<p>Hi,
I wanted to know is it possible to join an integrated course leading to PhD after my undergraduate studies. What are the situations in USA and in Europe? ANy info on finaid in such cases would be appreciated.</p>
<p>Where are you now?</p>
<p>Generally yes, but it depends on the type of PhD program and the quality of undergraduate education and how the school you are applying to preceives your school.</p>
<p>Generally those who want PhD will do it right after the BS degree (at least with most math/science/engineering). Some times the school will give you a masters along the way, not that it matters.</p>
<p>Most PhD students are supported by financial aid with a stipend. They generally will not accpet you if they can't support you. Its not a rule however.</p>
<p>It is possible, depending on your major and intended field of study.
In the US, (at least in engineering) the masters degree is more for people who want to go into industry and a PhD is directed towards those who want to do research. If you have research experience then getting into PhD directly after getting your bachelors is easier. There's also a Masters into PhD option. In Canada, I believe a masters is necessary to PhD entry.</p>
<p>Lets say I want to become a math professor at a college. Should I go for a PhD? And how much money would I be making if I have a PhD?</p>
<p>You pretty much have to have a PhD in most fields to become a faculty member at a non-lame college. But you're not going to be in the money being a professor -- academics are notoriously underpaid for the hours they work.</p>
<p>Professors work long hours? Don't they just teach classes? What more can they do? And does the salery go above 100k? That's all I want.</p>
<p>Professors work very long hours. Their primary job is to conduct research, write grant proposals and get funding for their projects, and supervise graduate students. Teaching is the least of their concerns.</p>
<p>Sometimes a professor's salary tops 100k. I think most senior mathematics professors in universities have salaries topping 100k.
But it varies from institution to instution, and I expect most junior professors to make less than 100k.</p>
<p>It's a little difficult to talk about a professor's "hours." Many professors in the school I go to regularly leave the school at 3 or 4 in the afternoon. In terms of the hours they sit in their office or attend to official duties, I don't think they work long hours at all.
But of course, they're probably working on their research unofficially almost every waking hour they've got. </p>
<p>I think what really make professors underpaid are the qualifications and time required to obtain their positions.</p>
<p>Professors at top schools work absurd hours, particularly around grant-writing time. They also do quite a bit of traveling to conferences and talks. The info I have suggests that a full professor (of biology) at a top program like MIT or Harvard makes around $150k, and that an assistant professor would make around $100k.</p>
<p>Professors at less well-respected programs would work fewer hours, but of course they wouldn't be paid as much either.</p>
<p>You don't get rich in academia as a professor, unless you mean "rich compared to grad students and postdocs."</p>
<p>Harvard and MIT are not the only places where professors work full time and are busy writing grants and going to conferences. Professors at a lot of universities do so. It sounds as if you are saying those two are the only "respected" universities that exist and all others are second rate.</p>
<p>...</p>
<p>Well, actually, I just meant "I only have first-hand information for professors at Harvard and MIT, and in particular only for biology professors." I was sort of trying to keep the generalizations to a minimum, particularly because salaries vary widely due to factors like cost of living and field.</p>
<p>Let me just add some perspective to some of the points that have been made here.</p>
<p>It is clearly true that ASSISTANT professors work very long hours. That's because they are fighting for tenure. However, if and when you get tenure, things get a lot easier. You may still work long hours once you get tenure (and many profs do), but it's now by choice. Remember, once you get tenure, you are basically unfireable. There are practically no other jobs in the US that have this characteristic. Maybe certain jobs with the government, but that's about it. So once you become a tenured prof, then you have complete job security unless you do something completely ridiculous, like burn down a building or something. This is a far far cry from the private sector where you can be the best employee in the company, and STILL get fired, just because your boss doesn't like you or something like that. Heck, sometimes doing a great job in the private sector actually INCREASES your chances of getting fired, because your boss then feels threatened that you will take his or her job. Remember, most states in the US are "at-will" states which means that a private company does not have to provide a reason to fire you. It can fire you at any time for any reason, or no reason, unless expressly prohibited by law (i.e. racial discrimination). </p>
<p>Furthermore, the fact is, professorial teaching contracts involve very little work. For example, most profs only teach during the regular school year, which runs only about 30 weeks a year. They are not obligated to teach during the summer. They get winter break off, which is usually about a month long. They get spring break off. That's a LOT of time off, compared to private sector employees, who generally work somewhere in the high 40's in weeks. Again, granted, a lot of profs conduct large research projects during those breaks, but the point is, once you have tenure, you don't HAVE to do that. You can basically do whatever you want. Couple that with the sabbatical (generally a whole year off once every 7 years) and profs get a LOT of time off relative to private sector employees.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the truth is, many many profs also conduct extensive consulting businesses on the side, or they serve on corporate boards or so forth. Obviously this varies by department to department. However, as delineated by the book "High Stakes, No Prisoners", many if not most professors at the business schools and economics departments at Harvard, MIT, and Berkeley (and presumably most other high-prestige schools) are extraordinarily wealthy because of their outside consulting gigs. </p>
<p>I'll give you some snippets from the book:</p>
<p>"LECG (the Law and Economics Consulting Group) is the largest corporate antitrust consulting firm in the United states with revenues of more than $50 million [in 1999]...Rich Gilbert [Professor and current Chair of Economics at UCBerkeley] was a founder of LECG. When he entered the government [by taking a leave of absence from Berkeley to become senior Economist at the Department of Justice in 1993], he sold his LECG stock back to LECG, thus avoiding conflict of interest restrictions. Then, when he left Justice two years later, he repurchased it; his LECG stock is now worth more than $30 million. [Two other senior economists at the DoJ, Carl Shapiro and Dan Rubinfeld, were, not coincidentally, also Berkeley Professors of Economics, and were also members of LECG]. Carl Shapiro formed his own antitrust consulting firm with Michael Katz, another Berkeley professor who had just been the chief economist of the FCC. Their firm, the Tilden Group, was recently acquired by the other large corporate antitrust consulting firm, Charles River Associates. Katz and another Berkeley professor, Glenn woroch, run a research project, the Consotium for Research on Telecommunications Policy, which is funded almost entirely by the Ameritech Foundation (now run by SBC/AT&T). Woroch also consults for BellSouth. Daniel Rubinfeld, the Justice chief economist until late 1998, owned more than $6 million in LECG stock while working for Justice, representing the overhwleming majority of his personal wealth. LECG's newest seniors partner is Laura Tyson, the [former] dean of UCBerkeley's business school [and now the dean of the London Business School], whoc is also a director of Ameritech and was the chariwoman of the National Economic Council in the first Clinton administration.</p>
<p>Berkeley is in no way unique. MIT's Jerry Hausman recently published a highly polemic paper in a Brookings volume, attacking the FCC for not giving the telephone monopolies more freedom in the Internet industry. What Hausman did not mention in the paper is that he has received millions of dollars from the telecommunications industry foe regulatory consulting and expert testimony. NYU's William Baumol, another famous economist and a past president of the American Economic Association, has a confidential consulting veresion of his curriculum vita containing a fifty-page supplement listing his expert witness engagements, for which he is paid more than one thousand dollars per hour...Peter Temin, former chair of the MIT Economics Department, has consulted for AT&T on antitrust and regulatory matters since the 1970's. Robert Crandall [former professor of economics at MIT, George Washington, and the University of Maryland and current Brookings fellow], consults for Bell Atlantic [now Verizon]."</p>
<ul>
<li>pages 346-347, "High Stakes, No Prisoners", Charles Ferguson.</li>
</ul>
<p>"...Frank Fisher, a professor at MIT...has practically made a career out of corporate antitrust consulting..." - p. 322</p>
<p>Nor is this unique just to the departments of economics of the departments of business administration, although they are probably the most wealthy. Most engineering profs at MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and other elite engineering schools have extensive outside engagements that pay them extremely well. So do many of the natural science profs. I would argue that any MIT or Harvard Professor of Biology could get paid extremely well either consulting for or serving on the Board of Directors on the biotech firm. Just think of it this way. For a biotech firm just to be able to say that they have been endorsed by a Bio Professor at Harvard or MIT could mean the difference between getting funded by a VC, or not getting funded. You have to imagine that that company would pay a LOT of money to get that endorsement.</p>
<p>So, while it is true that these profs don't get all that great by their schools, the fact is, they have extraordinarily prestigious positions, and that prestige can be converted into money. I go so far as to say that any tenured prof in engineering, econ, bus-ad or the sciences at the top schools who hasn't made himself/herself extremely wealthy through outside gigs is doing so only by choice. For example, I would say that there are almost no tenured profs at either the MITSloan School or HBS who are not worth at least 7 figures.</p>
<p>I would add some other examples to the fray. Robert Merton is currently a Professor at Harvard Business School and former Prof at the MIT Sloan School. Myron Scholes is currently Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and was formerly Professor of Business Administration at both Chicago and the MITSloan School, and is now also currently a Managing Partner at Oak Hill Partners, a major venture capital firm. They (along with Fischer Black) won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1997. Scholes and Merton, while still bus-ad professors at Harvard and Stanford respectively, founded the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management that infamously went bankrupt in such a way that it actually threatened the entire world's banking system such that Alan Greenspan had to call for a bailout of them in order to not cause chaos in the world's financial markets.</p>
<p>While LTCM did quite poorly, I would strongly suspect that Scholes and Merton are still quite wealthy. Furthermore, I would argue that most economics and bus-ad profs who found hedge funds (of which many do) do not have their funds end badly, but rather earn quite a bit of money. Just think about the marketing potential. For a hedge fund to brag that they have Profs of busad or economics from MIT or Harvard as founders or directors is a major fillip.</p>
<p>sakky,</p>
<p>You forget that not every professor in the US is in the sciences, math, or engineering. There are plenty of English professors that don't really make much outside of their salaries. If you go into the social sciences (econ possibly excluded) or humanities, you had better hope to get published and that your texts sell, 'cause you ain't gonna be makin' the big money otherwise.</p>
<p>As for going straight to the PhD in social sciences (my area), it's done. But, most professors I've spoken with caution against it, since social science PhDs aren't big moneymakers, so you had better be damned sure you want to go through with one.</p>
<p>Well, in terms of amount of time working, the professors that I know are working probably 12 hours a day or so, on average. Some put in more time, some less. I've heard of some routinely putting in 18 hours, every day (well, not many... but they exist!).</p>
<p>I was really surprised to see those big terms, in terms of salary. I've only had experience with math/physics salaries. I think that the starting salaries are around $50,000-$60,000, in those departments. Professors rarely do it for the money, of course!</p>
<p>
[quote]
You forget that not every professor in the US is in the sciences, math, or engineering. There are plenty of English professors that don't really make much outside of their salaries. If you go into the social sciences (econ possibly excluded) or humanities, you had better hope to get published and that your texts sell, 'cause you ain't gonna be makin' the big money otherwise.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>First of all, I did not forget anything. Read my post again, and you will see that I deliberately fingered the profs in bus-ad, econ as being the ones who can really clean up, with engineering and the hard sciences as also being target-rich environments. </p>
<p>I also would not automatically exclude the other disciplines right out of hand. Charles Ferguson, the guy who wrote the book "High Stakes, No Prisoners", got his Phd in Political Science from MIT, specializing in technology policy (especially US-Japan technological competition). While he didn't become a prof, he did end up working for Congress in setting technology policy to create Sematech (the US semiconductor technology consortium) and became a $500,000 a year [in early 90's money - so probably $1million a year today] consultant, before starting a company called Vermeer Technology which got sold to Microsoft to create the software application that is now know as MS Frontpage, from which he became a multimillionaire. High Stakes, No Prisoners is basically an autobiography of how he created Vermeer. </p>
<p>Nor is Ferguson particularly unusual. The MIT political science department, unsurprisingly, specializes in the politics of technology and the politics of national security. If you become known as an authority on technology policy or national security policy, you can make a very very good living as a part-time consultant, either to tech companies, or to the government, or to the defense industry, and so forth. Again, like I said, Ferguson was never even a prof, and yet he was a richly paid political consultant. </p>
<p>Sociologists, psychologists, and cultural anthropologists who are known as authorities on modern human behavior, and especially on modern consumer behavior, can undoubtedly become richly paid as consultants to marketing companies. Madison Avenue will happily pay many millions to anybody who can help them design better advertising campaigns, and big retailers will certainly pay boatloads of money for anybody who can help them reposition their shelf space in such a way as to sell more product. </p>
<p>Look, I agree that you shouldn't get a PhD for the money. If you just want money, go become an investment banker instead. That is a a far faster way to make obscene amounts of money.</p>
<p>However, my point is, I wouldn't cry too much for the tenured profs. Many tenured profs, especially in the disciplines that I named, have extraordinarily lucrative consulting practices on the side. They are not hurting by any means. Being a tenured prof at a big-name university gives you tremendous cachet in the world of consulting and in the business world in general. For example, one of the games that is played in the hedge-fund and private-equity fund space is to try to sign up a whole bunch of business school profs from HBS, MITSloan, Wharton, Stanford, and places like that to be co-investors or co-partners. Then you can tout that you are being backed by some of the most famous B-school profs in the world.</p>
<p>Professors in professional schools, such as business schools, in research environments, start around $130k (depending upon speciality) and most earn in the $200k range. I know many in the $300k range (salary just from bschool alone). They all work very long hours in research, consulting, administration, writing books, grants, sitting on boards (teaching is a very tiny part of the job).</p>
<p>Professors routinely work long hours, not necessarily reflected in time they spend in the office. In fact, when they need to get a grant out, many professors I know stay home, away from any other distractions. The office is a convenient place to meet people, but rarely needed to do the research work.</p>
<p>I think Mollieb's comments about Harvard and MIT were more about salaries of professors (H and M have among the highest pay scales in the counry), than about how hard they work. The lifestyle she describes is pretty typical of professors in these fields across the country.</p>
<p>True, one can slack off once getting tenure, usually as an associate professor. However, not many people do this. Among the main things you analyze when looking at a tenure proposal are the drive and ambition of the candidate. Ambitious people do not set out to do the minimum work they can to avoid being fired. Professors, even at places far lower on the pecking order than H and M, are ambitious people who work mainly to satisfy their personal goals, not because they have a boss breathing down their necks.</p>
<p>The average salaries of professors obscure big differences across fields. Even within a faculty of arts and sciences, the economics and tech faculty will make considerably more than the humanities people.</p>
<p>Sakky: No, Ferguson is quite unusual. Very few political scientists work as consultants or do work other than teaching, research, and public service. In the VAST MAJORITY of institutions, a fair number teach extra classes in the summer so they can afford to repave their driveways or go on a vacation with their family. </p>
<p>At the same time, most work quite hard. Acceptance rates in political science journals are between 5 and 20%, meaning that at least 80% of submissions get turned down. Grant funding from NSF is down the last few years and there are few sources of grant support. Public universities have had their budgets squeezed and there is less money to support professors to go to conferences. </p>
<p>The world of most academics is not the world of MIT and Harvard, just as the world of most undergrads is not the world of MIT and Harvard. Getting a job in one of those institutions requires being smart and lucky, just like college admissions. And almost no one gets tenure at the top schools.</p>
<p>But back to the math PhD question: Yes, you need a PhD to hold a faculty position in math at a university (although not to teach on a per course basis, little money, no job security). But there are other career options for people with this degree, particularly if you have an applied focus.</p>