<p>Here are where the MIT chemistry faculty went to for undergrad (American universities only): Haverford, UC-Riverside, Hope College, MIT (2 people), Harvard (2 people), U. of Delaware, Cornell, Columbia, Amherst (2 people), Princeton, Vassar, Northeastern, Amherst, U. of Arkansas, U. of California-Berkeley (2 people), U. of Washington-St. Louis, Stanford, Rutgers, Smith, USC, Brooklyn College, UPenn, Montana State, Cal State-Sacramento, Rice…</p>
<p>Listen, I’ve been through the process, and I’ve seen others go through the process. Getting into a top 5 school from a state school or top 20 school is not the feat people are making it out to be, at least in science. </p>
<p>As for sakky saying that consulting is a good fall-back if they can’t get a research job, well, I think that’s a little backwards. Research jobs in industry aren’t that tough to get–consulting is harder. Consulting is a good fallback if you don’t like research (which happens often) or if you only would have done research if you had gotten a good faculty position. </p>
<p>All things being equal, there are some advantages to being from the “better school.” However, if you are choosing between a top 10 school and a state school with a top department in your field, then I would choose the one you feel most comfortable with. This is, of course, assuming that you want to actually be a scientist/engineer and are not shooting for Wall Street after undergrad.</p>
<p>Well, it’s not so much a matter of wanting a career in VC as it is a matter of taking advantage of backup plans. Like I said, not everybody is going to obtain a desirable science or engineering job, especially not in academia, even if you graduated from a top school. For example, given the choice of joining a top venture capital or strategy consulting firm vs. taking an adjunct non-tenure-track lecturership at Southeast Missouri State University where you’re teaching all of the time and hence never have an opportunity to conduct research and therefore have no realistic opportunity to progress in an academic career, many (almost certainly most) of us would choose the former. </p>
<p>And such a juxtaposition can easily occur, as research is an inherently uncertain endeavor, as there is no guarantee that, even coming from a top PhD program, that you will produce top research that will merit any desirable research position. What if you turn out to be a mediocre graduate student because none of your research ideas panned out and therefore have no potential publications, yet still managed to (somehow) finish your PhD, or more realistically, leave with a consolation master’s? Consulting and finance firms won’t really know or care how poor your research was - heck, they won’t even understand what your research even is. All they will see is that you have a master’s or PhD from Harvard (or similar elite brand). </p>
<p>The upshot is that not everybody is going to obtain the career that they really want, especially if that career is academia, and so it behooves all of us to consider what other opportunities you may have. Surely we have all heard of the armies of poverty-stricken ‘gypsy’ lecturers that populate the ranks of academia as cheap cannon-fodder teaching labor that flit from school to school without neither job security nor time or resources to conduct serious research (and hence no realistic opportunities for promotion). I think it’s safe to say that you don’t want to be one of them. </p>
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<p>You just answered your own question: such positions are few and far between. Investment banks do have back-office research positions, but they (perhaps ironically) pay less than their standard front-office positions. You could also work for a quant hedge fund, but if anything, they are more insular and secretive than even regular finance jobs, heightening the value of networking access of an elite school. Apparently part and parcel of the recruiting process of those firms is figuring out how to even obtain a meeting with them in the first place, the philosophy being that if you don’t have the social networking access to engineer a slot on their calendar, they don’t want you anyway.</p>
<p>The question is not whether you can obtain some industry research position coming out of a top PhD program, just like the question is not whether you could obtain some academic position coming out of the same top PhD program. The question is whether you can obtain a desirable such position. I don’t doubt that if you’re willing to take any industry research position, regardless of pay or location, you could surely find one, just like I’m sure that if you’re willing to become a gypsy adjunct lecturer, you would surely find employment. But are you willing to do that?</p>
<p>The above issue becomes especially salient if you’re married or in a serious relationship, as many newly minted Phd’s are wont to have. You then can only realistically choose positions in locations that your partner will realistically will want to live in, yet many industry research and academic positions are not exactly in the most dynamic of locations. </p>
<p>Take Pfizer, one of the largest pharmaceutical firms in the world. For decades, their largest R&D arm was located in Southeastern Connecticut, yet the fact is, outside of a career in R&D, military/defense-contracting, and (recently) Native American casino gaming, there are not many careers available for your spouse to pursue in SE Connecticut, unless he/she’s willing to simply be a housewife/husband. It is for that reason that many new bio/chem PhD’s can’t seriously consider a research career at Pfizer, for fear of a divorce. Venture capital and (especially) consulting, in stark contrast, tend to have office locations where there are a variety of other careers to pursue, hence satisfying the professional aspirations of an ambitious spouse. </p>
<p>Furthermore, even if your industry’s research positions are located in a desirable location, that’s not to say that that industry will be hiring when you graduate. Each industry undergoes cycles of hiring and firing that are not always highly correlated with other industries. Right now, the pharmaceutical industry is experiencing a clear hiring slump with tens of thousands of layoffs, and many newly minted PhD’s in biology and chemistry are not obtaining research jobs that they would have obtained just a few years ago. In contrast, newly minted PhD’s in geology, chemical engineering, and petroleum engineering are enjoying a raucous hiring boom. Yet how quickly we forget - it was less than 15 years ago when the price of oil scraped $10 a barrel, oil companies couldn’t lay people off fast enough, and Houston was in a state of economic depression, while at that very same time, the pharmaceutical industry was undergoing the largest hiring boom in its history. The upshot is that you may well happen to finish your PhD at a time when your corresponding industry is undergoing a downcycle and not hiring.</p>
<p>Attending a well-branded school therefore provides you with greater career choice and hence allows you to diversify your risk across both space (geographic location) and time (industry business cycle). For example, I can think of a number of people who graduated with computer science PhD’s in 2002-2003 at the trough of the dotcom bust when hundreds of thousands of software/CS workers were being laid off, and who corresponding decided that they would rather become consultants or financiers instead. Why hack and slash your way to try to obtain a research job offer at a tech company where layoffs were rampant, employee morale was low, and the very existence of the company itself as a going concern was questionable, when you could instead obtain a lucrative position in consulting?</p>
<p>I could be wrong, but I don’t think that the Harvard (or MIT) brand name is much of an advantage over the top 10-15 research university when it comes to getting a particular “desired” industry job.</p>
<p>If that’s true, then that only further strengthens my point. If having even a Harvard or MIT brand name does indeed fail to provide much of a benefit over another top 10-15 program in obtaining a particular ‘desired’ industry research job (I don’t know if that’s true, but let’s go with it), then a restatement of that is that every PhD grad from a top 10-15 program (including Harvard/MIT) is roughly equally as likely to be forced to take an undesirable industry research job should they want to be in industry. </p>
<p>However, the PhD grads from Harvard/MIT (and probably a handful of other well-branded schools such as Stanford, Yale, Princeton, and the like) have the alternative option of heading to venture capital, private equity, or strategy consulting. The PhD graduate from Scripps (a top 10 bio and chemistry program) doesn’t really have that option. Given the choice between a job in venture capital vs. an undesirable industry research job (that is undesirable because it pays poorly, is in a locale that you or your spouse dislikes, doesn’t conduct the type of research that you like, or anything else), many people will surely choose the former. </p>
<p>Again, the bottom line is that the well-branded and heavily networked university gives you options, and those options lower your risk profile. Not everybody will obtain the research job that they desire, and it behooves you to consider what other careers you can obtain with your degree. Moreover, a significant percentage of PhD students won’t even finish the PhD at all, which renders concerns about what you can do with the terminal master’s (or no degree at all, but mere ‘matriculation’ status) all the more important. A terminal master’s, or even mere matriculation, at Harvard, can be leveraged to alternative careers in a way that a terminal master’s from Scripps cannot. </p>
<p>I would agree that if PhD programs - whether Harvard, MIT, or anybody else - could guarantee you would obtain a desirable job (whether in industry, academia, or elsewhere) upon graduation, then issues of branding would be moot. But nobody can guarantee that. The risk is borne entirely on the shoulders of the student. Hence, it is entirely rational for that student to take steps to mitigate that risk by expanding his career options.</p>
<p>If the desired industry job is with a hot startup or fast growing tech firm, then it can make a huge difference. I interact on a regular basis with the Langer Lab, which is the world’s largest biomedical lab. Langer has over 800 patents himself and quite a few grad and post-docs students in his lab (I even know some undergrads) are also co-inventors on his patents. MIT, the Langer Lab, Langer himself (and quite a few of his students) have made a fortune licensing his labs inventions to industry. Doing a PhD in his lab (or a number of the other labs on campus) is pretty much a guarantee of a high paying industry job, a nice sign-on bonus and possible royalties on the research you worked on. For some it is not even a backup but a primary goal. Several grad students have spun-off their own companies and have had no problem getting VC funding. The brand and blessing of the Lab made the whole difference.</p>
<p>Simply because MIT DOES NOT HAVE a biomedical engineering department. </p>
<p>MIT decided long ago not to create a separate biomedical engineering department because the field is not based on a core set of knowledge such as chemical engineering (chemistry), mechanical engineering (physics) or electrical engineering. Biomedical engineering is the application of all engineering disciplines to the field of medicine. It is by definition a multi-disciplinary field. There is no standardized curriculum and most programs are unaccredited. MIT does not believe you can be an effective specialist in biomedicine if you don’t master one of the core engineering disciplines that sustain it. At MIT you can get a minor in BME on top of pretty much any engineering degree.</p>
<p>Without question, MIT performs much more research in the field of biomedicine throughout the various departments such as chemical engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and at various engineering labs such as the Langer Lab or centers such as the Whitehead Institute (center for the Human Genome Project) than at institutions that claim a biomedical engineering department such as Duke or JHU. </p>
<p>If you are interested in biomedicine or biotechnology you are much better off with a core degree degree in chemical, mechanical, biological or electrical engineering or even computer science, than a degree in biomedical engineering. </p>
<p>Biomedical engineers have among the lowest starting salaries of all engineers and are not in high demand, largely because of their lack of core expertise. I have been involved in the field of medical devices for the past 30 years and none of the firms I worked with ever hired biomedical engineers but they did hire a number of mechanical, electrical engineers and computer scientists. </p>
<p>Around ten years ago, MIT created the first department of biological engineering in the country which is based on the application of biology based technologies to areas such as nanomaterials, energy, the environment or the life sciences in areas such as biotherapeutics, molecular imaging, tissue biomechanics, pharmacology.
[MIT</a> | Department of Biological Engineering](<a href=“Home | MIT Department of Biological Engineering”>Home | MIT Department of Biological Engineering)</p>
<p>But of course that still leaves open the question of what happens if you’re an MIT PhD student who isn’t in Langer’s lab or a similarly commercially productive one? Obviously only a small fraction of PhD students would want to engage in that type of research and even of those that do, not all will actually be invited. </p>
<p>Arguably the biggest concern is regarding those incoming PhD students who are aiming to research a highly theoretical topic with the aims of entering academia…but who then find that they can’t place in a desirable academic position. For many of them, the best academic placement they can obtain is a low-end post-doc at an unremarkable institute or a gypsy adjunct lecturership, either of which provides little opportunity for progression to academic tenure. They could find an industry research job, but most likely only an undesirable one because theoretical research is usually not commercially interesting. The other choice is to take a nice backup career in consulting or finance…but only if that choice is realistic, and is so only at certain schools. </p>
<p>To reiterate, if we could guarantee that everybody who completes their PhD at a top program will receive the job that they want - whether in academia or industry - then there would be no issue. Such a system obviously doesn’t exist. Plenty of such people will not be offered desirable jobs. Many people who want academic careers will indeed only be offered only non-tenure-track adjunct lecturerships. It therefore behooves everyone to carefully consider what alternative careers they can access via their university’s brand and network.</p>
<p>How about the idea that a MIT grad might be more flexible/ able to transform/ scale into other career, if he cannot find the type of job he wants, because of superior problem solving skills? I recall hearing about an MIT undergraduate who did his PhD in EE at some other school, but could not land a job that he wanted. So, he changed fields, went to medical school earned his MD and works as a doctor implanting biomedical devices.</p>
<p>^^ That MIT grad showed only that he had enough $$ to pay for Med school and could afford to study another 6 + more years - NOT that he was more “flexible” or had “superior problem solving skills”!</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>VCs also have zero interest in hiring a PhD whether from MIT or Harvard. That is just not the profile they look for. A Sloan or HBS grad, yes, a PhD in biology or engineering, no way! Once you have been successful with your own startup, then a VC may hire you as an entrepreneur in residence for a while until you get your next venture funded. </p>
<p>Other career changes I have seen with frustrated STEM PhD candidates include going to med school, law school, public health, government agencies such as the EPA (or the NSA for EECs and math majors).</p>
<p>I would say it is the willingness to adapt that matters more. Superior problem solving skills are found by graduates of a ton of universities, but not everyone with superior problem solving skills is able to adapt.</p>
<p>Is that so? Then somebody needs to tell that to General Catalyst Partners, one of the more successful VC firms in the world, because they recently hired David Danielson out of MIT *even before he officially completed his engineering PhD<a href=“although%20he%20did%20later%20complete%20it”>/i</a> Nor had Danielson even worked for a startup before in his life, let alone ever having founded one. But GC didn’t seem to care about that, as they not only hired him, but had him co-found the firms clean energy division. {Danielson later became Assistant Secretary of Energy under the Obama Administration.}</p>
<p>What makes that example all the more poignant is that Danielson was not exactly a ‘disgruntled’ or ‘frustrated’ MIT student, but rather one of the very best and dedicated ones, having won Karl Taylor Compton Student Prize for excellence in student achievement in citizenship and devotion to MIT. Yet the fact remains that Danielson chose never to work as an engineer at all, instead becoming a venture capitalist and (now) government policy maker. </p>
<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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<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>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>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>
<p>^ The discussion about MIT undergrad. Admissions looking for hypersmart kids who demonstrate potential to conduct research in middle and high school has branched into a discussions about whether this is true and career opportunities for those who get PhDs. From what has been said so far, it seems to me that conducting research in middle/ hs is not necessary for acceptance at MIT. Apparently, kids who want to go into medicine or business startups/ VCs etc may have activities/ internships that suggest exceptional interest in these fields rather than research. I have learned a lot from all the very smart posters who have contributed to this thread.</p>
<p>This, to me, is the heart of the whole thread (okay, I stopped reading at page 4 and then picked it up again half way through page 6 … so maybe not the whole thread).</p>
<p>Point is: Yes, it seems best to me that we should all just let our students decide what they want to pursue, and where they want to apply (as long as we can afford the application fees), and then let colleges (including MIT) decide whether they want to accept our students, rather than compelling our students to do anything just to please admissions. The reality is, after all, that we don’t really know what admissions is looking for in an applicant, we’re all only guessing – in every case. Even MIT alum, don’t really know exactly who will make the grade year after year. They would likely have a pretty good idea if an applicant would be a good fit, upon meeting that applicant and spending time with him/her, but they still wouldn’t know for certain if MIT Admissions would select that applicant for admission. It’s just that selective. More qualified applicants than spots.</p>
<p>On a more personal level:
My son was accepted EA into MIT for this fall. He chose NOT to attend. He took the free-ride and stipend at Texas A&M instead. He got enormously generous grant money from MIT. We were shocked. And so very excited! But upon calling FA, we learned that the grant amounts would, understandably, likely decrease after older siblings graduated from college, and/or I took a promotion (which has been the plan all along, now that the kids are gone from my single-parent, financially-strained home). And so, money was the primary driving factor in my son’s decision to attend A&M. Unfortunately, I think the other driving factor, which he claimed did not weigh heavily, was that he had that sinking feeling, as was mentioned earlier in this thread, that MIT might have made a mistake when they chose him. It does make me a little sad when I think of the opportunity lost – I am pretty confident that MIT did not make a mistake with him – but I also know that this had to be his choice, not mine. He had to choose what he thought was best for him. It’s that kind of thinking that got him into MIT in the first place – him choosing his own way, and excelling at his choices. And so, maybe MIT will be in the cards for grad school. At least that’s what he’s hoping for so far. Meanwhile, he’s already had some extraordinary opportunities at Texas A&M, including a trip to Italy this summer, before his freshman year even began. I think he’s going to be fine. It’s just another path. A still-good path.</p>
<p>My son had zero research experience when he was accepted, btw. He is from an excellent, very competitive school district. We’re lucky that way. He was a repeat all-state musician in a very competitive state for music. He enjoyed his community service “job,” which he held for 5 years. And he is, like all MIT acceptees, extraordinarily bright – like clearly “above the rest,” in his relatively small world so far, in that area. His letters of recommendation were extraordinary. And he has a heart of gold, which he is known for, and which, I am pretty sure, came out in his applications. He is selfless and humble. But he had no research experience and not really any “passion” for research. He did not ever ask me if there was a way to do research, and I never thought to ask him if he wanted to. We came to find out later that children of doctors and scientists in our own community “do research.” Frankly (oh boy, I think I’m going to get it!), I think it’s kind of silly – middle schoolers with a “passion” for research?! My thought on that is, most kids do not long to do research in middle school. It’s not even on their radar. That doesn’t make them ineligible or unqualified for our nation’s best universities. I totally agree with molliebatmit’s assessment that those who seek it out are often children of scientists and researchers. And by that, I mean, it may be more of the parents’ passion than the kids’.</p>
<p>I think that MIT’s blogs, and the MIT website in general, do a better job explaining what they’re looking for in an applicant than any other school’s site. By far. Everyone thinking about MIT should check them out! :)</p>