Should S apply to MIT?

[sakky]

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I really don’t think that is true. First, virtually all PhD candidates in engineering at MIT work on projects with commercial potential. That is after all the essence of engineering and even more so at MIT which has historically emphasized practical research over theory. There are many different labs outside of the Langer lab, (nearly too many to count) and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to get a good industry job if you really want it. I believe there are actually more industry opportunities than there are actual PhD candidates. It requires a fair amount of dedication to want to stay on the academic track when you can make much more money by switching to industry. With the normal academic track involving one or two post-doc positions at an average of $50 to $60K, freshly minted PhDs easily earn double that by switching to industry. If you don’t like research you can go back to business school after a few years and move to management instead. Even if your thesis was not on the latest nanomaterial, it does not really matter. very seldom are you expected to work in the same area you did your PhD research in.</p>

<p>It would also carry over to PhD candidates in biology, chemistry, biochemistry and very much so in materials science. The “ideal” track for a plum research position at big pharma or biotech firm is a PhD from a top program. With all the connections of the MIT departments and labs to would have to be pretty lame not to get an offer on graduation. If Mollie, God forbid, did not get on the academic tenure track (which is nowadays all about getting that R01 grant), she would have no problems getting an excellent job with any number of biomedical companies recruiting at MIT and Harvard.

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<p>Again, the question is not whether mollie or some other Harvard/MIT PhD graduate could find some industry research job, because they surely can. The question is whether they can find an industry research job they they actually want to take, and that desire stems not only from wanting to do the type of research that they company desires, but also from the simple matter of actually wanting to live in the particular area where those research jobs are. That choice becomes doubly complicated when you also have to factor in the problem of choosing a location that your spouse will actually want to be.</p>

<p>Again, I return to the example of Pfizer, whose central R&D headquarters in the US for decades was located in suburban Southeastern Connecticut where, frankly, there isn’t much to do. Pfizer was unable to hire many promising top science PhD’s simply because they (or often times their husbands/wives) categorically refused to live there. Nor was such a choice always entirely emotional or irrational. I know one woman with a top science PhD who could not consider a job at Pfizer R&D because her husband was about to graduate from law school and there aren’t exactly a bevy of corporate law firm jobs in Southeastern Connecticut (even Pfizer’s patent law/IP division is run out of corporate headquarters in NYC). I believe she ended up taking a postdoc at Brookhaven while her husband took a corporate law job in New York. </p>

<p>Now to be fair, there are obviously some people for which working in suburban Connecticut would be extremely attractive and Pfizer surely preferentially attracted those people. But the basic point is that not everybody feels perfectly flexible to move to wherever in the country the industry jobs may be. Personal circumstances often times intervene. </p>

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From my experience I just don’t see consulting or finance jobs as a realistic backup for STEM PhDs outside of a few select areas such as pure “quants” and even these jobs are now taken up by PhDs with degrees in financial engineering, not math or physics grads as was the case ten years ago. Investment banking and consulting firms will hire a select few undergrads and a number of grad students who have spent summers as interns but not straight PhDs. They have no use for them and the extra research experience is more a downside than a help.

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<p>Really? Then somebody really needs to tell that to all of those consulting and banking firms who persist in hiring STEM PhD’s from MIT despite supposedly having no use for them because their research experience is actually detrimental rather than helpful. For example, in 2008, the last year where PhD career data was available, what do I see listed amongst the employers who hired science/engineering PhD’s but firms such as McKinsey, Goldman, Credit Suisse, BCG, Deloitte, Oliver Wyman, JPMorganChase, Morgan Stanley, Booz Allen Hamilton, and the like. Heck, to take chemical engineering as an example, there seem to be more consulting/banking firms listed as employers than there were actual academic employers - and this at the #1 ranked chemical engineering PhD program in the world. </p>

<p><a href=“http://www.mit.edu/~career/infostats/graduation08.pdf[/url]”>http://www.mit.edu/~career/infostats/graduation08.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Nor is MIT particularly unique in this respect. A conspicuous number of Harvard and Stanford STEM PhD’s also seem to end up in consulting/finance. </p>

<p>Consider this posting at Chemjobber:</p>

<p>*As a former organic chemistry graduate student, I can say that finance/ consulting are hugely popular alternatives to academia/pharmaceutical research. I think about 25% of PhD students went in to consulting from the Harvard chemistry department during the years that I was there (2005-2008) (emphasis CJ’s), and McKinsey had a very strong recruiting presence, which made it seem that consulting was the main alternative to a lab based research career…</p>

<p>…don’t know the numbers for the department, but I can tell you from my lab, the number of graduate students who have graduated in the past four years who went into business consulting was [above 25%.] I know of plenty of other students from the department who have taken the consulting route (including the author of the original comment, I think), so if 25% is an overestimate, I don’t think it’s far off…*</p>

<p>[Chemjobber:</a> ~25% of Harvard PhD chemists go to Wall Street?](<a href=“http://chemjobber.blogspot.com/2009/08/25-of-harvard-phd-chemists-go-to-wall.html]Chemjobber:”>Chemjobber: ~25% of Harvard PhD chemists go to Wall Street?)</p>

<p>So clearly, somebody - perhaps the consulting/banking firms, perhaps the PhD students, perhaps both - did not receive the memo that those firms are not supposed to be hiring STEM PhD’s.</p>