I have a couple of questions regarding getting a PhD, which is something that has interested me for a while and that I’ve been thinking about lately now that I’m inching closer to the end of my undergrad career (about 1.5 years to go). My main motivation is primarily to expand education on the subject and allow for research positions and maybe teaching down the road. I’m interested in some of the general experiences that anyone has had or knows about.
-What is the difference between going the undergrad—>masters—>PhD route vs going straight to undergrad—>PhD, which some programs offer? Does it pretty much become your responsibility to obtain that extra knowledge yourself when doing your research?
-I’ve always imaged the experience being that you work under a professor to conduct research on your thesis; that they are there to guide you but most of the work is pretty much you making things happen. Am I wrong on this assumption?
-Research in undergrad: obviously this is a good idea if planning to go the PhD route, but how exactly do I do this? Do I ask a professor if they are willing to help me do research? Do I choose what to do research on or is it chosen by the professor?
-Beyond undergrad research: other than conducting research and getting good grades, what are other things that I could be doing now that would help me get into a program?
-Paying for it: I was always under the assumption that you could work as a TA or RA to cover the costs and to making extra living money. For example: someone works as a TA, making, say, 30k/year. Does this include the cost of the PhD program? How does all of this work?
-Age: I will be 31 when I finish my undergrad. Assuming I go straight for the PhD program and it takes 4 years, will there be any disadvantages to being 35yo when I go out into industry?
-Applied/Engineering Physics: one of my main motivations behind engineering is its link with physics (I love physics). Is this a feasible option if I wanted to get more into the theoretic side of engineering - something that would allow me to research new technologies as they apply to engineering - or am I better off just sticking with straight engineering?
Other general experiences would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
PhD programs typically admit students with bachelor’s degrees in the subject or a closely related one. In many cases, PhD students pick up a master’s degree along the way, based on graduate level course work and a master’s thesis / research project.
About one to two semesters of your life. Honestly, there is no real “extra knowledge” there since most thesis-based master’s degrees are basically the equivalent of the first two years of “getting your sea legs” and learning how to perform research that would normally be in a direct PhD program anyway. There really isn’t any sort of knowledge gap between people with all three degrees or just the two, in general.
Depending on how you are defining “closely related” here, this may be inaccurate. I know people who went the direct PhD route in aerospace engineering (for example) whose backgrounds were fairly diverse, including chemical engineering and physics. If you consider that “closely related” then you can safely ignore this paragraph.
In theory, this is how it works. How well it follows this idea varies highly on who you have as your advisor. Most (good) advisors give their graduate students a lot of slack and let them learn how not to hang themselves with it while performing their experiments or computations. Some are more hands-on with their guidance. All of them are different.
Mine pretty much took a fairly hands-off approach, allowing me a lot of latitude to learn and develop as a researcher on my own and only really guided me enough to make sure I was pointed in generally the correct direction. I had more guidance in the early part of my main project (so probably in the 2nd and 3rd year of graduate school or so) and then he really backed off and let me tackle it on my own, and I am very thankful for that. It was rough at first, and probably sounds daunting to a typical undergraduate, but I firmly believe I am better for it now that it is in the past.
Take a look at the professors whose research aligns with your current interests, then ask them if they have any openings for an undergraduate in their research group. You will likely start out being some graduate student’s understudy, learning the tools of the trade and probably performing some of the more mundane research tasks that are lower on their priority lists. SolidWorks modeling seemed to be a pretty popular first task for newly-hired undergraduates in my lab who didn’t yet have the expertise to jump into the more demanding things. As long as you are diligent about learning, though, and do your best to be helpful without being needy, most graduate students are happy to have you start taking on more important tasks.
Basically, the thing to remember about being an undergraduate who is supposed to be helping a graduate student with their research is this: graduate students are pretty much universally overworked and would love to have someone to pick up some of that load, but their future (and how soon that future starts) is riding on finishing that research project successfully, so they have to build up trust in your abilities before they are likely to willingly hand anything vital over to you. Just keep that in mind.
Those are the two big ones. GRE scores aren’t all that important so long as they aren’t too low. They will generally never get you into a program, but they could keep you out of one. The other big factor would be trying to get good recommendations from your professors. If you do well in the research lab, though, then that goes a long way toward getting a very nice recommendation from the PI running that group. That is a huge feather in your cap.
Generally, PhD programs are free to the students and come with a stipend. If you get an assistantship, that generally automatically waives the out-of-state tuition (if it is a public school) and then your professor or department pays for your tuition directly as part of funding the assistantship. Whether or not your fees are covered is variable not only form school to school, but from department to department within a school, or even from one professor to another within a department. Your stipend at most places will be enough to cover rent, food, beer, and a modest assortment of entertainment options, but you certainly won’t be saving for retirement until graduation. That is just one of the downsides of a PhD program, but we all have to put up with it.
I eventually solved that problem about 2 years into my program by marrying someone with an adult job, so it was like living on 1.5 real incomes instead of 0.5.
Apparently CC has a length limit on posts now, so I had to split this up. Strange.
That generally won’t be a problem, but I wouldn’t go in assuming that you will finish in 4 years. For engineers, the time from BS to PhD is typically 4 to 7 years depending on a whole lot of different factors and you really can’t control for many of them very well. Computational researchers seem to take less time on average, but not by a whole lot.
At any rate, even if you were 40 when you finished it wouldn’t likely be an issue. At the PhD level, employers (be it industry, academia or other sorts) are usually hiring you for your specific set of skills and expertise, and the number of other options for them is generally relatively limited. I have a friend who recently got his PhD at something like age 41 or 42 and he got a job at JPL.
Absolutely you can get more into the theoretical side of things. The line between physics and engineering blurs considerably when you get into academic research. Some engineering research groups do the exact same studies that other groups do in physics departments and are very theoretical. Some are at the other end of the spectrum and are quite applied (and there are physics research groups that skew that direction as well). Whether you have the opportunity to do that will depend mostly on which research topic you eventually choose and whose research group you join as a PhD student.
My dissertation was on a topic that is one of the more theoretical areas under the aerospace engineering umbrella. Really, the dissertation probably would have been more at home in a mechanics department rather than a traditional engineering department, but there are few of those remaining and it really doesn’t matter anyway which department hosts the research group. My topic had to do with some of the fundamental physics of boundary-layer flows and wasn’t really applied to any vehicle shape in particular. On the other hand, right across the street I had a friend who studied how bug splats and damage at the leading edge of wind turbine blades affects the turbine efficiency, which was the much more applied side of what was essentially my field.
I’d be happy to answer any other questions you have, of course.
Thanks for the in depth response! Is 4-7 years usual for an engineering PhD? Not that it deters me, I just always thought 4 was actually on the high side. That’s also very encouraging to hear about your friend who got the job at JPL in his 40’s; the impression that I got (from other threads) was that the aerospace field is pretty ageist and that it’s hard to get a job for graduates over 30.
What should I be looking for when it comes to funding the PhD? Is it a general rule/assumption that they are funded by the college or should I ask the college beforehand?
I’m also interested in hearing about what a typical day of a PhD student is like. Is it pretty much a split of performing research/going over results, writing up the thesis, helping the professor with grading (if I was a TA)? How many hours a week did you put in and how would you compare it to working a regular 40hr/wk job? Just curious so I’d know what to prepare myself for.
Also, I transferred from CC, would grad schools look at those transcripts too or just my last college? I did amazing in CC but had rough first semester after I transferred (grades weren’t horrible, but nothing near competitive either). Unfortunately, because GPA doesn’t carry over after transfer, my new GPA is defined from that rough semester. I’m doing better now but I’m worried that another mediocre grade in the future will halt my recovery (and from what I’ve heard about some of the professors, it’s not about being smart or working hard in the class but more about being lucky enough not to get a bad professor from here on out, so there’s a good chance that it’ll happen). If something like that would happen, would beefing up my transcript/resume with more semesters of research help?
Sorry for the 50,000 questions, I just want to go into this strong and prepared, thanks!
For the first question, any STEM PhD program should be fully funded with the funds coming from teaching or research assistantships, grants, or fellowships. If you’re paying for the PhD, something is wrong.
As for the second question, I’m a thesis MS student, not a PhD student, but most of my friends and labmates are PhD students. Most of the time is spent doing research-related work (experiment, analysis, modeling, or some combination thereof depending on the work in question) or writing papers to submit for publication or working on grant proposals and whatnot to secure funding. If a TA, a small or significant portion of time may be spent teaching, preparing for labs/lectures, grading, or office hours, depending on the class and the responsibilities. If they are taking a class that semester, that’s also a time commitment. With good time management, it’s probably pretty comparable to a 40 hour/week job (on average), though a lot of my PhD-track friends tend to work into the evenings and on weekends and during odd hours.
This is for PhD students in their third year and beyond. During the first two years, at least at my school, PhD students mostly take classes and, eventually, quals (qualifying exams or area exams).
The fastest BS to PhD that I knew was about 3.5 years, and he had some special circumstances. My experience is a small sample size, of course, but I seem to remember seeing an article somewhere that confirmed my earlier statement as typical (I can’t seem to find the link at the moment).
I can’t comment on ageism in the aerospace industry, as my experience is limited to a few internships. I went the national lab route after my PhD rather than industry.
PhDs are typically funded by either an employer or the professor advising you, and it’s almost always the latter. Depending on the program, you may start out for a year or two funded by the department if you haven’t chosen an advisor yet. Those sorts of things would have to be clarified with individual departments and professors. It’s definitely a good idea to discuss funding with potential advisors, but be polite, of course.
A typical day depends a lot on how far along you are in the program. Earlier in my program I spent most of the day learning the ropes from the older students, helping build a new wind tunnel, going to class, and studying. As the program went along, the research side of things gradually started to dominate, and after 3 years or so when my coursework was finished, it was all research.
Once you learn the ropes, the research side of things is a mix of running experiments or simulations, analyzing the data, adjusting your experiment or simulations based on those results, and repeating until you are in the position to start investigating the topic du jour. As an experimentalist, in the heart of my main campaign, I probably spent 20% of my day actually taking data or in direct support of that, 50% analyzing data and constantly tweaking my analysis algorithms, and 30% scouring literature and my previous notes to make sense of the results.
All told, in the heart of my experiments I was probably working about 80 hours per week. Earlier when I was just learning and going to class, it was probably 40 to 50 hours per week.
If you TA, that will have to work into the above schedule. I never TAed in the traditional sense, but I did act as the primary instructor of record for a course. I actually really enjoyed that. It was a lot more work than just TAing though so it might not be relevant here.
I’m not sure how CC would be handled. I’d bet they would want those transcripts but would weigh their decision more heavily toward last grades anyway.
I don’t think there is a magic number of semesters for research. I did 2 or 3 and they were medium quality but good enough to get me some good experience and apparently some pretty good recommendations.
Pick your field wisely. Boneh3ad said “At the PhD level, employers (be it industry, academia or other sorts) are usually hiring you for your specific set of skills and expertise, and the number of other options for them is generally relatively limited.” This is quite true from my experience; but coming at this from the other side is also very true. I managed a group of engineers of which more than half were PhDs. When I was hiring, I was looking for a very specific set of knowledge. If you didn’t have that knowledge, I wasn’t interested. The candidates may have been (were) smart enough to learn after time what the job entailed , but I needed and was paying for a person with that specific knowledge already. Therefore, my comment to “pick your field wisely”
BTW, the system I was familiar with was: TA’s had teaching responsibilities and so were considered part of the academic staff. As such, they were given tuition waivers and a small (read SMALL) stipend to (somewhat) live on. Because they had their teaching responsibilities, their time to do their research was limited to some extent and they were the ones that generally took longer to graduate. An RA was doing sponsored research, which was also their PhD research project. They received a stipend for their work, from which they had to pay tuition and live on. The stipend could vary depending on who was sponsoring the research. While you never lived in great luxury, you were sometimes better off than the TA’s as well as being able to complete you research in a more timely fashion.
I can’t believe I forgot to mention writing. It is usually best to write as you go along. Then when it comes time to actually put a manuscript together for a paper, your work is substantially lessened. In practice, however, most people I know (including myself) aren’t always that diligent for a number of reasons. Usually, then, when it comes time to write up a paper, the people I have known end up tacking that onto the end of their day when they are at home. If it is a particularly big paper (like a full journal article rather than a conference paper), then it is more likely to eat into your other tasks.
JPL is not known for ageism, at least not when I was there. A few of my friends who were laid off from Hughes Aircraft went to work there when they were past 30 years old.