Hello,
I am interested in going back to school for a PhD in either Mechanical Engineering or Nuclear engineering for Fall 2016. I am on the fence and the schools I get accepted and research into will determine which I will ultimately choose. I consider myself a non-traditional students for many reasons:
- Soon to be married - My soon to be wife goes to USC for SW and is set to finish Spring 2016. Being married in school seems to make things odd. My wife has a much different experience vs. her peers being engaged to me.
- National Guard experience (in IRR) - military experience was useful for toughing out my college. I have no benefits left however.
- Master's degree with research experience and contributions to publications in fuel cell manufacturing diagnostics at NREL.
- Field Engineering experience
- Desire a family friendly community and college
Degrees: BS, MS in Mechanical Engineering
College: Colorado School of Mines
GPAs: 3.8 (both degrees)
GRE: V157
Q157
AW 4.5
Research experience was at NREL in Golden, Colorado.
Work Experience: 7 months in field in North Dakota doing cement casing engineering
5 months in office doing piping engineering
Currently Residing: California
I am most interested in the types of schools I can definitely get in AND be fully funded. I am interested in top-tier, but I am comfortable with going somewhere mid-tier if the research is interesting and the location is healthy for my wife to find employment.
I have ZERO interest in staying in California or anywhere really really hot (i.e. Arizona, Florida). We want to move somewhere with a real winter. We also want to move to an area that we can actually afford a home (hence, no California).
I am considering the following schools for now:
University of Tennessee - Knoxville (Nuclear)
University of Colorado - Boulder (Mechanical)
Oregon State University (Nuclear)
University of Washington (Mechanical)
Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute (Nuclear)
Brown University (Mechanical)
Thoughts?
Being married in graduate problem is not an issue at all. A fairly large percentage of the graduate population is either married or is in a serious long term relationship. After all, it is largely a group of adults who are right around that point in life where they’d like to settle down.
I think your stats and experience other than the GRE score would put you in line for a lot of really highly-ranked programs. That GRE score will be problematic, though, being only the 68th percentile.
I took it 3 weeks ago and was pretty stunned by my score. Considering I earned an A in every math class in high school and college. I will likely take it again.
I have nothing to contribute wrt the programs because I am not in engineering, but I do have comments on being married and such in graduate school. I got engaged in my third year of graduate school and married at the beginning of my fifth. Being married isn’t a big deal in graduate school; we’re all adults, and a good percentage of your cohort-mates might be married. The social support is really nice - my husband cheered me throughout my PhD program. Having a two-income household is also really nice, since graduate students don’t make a ton of money!
As for the home part - I don’t really recommend buying a house in graduate school. Assuming that you even have the capital to do so, you need to be mobile, particularly if you want an academic career afterwards. The typical PhD program in engineering takes 5-6 years, which is generally the amount of time people in the know recommend that you live in an area to make buying a house worth it. But you won’t be buying one right away - you’d have to get to know neighborhood and such first. Even if you did buy one in your first year, though, what happens if you get offered an academic job across the country? You’d have to sell the house, and quickly, otherwise you’d be paying the mortgage and rent/a new mortgage somewhere else.
Of course, the decisions are all different if you are planning on going into industry AND you are planning on doing a PhD in the city in which you want to settle long-term.
Good advice!
Our concern is children. We are leery of waiting until our 30’s just for children. Since my wife would need to take time off for a kid, we would be stuck with a stipend supporting two adults and an infant. Murphy and his three uncles Broke, Desperate, and Stupid move in when people are in situations of low income and high liability. We could work a couple of years for cash reserves, but then we are still faced with being older.
I thought of a home because having a stable base can be beneficial with a family. In the case of Tennessee and Upstate New York, homes are a dime a dozen. In more expensive areas, we would obviously rent.
In terms of colleges, I need to know what I can get into and what safeties I should set.
For one data point, I’m 28 and a postdoc; my husband is 29 and finishing undergrad, after a stint in the military. We’re planning on waiting until our mid-to-late-30s for children (unless we get a surprise, lol). It’s quite common in academia - and other high-powered careers that suck a lot of time in the 20s - to wait until the 30s for kids.
Of course, that’s personal choice. I had friends who had children in graduate school (they were all in their 30s, too, though). Some of them borrowed additional loans to help pay for the costs of raising children, including childcare. A few of them were married to non-academic spouses with higher salaries who could support them while they were in graduate school. Some of them had family support in the area, and so had low-cost or free childcare through relatives. Basically, I think if you’re making a salary of ~$30K as a grad student and your wife is making ~$40K as a social worker, you’d have to accept that things are going to be tight if you have children for a couple of years until you finish grad school (and potentially a postdoc or two). It’s a personal choice - not impossible, but doable. Also, knowing that you want to have kids soon on the front end is helpful because you can consider those issues when choosing a school: choose a program in a low cost-of-living area, where there are affordable childcare options nearby, and good schools in the case that your child will be old enough to start school before you graduate.
Mortgages can turn out to be the same as or lower than rent but the problem with homes is 1) the initial investment; you need at least 10-20% to put down on the house, which would be hard enough to save up on a grad school stipend alone much less when anticipating children; 2) the maintenance costs - there’s no calling the landlord if your toilet or boiler breaks down - you have to call someone to fix it and pay for it yourself; and 3) again, the loss of mobility. If your goal is academia, there’s really no such thing as a “stable base” until you have a tenured position. You have to be more or less prepared to move from grad school into 1-2 postdocs and then a position as a professor.