requires for education. She is minoring in a foreign language and econ (she has zero interest in econ but gets it, and knows she may need it for employment). Here is the flipside: I know she could be some type of scientist without a phD but it is extremely difficult for me to discourage her passion to continue her education. I followed the $ after college, as did my husband. We had strong incomes and hated what we were doing within a few years, and I stuck with it for the $ even though I wish I had just gone back to school to get a phD in Econ (dreamt of working for the World Bank, a nonprofit or think tank that helps develop policy for developing countries). We were both completely burnt out by our late 30ās, at which point I bailed out, spouse took time off, switched jobs a few times since in the same industry, but pushing paper is pushing paperā¦he is counting the days to be done. Did it work out for us financially? Yes. But we would have been willing to make a lot less $ in exchange for rewarding careers. I know plenty of people who are absolutely unfulfilled in the careers, miserable wealthy people. This is why it is very difficult for me to tell her to do a major for the ROI alone. I tell her regularly that she needs to have a career that will allow her to support herself/lifestyle she desires, absolutely. But she is one of simple tastes and needs, always has been. If it was all about ROI/college as investment, I would send my kids to CC for two years, then to state schools, and invest the hundreds of thousands of dollars Iām spending on their educations instead until they turned 30 at which point Iād give them a big sum. But I appreciate your confirmation that I did the right thing steering her away from academia!
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@2ndthreekids we are on a similar page in thinking with our eldest S19. Heās currently pursuing an undergrad in Physics with a strong eye towards grad school. We, and he, are well aware of the perilousness of an academic career path, though I believe he would be very well suited to it. While we would have preferred that he had taken the more certain (and most likely more lucrative) path to employment of studying engineering, heās really is the intellectual type and Physics is his passion. Still heās very pragmatic and is aware that the future of his employment most likely lies in industry and not academia. He has applied to his schoolās co-op stream as a way of getting a better idea of what opportunities might exist in industry and his experience will most likely inform his choice of post-graduate program and the direction he decides to steer it in.
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That is great that your son has an opportunity for a co-op program in his field, and that sounds like an excellent plan.
It is quite a thing when you child is truly happy pursuing their passionā¦the best part of this school year for D19 has been her research position and what sheās working on (and learning) in the lab.
Having a career that works out financially shouldnāt be taken for granted. Most people work without the ability to retire early and then donāt even manage to save enough for a decent retirement by 65. And Iād hazard a guess that many of them didnāt find their careers all that rewarding either.
Being able to earn FU money/having the ability to retire early shouldnāt be under-rated.
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Wholeheartedly agree. Not having to work ever again, really puts working into a new perspective. Iāve loved my last career and have spent the last 17 years working in a field that I would work in for free. My kids have even commented that they want to find work that they love as much as I love mine.
My spouse has enjoyed working in the same industry for 30+ years. But when the financial pressure was off, new risks were taken and higher rewards were also generated. Some fields are high risk, high reward and some require years of work to get to a level where the financial benefits really make the long hours worth it. Itās all part of the consideration in choosing a career path.
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I have never heard anyone underrate āFU moneyā but we canāt all achieve it. Maybe a better goal is āIāll passā money, where you feel confident in turning down lucrative offers, but arenāt quite rich enough to burn bridges recklessly.
On the original topic, I wonder what people do who donāt have STEM degrees. This is a puzzle for me as a parent and software engineer. My son has sufficient math aptitude and even some early experience coding that he could do computer science, but he doesnāt want to. Iād rather he excel in something where heās self-motivated than languish in a field he hates. Stillā¦ it basically means his career path is off the road map for me. I have no career advice to give him, at least none from direct experience. Anyone else run into this?
Well, how does he decide what he is interested in and what he hates? Iād have him dig deep to figure out where his motivations come from. Also, how old is he?
If he has the aptitude, Iād urge at least giving a CS minor a try. That would leave the potential path to a CS masters open. And then go somewhere cheap and allow him to study whatever he wants. People often find different motivators once they become older/more mature/reality smacks them in the face.
I agree that he might change his mind. Of course, Iāve encouraged him to add on something that might help with employability. But what if he doesnāt?