<p>I've been thinking for a while now about whether I want to jump right into the workforce after graduation or go the PhD route. The more I think about it, the more I'm leaning toward continuing on to a PhD after I graduate.</p>
<p>Just to get it out of the way, it has nothing to do with the money (I know PhDs don't get engineers a considerably higher salary) or any other material reason, it's more about the intellectual pursuit and to open myself up to the world of research.</p>
<p>Some questions:</p>
<p>1) I've heard a lot of times you can get paid while working on a PhD. Can someone shed some light on this? How much? Is this common? Who is the one paying, the school of a sponsoring company? The reason I ask is that I'll be around 30 if I am to go for it, I'd need SOME sort of income to keep afloat and I'd imagine it would be too difficult to work at the same time.</p>
<p>2) How common is it to go straight from undergrad to doctoral? Would I be at a real disadvantage if I tried to skip the MS or should I plan on doing one?</p>
<p>3) Should I be doing research instead of internships while in undergrad?</p>
<p>4) I've been looking at a bunch of different colleges and was just curious, how bad does it look to work on a PhD from the same school you received your bachelors?</p>
<p>If anyone can also fill me in on what the general application process is like, what a typical day is like and so forth that be great too. Also, what could I be doing now (at the end of my sophomore year) that would help me prepare? Any other general advice is greatly appreciated, thanks!</p>
<p>1) You usually get paid as an RA and/or TA while getting an engineering PhD. It’s enough to subsist on. It’s paid by your program at the school.</p>
<p>2) You can do either route but at some schools you go directly into the PhD program.</p>
<p>3) Both are useful, but a lot of PhD programs will expect you to have research experience.</p>
<p>4) It doesn’t matter if it’s from the same school. </p>
<p>For the application process, just look at any college’s web site.</p>
<p>This is the absolute best reason to consider getting a PhD.</p>
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<p>Essentially every PhD student in engineering that I know gets paid from one source or another to do their degree. Occasionally you hear about people losing their funding due to a grant falling through or something but usually their advisors figure something out to keep them funded.</p>
<p>Most students get paid through a research or teaching assistantship. Those are typically enough to live on and go out once in a while, but you certainly aren’t going to be saving a whole lot for retirement or anything. They do cover tuition and sometimes fees, though. For an RA position, the funds come out of the advising professor’s research budget. For a TA position it is usually from the department.</p>
<p>If you get a fellowship, those can often be quite a bit more. Several of my colleagues have or have previously had fellowships paying on the order of $35k per year plus tuition and fees. Those are really nice. Still barely more than half what you would make in industry with a BS, but given what most of us are used to living on in college, that’s a ton.</p>
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<p>It really depends on the school. I didn’t even know you could skip the MS until I got to graduate school and lo and behold, that is what I am doing. It should let you save a semester or two on your total time to degree. The downside is that your dissertation will be the first thesis you have written, and the MS thesis can often lead to a publication on its own. There really is no reason not to skip it if you know for sure you want a PhD, though.</p>
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<p>Research should definitely be the priority. I usually suggest that undergraduates do at least one internship even if they want to go to graduate school. You never know if you will change your mind by the time you graduate and the experience will help in that case, plus it will help you rule out industry versus graduate school (or conversely, decided you would rather do industry immediately).</p>
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<p>That depends on the situation. For industry, most people probably won’t care. if you are trying to get an academic position, it looks pretty bad. It also will pretty much absolutely disqualify you from ever holding a faculty position at the school in question. Academic inbreeding is a real thing and is generally avoided at all cost.</p>
<p>The best thing you can do to prepare is to make sure you are comfortable with your mathematics and do undergraduate research.</p>
<p>Most schools will support you out of their research and teaching budget. It’s not a great living, but it’s usually manageable. </p>
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<p>I went straight, though I did do coop as an undergrad. Some schools require you to do a Masters as part of the PhD program. I think getting some industrial experience is good because it exposes you to real problems. Working at a research lab is ideal. </p>
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Do internships in the summer and research on campus during the school year. I think both are valuable. Ideal situation is to intern at a company that does research. Recommendations from a well known industrial researcher carry some good weight too. </p>
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If it’s a top school, it’s not bad at all. Ranking matters a lot more for graduate school than for undergraduate because academic institutions generally want faculty from higher ranking schools than themselves. </p>
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<p>Application processes varies. You need to write a statement of objectives which indicates your plan. Generally decisions are made by professors based on who they want as students. It’s very different than undergraduate admissions. You need to demonstrate maturity and a healthy approach to research. Nobody wants to invest in someone who hasn’t done enough research to know if they like it. You need great recommendations that attest to your potential as a researcher. </p>
<p>As a graduate student, early on, you spend about 50% of your time taking classes 50% of your time doing research or teaching depending on how you are funded, and the other 50% preparing for qualifying exams and trying to find a dissertation topic worthy of a PhD :-). Sometimes if you’re an RA, you’ll be given a job in the lab that isn’t going to lead to your topic, but is a job that someone must do and you need to pay your dues. </p>
<p>Finding your topic is the hardest part and can take years. You may go through several topics that don’t pan out before you hit your stride. The process is exciting though because you will be learning faster than you ever have before, and you will be slowly becoming a world-class expert in your field. </p>
<p>There are also a lot of group meetings and discussions with your colleagues and your advisor. These are the best things about being a graduate student. Grad student life is also pretty fun. I think it’s less stressful than undergrad until you get to the point where you want to be finished and earning money. Then it’s really stressful because you can’t leave until you finish. Finishing seems like an asymptotic processes that never reaches the end, but eventually, it ends. When I hire new PhDs, I usually anticipate that they won’t show up for work for between 6 and 12 months later than they think they’ll finish. They don’t really know, but I do :-).</p>
<p>I’d contend that saying that prestige is more important for PhDs is misleading. What really matters is the clout of your advisor rather than that of the program as a whole. Given, there tend to be me well-known advisors at the top schools, but it’s not an exclusive thing. I know a guy who, without being an MIT or Stanford grad is being strongly encouraged to go be faculty at Caltech by the guys at Caltech. It has a lot to do with his advisor.</p>
<p>I absolutely agree in terms of getting the faculty positions, but for choosing a program, at some schools, you get admitted, pass your qualifiers and THEN find an advisor, so in that case, going to a well ranked school is the master move because there is a better chance of getting an advisor with some juice. If I recall, at UIUC, at least in EE, the professors often pick their own students for admission and offer them RAs, but at MIT it is very common to get accepted in general by the committee, be a TA and then discuss research with a number of faculty before choosing a particular advisor. Also, it is not a given that your Masters advisor will be your PhD advisor. I think going to a lower ranked school without knowing that you’re going to get a good advisor is risky. Going to a good sized program is also better because there are a lot of faculty to choose from.</p>
<p>Wow, really good information here. So when you pick your research topic are you picking from a list of topics decided by the school or is it something you think up yourself?</p>
<p>Something you think yourself, hopefully something that a major funding professor is also interested in doing… If you want funding you have to have the talk with the funding people and see what they’re working on and see how you can fit in topic wise.</p>
<p>I was offered an RA’ship fresh out of undergrad school but managed to mold my topic around his area of interest. I was interested in computational linguistics and he was interested in database management, so what better for both than to combine them into ‘computational linguistics for a natural language database query system’…</p>
<p>If I wanted to research the mating habits of Elbonian slugs with focus on the moves they make, I’m sure I could find a prof or two to accept the topic, but not likely to receive any funding so I would be spending a good deal of my life grading or working as a lab assistant…</p>
<p>The broad area you pick yourself and you probably choose a program and an advisor in the area that interests you, but the specific problem requires you to learn enough to develop some concrete ideas about a problem that you think that you might be able to solve. Eventually you become smart enough, focused enough, and it gels and you become the master and solve it. It doesn’t always happen on the first problem that you try, though and that’s why the question of “how long it takes” is so difficult to predict.</p>