Mechanical Engineering PhD - Student Personality and the Stress Level

Graduate School
1

I know this is a little long, I’m just trying to make sure i give good advice. I’m looking for some information regarding the stress level involved with completing a PhD program in mechanical engineering. Much of the available information I’ve found makes the statement that engineering PhD programs are extremely stressful but it’s not clear why. And it isn’t always clear if the statement is made from the viewpoint of someone who has been there and done that, or if it is an opinion based on second-hand knowledge.

I’ve got a son who will be graduating in May from an ABET accredited engineering physics program with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering. He is completing the program in 4 years, no summer courses for his degree, he did do one summer semester abroad and completed 7 hours, but they were not related to his degree. I assume his degree program was typical of undergraduate engineering programs; he had 97 hours of engineering and physics classes and 25 hours of the university core (fine art, writing, social science and the humanities). Because he has interests other than engineering and physics, every semester, in addition to his required courses, he has taken another course. While these were not physics/math/engineering courses, they weren’t what I’d call fluff courses either. An intro to artificial intelligence course, a digital design class (in addition to his fine art core, he wanted more design knowledge), several courses in the music science and technology area, including algorithmic music composition. He also has tutored math and physics for a charter school (high school and some middle school) since sophomore year.
He’ll probably wind up with a 3.2/3.3 GPA

He is the most laid back, even keeled person I know. He is friendly, gets along with everyone, and has a sense of humor. He could care less if he’s not among the top students in the class, but certainly doesn’t want to be in the bottom of the class either. I’d say he’s content being in the top 20% or so, as an average, some classes he is in the top; one or two classes he might only be in the upper 50%. He has never dropped a class, even when it might have been the wise thing to do, once he commits, he’s determined to see it through. He took a few of his engineering electives in the bio-mechanical engineering area, as they would work with his schedule, and he struggled with these, so he has a C or two
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Looking back, I see there has been a couple of weeks every semester, when the work load would get to him, tests and projects all due at same time, that type stuff, and he would stress out, a few times really stress out and then it would be over and done.

He never really thought about graduate school, not that he wasn’t interested, but more to fact that he/I didn’t realize there were graduate engineering programs or that they would serve a purpose. Most of the info we looked when he was in high school, seemed to imply that engineers didn’t get advanced degrees unless they wanted to go into management, and he is not interested in that
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Last summer he did an internship, in the Research Directorate, up at the NASA Langley Research Center and the two mentors he worked with encouraged him to consider graduate school. He enjoyed the work quite a bit and after he got back on campus in the fall he started thinking about it. I told him he could certainly explore both graduate school and entering the work force; he didn’t have to decide right away, one or the other. He contacted his mentors, and they suggested a school and a faculty member, made the introductions, he did a phone interview, the guy was interested. As far as we could determine, there was no guarantee of admission, so I told him if he was really interested, he needed to apply to some other programs. As he didn’t take the GRE until January, he missed many deadlines, and only applied to a few Master’s programs. We figured he wouldn’t hear anything until possibly end of March and maybe not till April or May. Maybe the introduction and recommendation actually counted for more than he was thinking, he’s not heard back from the Master’s programs, in fact, one app isn’t done yet, but he was accepted into the PhD program, the day after the last recommendation letter was received. He will be visiting during his spring break. He doesn’t know whether to wait to hear from the other programs, withdraw his applications or what. The research areas do match up, but they do on the other programs he applied to as well.

He is asking for my opinion (others as well), so far I’ve only told him I that he needs to visit and meet the guy in person, there needs to be a match personality wise, and a phone conversation isn’t enough. I do figure that since the mentors worked with my son all summer and have worked this other guy as well, they must figure it would work out. I told my son we would sit down when he comes in for spring break, and talk it through, pros, cons, the whole bit and to not feel that he had to commit to anything right now. Here’s the thing I worry about; if the stress level of a PhD program is going to match the stress level of the few weeks had every semester, ALL through the whole program. Because if so, I think the cost to him (and I’m not talking financial cost) would exceed the benefit. And that’s if; he managed to complete the degree. Handling stress, on a daily basis, for years, isn’t something that everyone can do and survive with their self (or soul, or whatever you choose to call it) intact.

2

There are a lot of reasons graduate school can be very stressful. I’ll try to write some out chronologically that you might experience!

  • Adjusting to a new school. You're no longer an undergrad, and the school doesn't treat you like one. As a PhD student you're more of an employee of the school than student, and it can get rough seeing all the students having fun while you're slogging away in the lab every day.
  • Difficult classes. People are coming from schools and programs all over the world, and they all have different backgrounds. You'll be well prepared for some classes, but likely not others.
  • Quals/Prelims/orals/whatever. Huge exam where either in one, two, or three parts need to demonstrate your ability to answer *any* question, and your ability to generate original research. The exam part can be extremely stressful depending on the program, as some fail out a number of students, while others just make it the most miserable three months of your life leading up to it with studying all day.
  • TAing. Some classes are alright, but you'll feel like an indentured servant. Grade grubbing students, professors shifting off too much work onto you, massive stacks of illegible homeworks to grade weekly, and then you have your own classes and research to worry about. Honestly I liked TAing grad classes a lot more. Students were way more interested in the material, and I got a lot more out of it.
  • Having to TA way too much. I had to TA 8 times as a grad student. My group was poor, and it was how my tuition got paid most terms.
  • A poor lab. No money to buy equipment. For a while we didn't even have money to buy kimwipes, so we were using coffee filters from the dollar store :rolleyes:
  • A demanding advisor. Expects results no matter what, unreasonable hours, treats students poorly, or any other list of things.
  • An advisor that doesn't know you exist. At times this is worse. Nothing like working for a year on a project only to have your boss come in and go, "Oh, hey, what have you been up to?"
  • Research not working out. Machines break. You need to fix it. Data doesn't seem quite right, oh crud, there was a systematic error I couldn't detect until I aggregated everything. Time to rerun my last 6 months of experiments. Synthesis won't work right. Watching friends breeze through because they managed to get lucky with projects and timing (or realizing they're just that much better than you).
  • Realizing after around year 3 you've just gotta stick it out. Any other job you could quit. As a grad student if you leave after 3 years, you'll be lucky if somewhere else will take you in. And if they do, odds are you'll have to repeat your MS (so add 2 years to that degree). Start hunting around for a new advisor, and hope it works out. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.
  • Work on a project for a year, see someone else published exactly what you did as you're writing up your results to submit it to a journal. Die a little bit on the inside because you just got a year added to your degree.
  • Go on facebook and see your classmate from undergrad just bought a house. You're renting a 2 BR apartment with 3 people in it. And barely breaking even.
  • Start to see your friends graduate while your thesis isn't even being dreamt about yet.
  • Get that e-mail from the graduate office saying, "Hey, you've been here 6 years and almost everyone from your year has graduated. Please write a justification as to why we shouldn't kick you out."

With all of that said, graduate school can still be a fantastic experience. While there I was surrounded by smart people. I’m now at a place people would consider a dream employer, but it’s still not even close to what I had there.

By the way, there is NO WAY he should commit to a graduate school without meeting the professor first (provided it’s for a PhD). His visit should be paid for by the school, he should be getting a stipend and tuition covered. While he’s there, he should also interview with a number of other professors and make sure there’s another person he’d be willing to work with. There’s no guarantee this professor will be around for 6 years. Funding situations change, professors can be jerks, professors change schools, etc. Heck, it might sound morbid, but occasionally professors will be in a random accident and pass away.

Years ago on here someone said graduate school is a marathon, not a sprint. I really think this is the best analogy I’ve heard. You’ll have ups and downs, but if you have persistence, you’ll make it.

3

For me, the qualifying exam was the most stressful few months of my life. It was a three part exam: one for each of the three major research areas in my field. Of course, my research and expertise was only in one of those, so the other two were huge stressors. Add in the possibility of failing out due to a test on a subject not related to my field and it was a real pressure cooker. Of course, Iade it through, passed apparently with flying colors, and never felt so mentally destroyed again throughout the rest of my time as a student, even leading up to my preliminary exam or my dissertation defense.

I also had an advisor who held his PhD students to a very high standard and basically never gives pats on the back. It basically means when you are doing well, you get no praise, and when you are screwing up, you are really going to hear about it. Despite that, we got along well (and still do) a dim incredibly happy I got the chance to work with him.

Overall, I don’t have any regrets about choosing to do the PhD. It certainly put me under a ton of stress, but it was still an overall good experience (despite how much my friends would tell you I complained).

Of course, if the career goal is research, then it’s not even really a choice. The only choice is where to study and with whom.

I’ll definitely second the part about watching peers from your undergrad years off buying houses or taking big vacations to Europe or Asia or wherever. That’s further compounded in the age of Facebook where it’s all plainly in front of you to see. That’s been a real treat to experience over the last year or so of my program as I came down the home stretch.

4

Hey boneh3ad, how’s it going? Long time no see. :slight_smile:

Scribbulus, I actually recommend seeing if you can get a copy of the PhD Movie ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpZ5rS4KhOA ). It’s pretty true to life. The segment at 0:22 actually happened to my officemate during interviews with that exact professor, lol.

5

All of the above=truth. Otoh there are a LOT of jobs available for engineers with only a BS. He doesn’t need a PhD in order to get going in his field of interest. A PhD creates a specialist, which actually narrows opportunity to a certain extent. If he’s not sure, encourage him to work a bit and see if he likes it. I did that-turned down a PhD program to accept a job (turned out I didn’t like it; took me a few years before I stumbled upon my passion, and then I went back to grad school for my PhD, but highly motivated!). NASA is unique in a sense that they do the Really Cool Stuff. My dh got a job there with a Masters, and it was a lot of fun. Fwiw the downsides were politics messing with funding, and having his program shut down due to shifting winds, getting re-assigned to new programs, etc. he eventually became disillusioned and left, although many stay for a career there. Best wishes!

6

Hello back, @RacinReaver‌. I didn’t even know you still tr0lled around here anymore.

@Scribbulus‌
I just thought of one more bit. I had somewhere in the 3.3 to 3.4 range for my undergraduate GPA (I can’t remember exactly) and still got into a few “top 10” programs and a number of what I suppose are approximately “top 25” programs if you subscribe to those sorts of tiers. I did have research experience, though, which I am sure helped a lot. The GPA here shouldn’t discourage you.

7

So why is getting a PhD stressful? It is a good and a simple question…At least on surface. I’ve actually had this discussion with other students. Ideally to receive a PhD (in engineering) you should

  1. Pass Quals
  2. Understand your specialty and the literature
  3. Try something new to solve a problem relevant to your specialty
  4. Achieve moderately good results
  5. Write a lot about it.

Hard…yes…soul crushing…it shouldn’t be. This isn’t the “real list”. I think the “real list” is below.

  1. Get and stay funded by a TA, RA, or fellowship.
  2. Get along well with your advisor, other faculty, committee members, post-docs, research scientists, other grad students, and academic staff.
  3. Pass Quals
  4. Understand your specialty and the literature
  5. Try something new to solve a problem relevant to your specialty
  6. Achieve moderately good results
  7. Write a lot about it.

In the “real list”, issues 1 and 2 caused me the stress. The rest of the issues I either didn’t mind or enjoyed.

  1. I accepted without funding into grad school. I did get funded the Wednesday before classes started. While I had the money to pay for a semester or two, this was very stressful. TAs are tough. You earn every penny of your tuition and stipend. They are 20 hours of hard and often unpleasant work. You do the grunt work of academia, work with profs that are too busy, and undergrads who don't respect your. You have no freedom in your schedule as a TA. You must keep office hours, hold help sessions, proctor exams, and sub for the professor's class at set times. RA's are tough too. They are better than TAs, but funding is fleeting. It gets cancelled for no reason without warning. As a student, you constantly are filling out funding reports and preparing funding presentations.
  2. As a grad student, you are nobody's priority. As an undergrad, you evaluate your profs for every class. At my undergrad, students were chosen to write tenure evaluations for professors....I wrote a few. This type of thing gives undergrads real power. As a grad student you don't have that same power. Your advisor, other faculty, committee members, post-docs, research scientists, other grad students, and academic staff care about their careers above all else. To make matters worse, on some level, other faculty, your committee members, post-docs, research scientists, other grad students are your competitors. Sometimes your advisor is your competitor indirectly too....I didn't feel this way about my advisor though. All of these people have control over you.

Keeping issues 1 and 2 in mind from the real list, you must complete the rest of the list.

Your son should take it slow, talk to profs, and maybe just commit to the masters degree for starters.

8

I, for the most part, enjoyed graduate school (my PhD is in public health and psychology, not in engineering - but the process is the same; only the content is different). It was also very, very stressful for me - much more stressful than any weeks in undergrad when I had several things due at the same time. It’s not just the work load - the work in graduate school isn’t difficult in and of itself; it’s mostly the amount of it and the compressed time to complete it that makes it stressful. It’s moreso the atmosphere of graduate school that can get to you. It’s definitely a marathon and not a sprint - but it feels like a marathon you are trying to win, a marathon during which you are running a 6 to 7-minute mile the whole way. The reason is - particularly if you are trying for academia, but even if you aren’t - the research world these days has become very competitive; it’s difficult for people to get jobs after graduation (engineering is far easier, though), so everyone’s trying to get fellowships, publications, and grant funding. In addition to taking classes and exams you are also TAing and doing research and struggling to survive on $30-35K a year (probably less of a problem in rural and suburban areas than where I went to grad school, which was New York). Like I said, I enjoyed grad school in an intellectual sense, but it was stressful and not something that I would ever want to do again, lol.

That said, if he’s a resilient individual he can get through it - and there are ways of managing the stress. By the time I was in my fourth year of grad school I was so used to the stress that I had learned to manage it well and figure out how to arrange projects, and now as a postdoc I don’t even feel stressed when I work on several projects at once. You just…figure it out. The other thing I always remember is that there are lots of stressful jobs, too - lawyers, doctors, investment bankers, high-level CEOs, etc. If your son is a successful individual the career he has is probably going to be somewhat stressful.

Anyway, my main concern for your son is this: does he actually want to get a PhD?

It’s really, really common - in my opinion - for undergraduates to feel positively validated by their professors, and to use those feelings of positive validation to propel them into graduate programs. It’s also really, really common for professors to convince any of their really excellent undergraduates that they should think about a PhD. It’s natural for many of them - we academics are a really weird bunch; we’re intensely invested in our work and we think everyone else should be super excited about it, too, so whenever an undergraduate comes along who is really excellent many of us have the kneejerk reaction to convince them to go to graduate school…just because! But many professors do that without considering the needs and career goals of the student in front of them. It masquerades as altruistic but really comes from an inherently selfish desire to clone ourselves, etc.

With that said - you said that your son never really thought about graduate school, and then these professors encouraged him and things kind of fast-forwarded from there. But does your son really want to be a researcher in engineering? I’m not in the field but all available information seems to indicate that job prospects are very good for BS-level engineers; that MS-level engineers also get great jobs and move into management all the time; and that the PhD is really reserved for those who want to teach at universities, direct research in engineering, and can sometimes narrow the job opportunities for engineers (although not always - PhD level engineers get jobs). I looked at the NSF’s Survey of Earned Doctorates recently, - which PhD students across the country take when they are depositing their dissertations, and if I recall correctly only about 60% of engineering PhDs who were finishing their dissertation had definite plans for their next step. The majority of them were headed into postdoctoral fellowships. (The NSF website is currently down, so I can’t double-check.)

So basically, does your son want to be a doctoral-level researcher in industry or a professor?

Anyway, to answer your last question, he should definitely wait to hear back from the other programs. Your son’s school should give him until April 15 to decide, and the other decisions should come in soon, so there’s no reason not to compare offers unless this school was absolutely his first choice and he knows that he would turn down other offers for it.