How To Get a PhD? All You Should Know To Get Your PhD Degree.
Updated on September 30th, 2023
July 3rd 2020
This text was fully written by humans.
SUMMARY / KEY TAKEAWAYS
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Before even asking yourself “Which PhD program to choose?” first ask yourself “Do I need a PhD?”
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Consider other options and think of pros and cons of working in academia. Do the working conditions suit your personal needs?
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Joining academia requires not only specialistic skills but also a specific mindset. Test yourself first!
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Prepare for your PhD and work out a plan before you start.
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Consider multiple types of PhD tracks, including “atypical” PhDs beyond the grad school: industrial and individual PhDs.
Table of Contents
How To Get a PhD?
This blog post is for Master’s students who are at the end of their Master’s programs. Those who wonder if the attempt to obtain a doctoral degree is the best choice for them. Or perhaps, they should rather go for the industry job instead.
If you happen to be a PhD candidate or PhD graduate reading this post, it would be great if you share your thoughts in the comments below!
What This Article Is NOT About: Where To Find Your Dream Project or PhD Advisor.
In this article, we mostly talk about the mindset: what criteria to choose before enrolling into a grad school and how to make sure that you won’t get disappointed in the process. It’s a big decision and it’s very important to approach it with a clear mindset and good-defined criteria.
But remember that choosing the right supervisor might be 50% of the overall success, and choosing the right project is another 30%. The work put into the projects, is only the remaining 20% of the success, unfortunately.
Therefore, once you make up your mind, you should spend lots of time and effort on researching your options to make sure that you find yourself in a supportive environment, you work with a synergistic promotor and on a subject-matter that is both fascinating for you and publishable.
Of course, there are open-source browsers of PhD programs and PhD projects such as PhDPortal, PhDPortal, or FindaPhD but it’s unlikely that a project found via such a browser will bring you a PhD project of your dreams.
In fact, the best way to look for a PhD program – just as in the case of any other job – is networking. For more, according to research, even in academia networking is the key factor for career success!
To read more about why you should network and how to effectively do that, please take a look at our articles:
- “10 Good Reasons To Build Efficient Networking Strategies and Treat Networking as a Mindset,”
- “Make Strategic Networking a Part of Your Career Development Plan: The Depth vs The Width of Your Network,”
- “Top 11 Rules For Effective Networking on LinkedIn,“
- “Before a Job Interview: How To Conduct an Informational Interview.”
And now, to the merit:
Questions To Answer Before Starting a PhD.
Why Is This an Important and an Unimportant Choice at the Same Time?
First of all, working with Master’s students on their career development feels great! This was explained in the article “The Tree” dedicated to how employment changes personality (most often, in a negative way). Namely, the vast majority of fresh graduates have energy and a positive mindset, are idealistic, not cynical, have work motivation and willingness to work hard—especially if it’s for a good cause.
But if they step into the wrong environment, then after just a few years they might become cynical, broken people with a learned helplessness syndrome. That’s why it is so important to make a good, or at least, a well-calculated decision of “where to go” at the start.
This decision is hard though. As a typical Master’s student, you didn’t have much practical working experience just yet. You just don’t know what works for you in the working environment and what doesn’t.
With jobs, it’s a little bit like with relationships. Most people don’t succeed at the first go, as they don’t know at that point which types of people they would resonate with.
Even if you have some internships under your belt, an intern and an employee are two substantially different types of experience. The expectations towards an intern are typically much lower than those towards an employee, so you can’t compare the two.
The Long Journey Ahead.
So, you need to accept that your first job after graduation is just a starting point in the long, 40-45 year-long journey. It’s going to be the longest journey in your whole life. You will most likely need to change your life plans and strategy on the job market at least a few times in the process.
Hoping that your first job will end up with a straight career path toward the top is like hoping that your high school sweetheart will become your spouse and that you will live happily together ever after. Not a very likely scenario.
That’s why in your first job, it is important to choose an environment in which you can grow, you can work on your professional development and develop in many directions depending on what you will discover about yourself in the process.
This choice is important because you need to find an environment in which your natural potential won’t be blocked. At the same time, it is not as important in terms of where you end up as a professional in the long run.
The Right and the Wrong Reasons to Choose Academia.
This is a controversial subject. In the “boomer” generation, high academic education almost automatically led to a high social status. Today, the market value of academic titles is not as obvious anymore!
First of all, you need to know that if you are going for an academic career with an intention to become a tenured researcher, the odds are against you. As Schillebeeckx et al. (Nature Biotechnology, 2013) have shown in their seminal article, the discrepancy between the number of tenure positions and PhD graduates in STEM sciences has been systematically growing all the way since the 80s.
In other words, there is simply no room for everyone to stay.
Moreover, today, employers value practical knowledge and execution skills more than theoretical knowledge and academic approach to solving problems. Especially Elon Musk is vocal about this, talking about his attitude to academic research in this interview.
There opinions on whether it’s a good idea to get a PhD degree assuming that it is just an additional 3-5 years-long professional training before starting a career in the industry are mixed.
However, going for a PhD title as the credibility card at the start of an industry career is not an optimal motivation. You always need to compare the scenario you are choosing to alternative scenarios for spending your time. What (constructive) things would you do with the same amount of time if you didn’t go for a PhD degree?
Those who go straight to the industry after their Master’s, have enough time to gain practical experience and build expertise in their branch of the industry before they hit 30. So, they usually end up in better positions than those who spend a few years behind closed doors doing their PhDs first.
Also, since the number of PhD graduates substantially increased within the last two decades, a PhD degree in itself is no longer unique enough to make you a special commodity in any way. For this reason, it is advisable to choose a PhD only when you are a fanatic of science. And, if you seriously consider an academic career as a way of living.
What’s the Worst Possible Scenario?
The worst possible scenario is to go for a PhD degree just because you have no better idea of what to do with yourself. In that scenario, you just want to postpone your career decisions by another few years. Yes, the job market is complex and chaotic, and entering the grad school won’t save you from this mess. And yet, according to research, roughly, 15-20% (!) of PhD candidates follow this exact motivation.
So, try to understand your own motivation on a deeper level and make sure that choosing a PhD program is not just a way to “take the time to think” or “reduce uncertainty” about the future after graduating from Masters. Please find more personal discussion on this subject matter by Andrea Farias or Aatiya, also known as PhDpreneur, who have posted their videos on YT.
Take into account that the time in your life in which you will be doing your PhD, which is typically around 25 years old, is the period when most people reach the top of their creativity. After that, your energy levels and the affinity to take personal risks will rapidly start decreasing.
So, do you want to spend this time locking yourself behind a closed door and struggling with complex research problems? Only to buy yourself more time to think about your future?
For most people, graduate school is physically and emotionally draining. Going for the PhD program as “the easy solution” is comparable to going to Marines thinking that it’s just giving yourself more time before you start your adult life. Frankly, no one with that motivation would ever be happy in academia.
What’s the Best Possible Scenario?
To sum up, the best motivation to go to academia is probably to be deep in love with the research topic from your Master’s. You feel you are talented in this discipline, and you can see yourself working as a researcher for the rest of your life.
Of course, you will have a chance to verify and change your plans later. But if you don’t see yourself as a professional researcher from the very start, it’s probably better to skip the PhD degree and move straight to the industry searching for a job in the open job market.
You also need to take into account that even if you are in love with your research subject, the numbers are against you. The probability of landing a tenured position is low, and the numbers get worse every year.
Thus, it’s better to assume from the very beginning that the academic career path might just not work out in the long run. You should prepare for grad school as if you were preparing for the Olympic Games rather than as if you were crafting a career for life (as also explained in the post “We Are the Champions. Leaving Academia After PhD Feelin’ Good“).
Do You Make This Choice For Your Family, Or Is It For You?
Lastly, remember that it should be your decision rather than your family’s decision. In many countries of the world, such as India, a researcher with a PhD degree is a noble profession, a sign of life success, and a reason for the family to be proud.
Many Indian students admit that in hindsight, they see that they were influenced by their families while taking this crucial decision in their life. And, they regret it.
Academia vs Other Options.
Academia, startup, corporation, public institution, or perhaps, your own company? First, there are no better or worse working environments.
After all, every environment is built by people. What is important, is to find one environment where people have similar qualities, or values, to yours. To some people out there, the quality of life largely improves after moving to industry. Others were heavily disappointed with the industry life and are much better off in academia.
Again, this is what you will most likely need to discover from your own experience, without blaming yourself for miscalibration. Especially in case, you will need to change your working environment in the process.
Briefly, the major differences between academia and other working environments are as follows.
Cons.
(-) Academia is a medieval system in 21st century.
Today, it is not a secret anymore that academia needs a deep reformation. The structure and the mechanisms governing the academic system today do not differ much from medieval times, including phenomenas such as notorious exploitation of the early career labor, racism and discrimination.
At the same time, new, groundbreaking discoveries and developments in science are becoming increasingly scarce. Innovation is slowly but steadily moving toward fast-developing industries such as IT, engineering, and biotechnology. In this situation, you should think about academia as one of the options for a career in research rather than the main option.
(-) More idealists than elsewhere, yet the rules stay the same.
Many academics are in deep love with science/knowledge and value the intellectual qualities higher than the practical aspects of the job such as the salary. They don’t use elbows while working with other people.
Yet, the rules for getting promoted in academia are as harsh as everywhere else. If you don’t develop a thick skin and don’t start thinking strategically early on, it might result in deep disappointments and burnout down the line.
(-) You are on your own.
This can be taboo in academia, but teams are only on paper. At the end of the day, everyone needs to take care of their CV. The way of incentivizing people in academic projects does not promote teamwork at all.
Every single project results in a research paper. Your place in the sequence of the authors determines how your scientific achievement is perceived by outsiders, including grant agencies who decide about your future in the field.
The Daily Life Might Differ From What You Expect as a Laic.
It is also worth considering how your imagination about academic work looks and confronting it with reality. Many young people fancy working as researchers as they are fascinated by the vision of studying topics such as astronomy, the origins of the Universe, wildlife, human cognition, ecology, or some specific sociological phenomena that they find extremely important in today’s world.
For this reason, they apply to join graduate school expecting that from now on, they will be spending their days surrounded by like-minded people, and discussing the big problems in the world.
Academic World Was Built For Individualists.
Well, unfortunately, in most types of academic projects, such moments are extremely rare. Daily life is all about sitting in your office and reading the specialistic literature, planning projects in every detail, and meticulous and often tedious execution of these projects.
Whenever you join Friday Afternoon Drinks with your colleagues from grad school, you are all typically too tired to even think about work anymore.
The leading topics become planning vacation, concerts in the city, who-is-dating-whom, the plans for the next Day Out, games between professors in the institute, whose contract ends next and how to possibly keep this person around by landing a grant, et cetera. Anything but science!
Occasionally, you will present your progress at a seminar to your colleagues or during a 1-1 meeting straight to your boss, or your supervisor. Once or twice a year, you might also attend a conference where you have a chance to get into a more philosophical dispute about what you do in an international and informal setting.
But that would be it! In daily life, the work is systematic, structured, quite mechanistic, and often even boring. For this reason, many people come to academia only because they dreamt about doing science after watching fascinating documentaries on the Discovery channel for years and years, soon get disappointed and often drop out.
On The Dysfunctional Teamwork in Academia.
As a result, academics have an incentive to get their name onto as many papers as possible. While at the same time, doing as little as possible for each one of the projects they participate in. Their publication record will be the major factor that the granting agencies take into account while dividing the money for future projects.
Furthermore, since academics prioritize finishing projects in which they are the leading authors over other projects, they often delay their input to the projects in which they are supporting authors. As a result, they successfully block them.
Complex Employer-Employee Relations.
The situation is not any better when we look at the employer-employee relationship. Unlike in industry, in academia bosses and their employees often have contradictory goals. Namely, your boss often wants you to exploit their research ideas that they developed a long, long time ago. So, you work on expanding their fame even further rather than working out your future line of research.
Typically, there is also less mobility in changing the boss as in many countries (such as the Netherlands), you are paid a salary straight from your lab’s budget and not from the department’s budget. It means that you effectively belong to your boss: if you cannot find common tongue, you will be laid-off rather than transferred to another lab.
The situation is different in some countries such as the US where graduate schools offer fellowships. In such a setting, theoretically, you can change your lab affiliation within the same graduate school in the process. However, it makes your life harder and is often perceived as a failure.
(-) Delayed Gratification.
In companies, employees usually need to accomplish several small tasks during the week. They get some small personal gratification for completing each one of them. This reward is often as little as a thumb up and smile, but that also counts!
On the contrary, academics need to develop sacred patience as the days of triumph are scarce. One or twice a year, you will publish something and celebrate. Once or twice a year you will present at a conference. Other than that, research is a peaceful grind away from the world. So, you need to motivate yourself or find a peer group to support each other. Or otherwise, your life will get hard.
(-) Games.
You can expect that once in a while, there will be an extra author(s) on your paper. They did nothing for the project but are listed as co-authors only because some professor owes something to another professor.
Or, because the project is a part of a consortium, or so. There are lots of games to be played around you. You will need to tolerate these games to survive in academia. However, this is material for a whole book so let’s skip the details here.
Neutral Points.
(+/-) Travels.
Unlike in other fields, in academia, you are often expected to have experience working abroad to get a permanent academic contract. This might be good news or bad news depending on how fond of traveling and relocating you are.
Pros.
(+) Your Work Contributes To Human Heritage.
If it matters to you that your work will be known to the public and remembered even after your death, it is the place. for you!
(+) Learn-To-Earn.
This is also one of the few places on the market where you are paid for learning. If you have a natural curiosity and affinity to drill deep into problems and learn about them in every detail, academia might be for you.
(+) Your Work Is Not Anonymous.
This might sound like a detail, but for many people, it is an important aspect. While in academia, you put your name on every single research paper.
Then, your work becomes public and visible to everyone around the globe. In industry, on the other hand, the whole team produces a new product or a document under the brand of the company.
Public opinion doesn’t know the names of the direct contributors. For academics switching to industry, it is often disappointing to realize that they are no longer recognized as authors of their work.
Of course, a good manager should make you feel essential to the team. Yet still, your name won’t be mentioned in the history books even if you did something truly groundbreaking.
(+) You Are Encouraged To Share Your Know-How.
As mentioned in the blog post, “Things learned in science, for the good and the bad,” one of the things that can be hard after starting a company, is the realization that you are no longer able to openly share your know-how. In the private sector, the company’s know-how is under strict protection.
Everyone who breaks the rules would likely be fired. Companies don’t organize international conferences so that everyone can share with representatives of other companies what they did in their projects in every detail. No one shares their pipelines so that their results can be reproduced. So, if sharing what you do with public opinion matters to you, academia is the environment to go for.
(+) You’ve Got a Chance For a Fascinating, Stable Life.
If you successfully climb up the ladder, you have a chance to get a tenure position. It means that you are going to get a lifelong appointment and you won’t ever need to apply for a job again. Only academics have this luxury.
How Is Academia Structured?
Many people outside academia believe that the academic career path looks as follows. PhD candidate —> Postdoc —> Professor. It is much more complicated than that. To a large extent, it depends on the country, as the structure of the academic system is very different around the world.
Typically, PhD graduates need to jump over more hurdles than just one or two Postdocs on their way to land tenure. It’s a 10-15-or-more years-long journey. Within this time, many extenuating circumstances can happen. For example, equipment that you are working on can become obsolete which can affect your further career opportunities.
How Can You Prepare For a PhD Program?
There is a huge difference between landing a PhD contract and landing a good PhD contract. Two factors are crucial of course: (1) to land the topic that you find truly fascinating, and (2) to get under the wings of a good supervisor and mentor.
The second factor is usually even more important than the first, for a simple reason. Even the best project will be spoiled by an incompetent or sociopathic supervisor. Many Master’s students undervalue the importance of the supervisor in the project. They get excited by interesting topics and go for them. This lack of strategy often backfires…
To find the right supervisor, you will need to spend more time networking and visiting labs. But believe me, the effort will eventually pay off. And, you should ask the current and former students of a given professor about their experience of working together.
It’s good to ask them about “3 positive things versus one negative thing they can say about their boss.“ In this way, they can honestly share one sincere downside of the person without feeling guilty for it.
Furthermore, it’s important to keep in mind that a good PhD experience is also about the environment you work in. It’s good to make sure that you will also have daily contact with someone assigned as your daily supervisor.
…And, that you are going to join a graduate school: a cloud where dozens (or even hundreds) of students complete their PhD degrees in parallel. In a grad school, students share the same culture: attend common courses and seminars, go to conferences together, party together on the weekends.
Most graduate schools also offer some perks for alumni: annual meetings, career fairs, databases of personal contacts. If you don’t have such a supportive environment of people who are on the same career stage as you, you might feel isolated and demotivated after a few months.
Lastly, despite it might not be politically correct, we need to talk about the brand. Before choosing grad school, you should think about it as it has massive influence on your future career.
As a matter of fact, a few people in the world will be able to understand the details of your scientific achievements while household names such as Stanford or Cambridge will open many doors for you wherever you go. And even people fluent in your discipline, will likely use heuristics to evaluate your competencies rather than going in depth and looking into nitty-gritty details of your projects.
And sometimes, it is tactically better to choose for a relatively simple project at a prestige institution rather than an extremely ambitious, complex project at a small institute that lacks international recognition. In the long run, especially if you will leave academia one day, the brand of your alma mater will many open doors.
As an example, PhD degrees earned from reputable research institutions open many doors to VC funds in the San Francisco / Bay Area.
Don’t Wait for Others to Create a Plan For You: Create Your Own Research Proposal!
Moreover, before you launch your academic career properly, you will need to have a plan. Academia is a complex environment because the currency in academia is dual. While companies aim to just increase their profits, academics need to first produce papers to attract grants later.
And, it’s important to choose a topic that has a good potential to publish. Or, good potential to pivot if any major problems with the project emerge in the process.
Even within one lab, there might be a high variety in project publishability. One student might have a wonderful project from which they can produce multiple high-impact publications.
While a student next door might have a project that can result in one paper at best. And, for worse, the journals interested in this type of material have one order of magnitude lower impact factor.
So, how to work out a nice research project if you are a newbie to the field? Your potential supervisor will be too busy to write a proposal for you! Well, fortunately, in the times of chatbots, you can get helped right here right now – and entirely for free!
You can, in example, let ChatGPT help you write a research proposal. You can find example of how to work on a research proposal with ChatGPT like a pro in Andy Stapleton’s video “ChatGPT: A game changer for researchers? See it in action.”
“Just a School.”
Many PhD candidates hear from their supervisors that graduate school is “just a school.” Namely, that they should not be fixated on publications as the main point of the PhD is to learn and produce a good quality work rather than publish.
Supervisors often say this as they believe that taking off the publication pressure from the students will make them more relaxed… and more likely to publish.
Beware of this! If you buy into these rhetorics and don’t pay attention to publishing, then you can expect that in your last year of the PhD, the rhetorics will drastically change. And, all of a sudden you will be bombed with questions about your current and future manuscripts.
So, instead of listening to this advice early on, it’s better to assume from the start that you should care about publications. Make sure that your project has a good publishing potential.
Assessing the potential of the research projects is highly challenging and requires many years of experience in the field. Many full professors are still poor at spotting good publication opportunities!
Therefore, to approach this issue, it is advisable to come up with at least a few alternatives. Also, check in which types of journals the topics interesting to you tend to appear.
Ask at least 3-5 researchers in the field for their opinion, preferably those who have experience (in essence, Postdoctoral and senior researchers). Remember also that publications are very important for your professional development.
Will I Make a Successful PhD Candidate?
Lastly, please take into account that it is hard to predict whether you will perform well as a PhD candidate. Some Master’s students who pass all exams with flying colors fail when it comes to academic research.
It is because research requires more independence, creativity, risk management, and endurance than Master’s studies. The opposite scenario is also possible. Many PhD candidates flourish only after they start leading their research projects.
Therefore, you need to take into account that you might love or hate this job. You will learn about it in the process, but for sure it’s important to stay focused on your goals and maintain a positive attitude during this process in order to avoid disappointment.
As a rule of thumb though, successful PhD candidates share a few personality traits. They tend to be:
- Modest and not materialistic BUT with at the same time, with high intellectual needs and hunger for always learning more,
- Creative: next to collecting good grades for learning how things were done before, keen on exploring new, unexplored areas and building solutions to problems,
- Individualistic and independent by nature: willing to take their own decisions and manage their own time and resources,
- Self-motivated: good at pacing themselves, not reliant on external motivation such awards, money, acknowledgment, or even academic titles.
On The Way To the PhD degree.
The PhD degree requires a lot of self-management skills. You will be put in the same pot with plenty of other young and ambitious people. You will have similar career goals, and in that sense, you will compete to some extent.
Academia is highly individualistic and puts a lot of pressure on productivity and personal branding. Self-management in academia is a big topic but you can find some tips here.
“I’m Not Sure If I Want to Be a Professor but I’d Like to Do a PhD.”
You might still be asking yourself, “Should I get a PhD degree?” Well, in some areas of industry, it’s good to hold a PhD degree. For instance, Google is known for its preference to hire PhD degree holders over other candidates.
In case you think of a PhD degree as a way of advancing your position in the job market rather than as a start of your research career path, you shouldn’t rush to start your PhD.
You should know that you are not alone. Millions of PhD candidates worldwide start their PhD programs as late as in their forties and fifties. The average graduate student today is 33 years old and it is projected that this average will increase in the future.
In case you take the decision to pursue a PhD as a path to self-development rather than professorship, you can think of two PhD tracks beyond the typical graduate school:
1. Industrial PhD.
In this case, you conduct your PhD directly in a company. The company proposes a topic and collaborates with some research institutions where you’ll get supervision for your project and eventually defend your thesis.
In this scheme, you will learn much more about the industry from behind the curtains and you will work also on your professional development. However, you need to accept that the hosting company has a primary interest in their commercial projects and products, and not in your publications.
Thus, if you enter a PhD program this way, your publication record will likely be worse than your colleagues’ records at the end. In case you change your mind in the process and wish to develop an academic career, this outcome might effectively block you.
If you are interested in hearing more insights from a person who went through this type of a PhD, please take a look at the interview with Dr Alican Noyan, PhD who conducted his PhD program in Hewlett Packard.
2. Individual PhD.
In humanities and some branches of fundamental natural sciences, most of the PhD positions are individual. In this system, you only work with your promotor and, sometimes, with some collaborators of your promotor.
This form of a PhD degree is much more individualistic and isolated. Yet, on the good side of things, the requirements are also typically lower. Therefore, this option is often chosen also by professionals who already work full-time or part-time in the industry, yet they still dream about completing a PhD degree on a topic personally fascinating to them as a sidekick
In that case, they go through the whole PhD program part-time, usually after working hours and without any remuneration. Their contacts with their promotor usually boil down to reporting and discussing the progress once in a while, until there is a crucial mass of work that can be wrapped up into a dissertation, and defended as a PhD thesis.
Although many people go for unpaid, part-time PhD in their free time, it is not an advisable option. Every PhD project is a huge intellectual effort.
If you decide to pursue PhD without a stipend, you will sacrifice all your free time for the next few years only to be constantly overworked, sleep-deprived and deeply frustrated as you do all the job for free—the same job that others, who do full-time PhDs, are paid for. Before taking the final decision, perhaps it is good to take a look at what Google thinks of academia as a system.
Take The Demand In the Job Market Into Account.
If you are not planning to pursue a full career in academia and build up toward professorship, you should take the demand in the job market into account.
Yes, it is true that the demand dynamically changes and it is hard to predict the evolution of the job market in the future. However, for the past few decades, PhD graduates in STEM sciences used to be better-paid (on average) than PhD graduates in social sciences:
Next to prospective salaries, you might also be willing to consider the range of applications associated with your major of interest. The closer to “the core of the map of science,” the more applications your knowledge will have:
Where To Actually Go? Which Country To Choose?
Well, now: where in the world are the best PhD programs? The answer to this question is no longer as simple as “Of course the US!” It is true that the US still invests the most per head to educate future researchers (see: Figure), but your should consider more pivotal questions such as:
- What matters for me in life?
- How important is the work-life balance?
- How curious am I about other cultures, climate, cuisine?
- How close to my parents would I like to be?
- How much the branding of my research institute matter to me?
If you choose to move abroad for the project of your dreams without giving these points a proper thought, you might have regrets.
More Information on How To Pursue a PhD.
Please find more information on what you should know to get your PhD degree in our articles on related topics:
- “We Are the Champions. Leaving Academia After PhD Feelin’ Good,“
- “Pivot After PhD: Why, When, and How? Career Development Strategies for Career Change After PhD.“
We can also recommend getting familiar with Natalia’s book “What is out There For Me? The Landscape of Post-PhD Career Tracks” as well as “A PhD Is Not Enough! A Guide to Survival in Science” by Peter J. Feibelman.
Last Words: Observe Yourself and The Job Market!
There is always the right pace and time for everything. You might be the right person to do a PhD, but at the wrong stage of your life. Remember that PhD is a high-intensity sport. Therefore, you might have a hard time completing your projects and graduating if you, in example, have newborns at home or notorious health problems.
Lastly, you can’t take anything for granted in the job market anymore. Due to fast development in AI and machine learning, new professions loom and old professions fall into oblivion every day.
While PhD is a 4 to 6 years of commitment. Most probably, in the future, we will be more mission-driven as professionals and we will juggle a few professions rather than focusing on one narrow topic or one skill.
And even during your PhD program, you will need to stay agile in your creative process in order to stay on the surface and survive. Please read more about agile workflow in our article “The Basics of Project Management 1.0.1. Key Concepts: Agile, Kanban, Scrum, Waterfall.”
Therefore, it might turn out that choosing for an additional, 1- or 2-year-long Master Program will serve you better for your employability than admission to a graduate school. Please find the list of 13 Master Programs of the future that will give you great perspectives in the job market in our article “Top 13 Master Programs of The Future.”
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Please cite as:
Bielczyk, N. (2020, July 3rd). How To Get a PhD? All You Should Know To Get Your PhD Degree. Retrieved from https://ontologyofvalue.com/how-to-get-a-phd-all-you-should-know-to-enroll-onto-a-phd-program-and-land-your-phd-degree/
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