<p>say you wanna go into industry, say a company like boeing, but you don't want an entry level job. you want to work in research and design. would a PhD be worth it, or would getting a MS be just fine?</p>
<p>there are entry level jobs in R&D</p>
<p>either degree will do to get you in the door, performance gets you out of the entry level work</p>
<p>to skip an entry level “job” you would probably need co-op experience while getting your MS or PhD, but that co-op would be the work experience.</p>
<p>I am going the Ph.D. route for that very thing, but there are some things to be very wary about. Getting an M.S. will open a lot of doors for you beyond what a B.S. would give you, especially research related, and it won’t be closing any. With a Ph.D., you open a few more doors, almost exclusively in the area or research and development, but it will also start closing doors, as you will be “overqualified” for a lot of positions, or too specialized for many more.</p>
<p>If you go the route of the Ph.D., make sure that you know your goals, and you don’t make your dissertation and research on a topic that is so restrictive that you end up not being marketable to major corporations. When that happens, you basically end up with two options: academia or national laboratories.</p>
<p>Personally, I am going for my Ph.D., but I am, at the advice of literally everyone, trying to maintain my marketability to mainstream industry as much as possible so that I can leave that door open. I would love to be at somewhere at Boeing or Lockheed in their advanced development programs, Phantom Works and Skunk Works respectively. I would definitely be shooting for an eventual Sr. Technical Fellow position as opposed to Chif Engineer or something else.</p>