<p>Dear Golden,
Please listen to your father, he knows what he is talking about. I completed a PhD (from the #1 life science research university and I published high impact articles), now I am attending medical school because the job prospects are absolutely terrible for neuroscience PhD holders. All of these posters are giving you bad information and do not know what they are talking about. If you complete a PhD in the life sciences it will take 6 years, then you will most likely do 2 postdoctoral fellowships that last an additional 6-7 years. After 12-14 years in training, only 15% of life science PhD holders get a PI position in academia or industry. The rest of them end up leaving research in their mid-thirties or get stuck as “perma-docs = post-docs forever.” The average age for a first R01 grant these days is 42 years old. The starting salary for an academic PI is somewhere between 60K and 95K.</p>
<p>DO NOT GO TO GRADUATE SCHOOL</p>
<p>A degree (MD or MD/PhD) from any medical school in the country is more valuable than a PhD from Harvard or Hopkins. Even if you do research, it is a very competitive environment and when you lose your funding at age 49 you can always fall back on your clinical training if you have an MD. </p>
<p>There is a reason it will be easier for you to get into a top PhD program than any decent medical school. There is also a reason 50% of post-docs are foreign and no Americans will take these jobs anymore. </p>
<p>I would suggest you do some google searches (i.e. Miller McCune, The Economist “why a PhD is often a waste of time, The real Science Gap, Nature on PhD overproduction”) rather than listen to a bunch of random posters.</p>
<p>You should listen to your father. He is right.</p>