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1) MS being looked down upon, is it worth doing this. i don't want to put myself in a situation where hard work doesn't pay off
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<p>Well, welcome to the real world. The truth is, there are a lot of instances in life where hard work doesn't pay off. </p>
<p>The major issue with any credential, not just the PhD or the MS, but any credential, is the signal that it sends to the market. Certain credentials may signal that you are simply overqualified for a certain job, which means that an employer is afraid to hire you for fear that you will get quickly get bored and quit to find another job. One way to mitigate that problem is, as I said, to simply omit certain credentials you have from your resume. A resume is a marketing tool, nothing more, nothing less. It has to be truthful, but it doesn't have to be the whole truth . </p>
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If you do a PhD and then do not include it in your CV this will cause a large hole in your life history. There will be like 5 to 6 years of your life missing. Employers may wonder what is up. Of course you could have had children, been sick and etc but I am sure that if you get to the interview stage they will be asking questions about the gap.
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<p>Personally, I think that far and away the easiest way to solve this problem is to just say that you ran your own small business, i.e. your own small consulting firm. Nobody can really challenge you when you say this, because it's your own small business, so you can say whatever you want about it. So if they want to run a background check on you, there is nothing to check out. You just have to file for a small-business license (which is generally no more than a few hundred dollars a year), and obtain a business tax ID number (also cheap), and you are legitimately a small-business entrepreneur, at least on paper. If they later find out that you were obtaining your PhD at the time, you can legitimately say that you weren't lying (because you never claimed that you DIDN'T have a PhD), but that you were also running your own small business on the side while you were in school, so what you listed on your resume was technically true. To make things even more legitimate, you can even garner some actual consulting gig, even if it's for only a few hundred dollars a year, because that means that your company is now legitimately generating revenue. Very little revenue, but it's still revenue.</p>