PhD admissions - parent experience :)

General question: how many of your kids (or you) had decided well before application time that they/you would be going for a PhD?

DS is a CS major, who is being encouraged to go for a PhD by PhD students and faculty, and also has reason to think that he’d be offered quite lucrative employment if he opts for industry. He feels that the pressure of pursuing acceptance into a PhD program while at the same time traveling for job interviews would either burn him out or force him to do a poor job on one or both of the pursuits.

He really enjoys research (his CS major emphasizes theory), but he knows how few tenure track positions are available. He wouldn’t be interested in a PhD other than from one of the highly competitive programs. Money is not a massive driver for him, but he’s also realistic.

Competition to get into PhD programs, especially top 8-15 programs in their respective fields/subfields with full fellowship funding is exceedingly fierce.

One older college classmate who graduated with high honors in Chemistry and Viola as a double-degree student ended up getting shut out of all PhD programs where he attempted to apply for 4 straight years in a row. The 5th year, he ended up at a topflight program at an HYPSMCC university.

Some possible reasons for getting rejected having nothing to do with the applicant’s academic stats/qualifications:

Shortfall/cut in department funding for fellowships

Prof in applicant’s field of interest isn’t interested/able to take on new graduate students that year.

Prof(s) in applicant’s field of interest left in the middle of application cycle and no other Prof left in the department with expertise/interest in the subfield area is able/willing/available to take the applicant on as a student.

Applicant’s interpretation/orientation of the subfield does not accord with those of the department* or Profs who are likely to be potential advisers.

Situations where infighting among senior Profs in a department ended with dominance by senior Profs who don’t favor the subfield of the prospective applicant because the faculty who have expertise/strong interest were part of the losing faction in that infighting**.

  • I.e.: One reason why an older college classmate was advised by a senior Prof to avoid applying to NYU for poli-sci was the department's heavy emphasis on Quantitative-oriented "rational choice" theory conflicts heavily with the classmate's qualitative emphasis/interpretation.

** One critical reason why an uncle left his social science PhD program after ~2 years in the early '70s at an elite/respectable West Coast institution was because he grew fed up with the toxic environment generated by this type of infighting between two factions of senior Profs with grad students…especially recent arrivals like himself being caught in the middle.

Also, a HS friend dropped out of his PhD program in Near-East/Middle East Studies because he felt the infighting in his field among senior faculty was such he was being in his words “force-fed polarized opinions” by both factions and was sick of it.

This included the side he nominally agrees with, but not to the extremes of those representing them among senior faculty he encountered not only at his university, but also among prominent faculty at various academic conferences.

What’s worse is that his area of interest laid well-outside those factional disputes.

Thank you, @cobrat. I will keep your post in mind as the decision season progresses.

I used to do a lot of recruiting for CS and finance. Candidates with PhD were generally not looked at as favorably unless the degree was relevant(necessary) for the job. One concern is when someone has been in academia for too long it is harder to transition to a real world.

Thank you, to the knowledgeable posters on this thread who have provided such great insight. I forwarded the link to the thread to my D, who is attending a bunch of interview weekends for biomedical sciences PhD programs over the next couple of months. The thread contains many great questions to ask, as well as factors to consider as she makes her decision. The first interview weekend starts today, so very timely and much appreciated!

This attitude among many engineering/CS employers along with the lack of desire of most to go into academia/high-level research careers is one major reason why most engineering/CS majors if they continue past undergrad after working for a few years stop at a Masters.

Also, there are some exceptions to the rule. For instance, the cousin who got his PhD in EE at a top 10 program spent ~10 years in academia after PhD as a tenure-track/tenured academic before leaving it to co-found a engineering startup firm on the West Coast which has been successful for the last 10+ years.

Then again, he also goes against stereotypes in other ways as his physical appearance tends to lead many to mistake him for a former Div I college athlete who has kept up his fitness/athleticism after graduating for several years(He’s actually been out of undergrad for ~3 decades).

I have been organizing talks for a monthly lecture series for a number of years. We aim for about half industry speakers and half speakers about research going on at our local UC campus.

It is more common than not that our industry speakers–who are founders, CEOs, CTOs, and Directors of Engineering–do have a PhD in engineering, CS, physics, or some related field. A number of our local companies were founded by professors and postdocs at our UC as spinoffs from their research, so that accounts for some of the prevalence of PhDs. A number of the senior scientists at my client companies also have PhDs. (Though this is more common in engineering companies than in software companies.)

For Physics grad school application:

http://homepages.rpi.edu/~persap/GRE_primer_2011_public.pdf

@ihs76, nice link but do you have anything for Materials Science Engineering, Polymers E or BME?

All this information is very helpful, based on my PhD experience years ago & consistent with the experience of my son’s cohort that are now in science PhD programs.

I’ll add my son’s story & dilemma. He chose to work in order to make career decisions. He knew/knows he would need to earn a PhD because he wants to do quantitative-computational research, which could be at a research institute, biomedical institution, even finance (an older friend of his works on Wall Street after earning a physics PhD). He’s not interested in traditional academia.

At present he thoroughly enjoys his work. He’s like a grad student because of the work he does with his PI. He also works with PostDocs. His dilemma is that his salary is more than the Postdocs & he has firsthand knowledge of the vicissitudes of being a Postdoc.

Although this book’s revised edition was published in 1997, apart from the tech/computer information, it’s recommendations continue to be useful. For those not familiar with the process of getting a doctorate, it helps one appreciate/understand what’s up.

Getting What You Came For - The smart student’s guide to earning a master’s or Ph.D. by Robert L. Peters, Ph.D.

@ihs76 Interesting document. It seems like it would make sense to take the PGRE early in junior year–for the same reason the high school advice is to take SAT Subject Tests in June after the relevant course.

My kid took the physics GRE twice. Spring of junior year, then again in the fall. There are only 3 chances per year, and the fall ones are pretty close together. My guess is that early in jr year, student will not have had enough coursework to do well or benefit much from it.

Her first score was not satisfactory, although she took it again in the fall. She did study some the first time, but worked all summer for the second score. She got a very respectable score the 2nd time.

But… quite a few programs insisted (would not let the applicant move forward without it) that the unofficial scores be uploaded. And the unofficial score document has all attempts on it. (Combined doc with regular GRE & subject tests). Her regular GRE was very good on the first attempt, though. Still… this really low initial PGRE score shows up. They have score choice for the official ones, and wherever possible she sent those off early (as soon as the 2nd score was available) for schools that made it optional to upload the unofficial version.

I still think it was good that she tried it in the spring, though. She then knew how hard she had to work over the summer.

blank.

@LanaHere, that doc was written by a professor at RPI, I believe. I just found it while searching the web for info on Physics PhD apps few years ago.

^I don’t know why that doc lists no subject GRE for math grad programs. That’s not true. My D applied to math programs last year. She is in grad school now. As far as I know, most of them, maybe everyone asked for the math GRE score.

True @iglooo … Maybe it was accidentally left out? My friend is a Math teacher at a local University and he said the same thing.

Wow this thread is very helpful although making me nervous for S, who is not nervous at all. He will land on his feet wherever. I never knew the PhD process could be so political and/or burdensome!

@Iglooo, true that. Had not noticed it before. Obviously, the doc is written by a Physics prof for physics grad apps so certainly would not look at it as more than that.

Yes, Math subject GRE is required by most, although not all, worthwhile PhD programs in math.

@surfcity, yes, a very stressful process. In some ways, more so than college apps in that the decisions can come on almost any day…at least for me as DS was on the bubble both times he went through the process…

@ihs76 Thanks for posting that link. My son will be taking the pgre this spring for fall applications. I’m sending him the link.