<p>Why do you want to do a PhD if you have no idea what you want to study and don’t have any research experience? You don’t even know what you are getting yourself into at this point. A PhD is a research degree - you spend 5-6 years doing research primarily, and the purpose is to get a degree so that you can do more research as part of your career. If you have no experience now and aren’t passionate enough about it to be creative and think of ways to get more, how can you possibly be dedicated enough to commit to a career in the area?</p>
<p>Grad programs don’t admit people to PhDs on the basis of them randomly deciding one day that they want to do it. Think about it like a job. Most employers want to hire someone who has experience doing the exact thing or something very similar to what you will be doing in your new role. At the very least, they want someone with transferable experience.</p>
<p>PhD programs invest thousands of dollars in their doctoral students - tuition waivers, health insurance, and your stipend, plus all the overhead it takes like your equipment, travel funds, office space, etc. The cost to fund you alone can easily cost nearly $250,000 or more depending on the price of your school. They do it in hopes that you will bring recognition to their school - by finishing the program, publishing scientific articles, impressing your colleagues at conferences, winning grants, and going to be a prominent faculty member or industrial/government researcher elsewhere. All of that is about research prowess, and the best way to predict who will be good at that in the future is by looking at what you did in the past related it and how successful you were. Why would they bring you into their program when they could bring other students in with 2-4+ years of research experience?</p>
<p>I’m not saying this to be rude or discourage you, but I’m saying it to say that you need to be both thoughtful and creative about this enterprise.</p>
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<li>First you have to decide why you really want the PhD. The only acceptable answer (unless you are independently wealthy and just have loads of time to waste) is because you want a career that requires a PhD, either as an engineering professor or the head of an academic, industry, or government lab in your field, or something like that - that involves directing research. If your answer is anything other than that - especially anything like “I want to learn more about engineering,” “I want it for the prestige,” “It’s a dream of mine,” - you probably should NOT go. It’s far cheaper, in terms of opportunity cost, to get an alumni membership to Lehigh’s libraries or otherwise get access to some academic library and read more about engineering, and perhaps attend a few conferences every year.</li>
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<p>This is, of course, unless you don’t mind the losing the earnings you will miss out on (plus the retirement savings and free time), as well as incurring the mental/emotional distress, during the 5 or 6 years a PhD takes you - all for the purpose of earning a degree that you don’t need and probably won’t lose.</p>
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<li><p>If you do decide that you want the PhD, then you need to decide what you want to study. Usually #2 comes before or in tandem with #1 - as in, students get research experience, they fall in love with research in some area, and they decide “I want this to be my career.” You need to find something you are passionate enough about to do for a long time and really dive into. Thinking about what classes you liked in college and your MS is a good start. If your favorite is automative stuff, then you need to find a way to dive into that. I’m sure there is still interesting research in that area - alternative energy solutions is a big one; I’m not even an engineer and I know that that’s a big field right now. The way to find out is to read scientific articles in the field and talk to some of your professors doing research on automotive stuff. What are they studying? What are their colleagues studying?</p></li>
<li><p>Only after you decide #1 and figure out #2 can you begin to put together a list of programs to apply to. That’s because your programs need to based upon your research interests. You have to go somewhere where there are at least 2-3 people doing something that you would be interested in and in whose lab you would like to work. The reason I say 2-3 is because your first choice could die, leave the university, get denied tenure, leave academia altogether, etc., and you want to be able to stay in your program and transition to working with someone else.</p></li>
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