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As a PhD dropout from an east coast Ivy League school who just turned 24 this year, I would say a PhD isn't worth it if you've already decided not to follow the academia path for the rest of your life.

Besides, PhD programs in the states has been filled with Chinese and Indian smart kids these days. While you may be looking for your unique contribution to the frontier of the fearless intellectual exploration in Mother Nature from those programs, those smart Asian kids are just looking for a ticket into the states and they probably would sacrifice as much as it takes to outperform you.

So take a pause and pay attention to the facts. I know your advisor may be extremely warm and friendly and his recent publications may be extremely exciting. But the facts are that they expect you to follow the academia path while you don't want to, and that your grad school classmates are competing for an immigration stamp which you don't care.




PhD isn't worth it if you've already decided not to follow the academia path

I know a least a dozen people with PhD's in science, medicine or engineering and only one of them is following the academic path, and he gets regular offers of big bags of money to work for various commercial companies. The only PhD's I know who are 'stuck' in academia are people with PhD's in 'softer' subjects like architecture or social anthropology.

the facts are that they expect you to follow the academia path

Again this varies a lot from advisor to advisor. I know at least one guy (and know of several more) working at a company started by him, a classmate and their advisor during his PhD program. I also know other people who's advisor happily used their contacts in industry to place their students in great jobs.


These are the opportunities that I'm still trying to explore.

Even though my PhD would be in basic science, there are lots of potential applications. In fact, the program I'd be at has very, very strong links with the medical school. I'd probably be able to use some of these techniques on clinical populations and doing some translational research (i.e., stuff that has direct applications). For example, using machine learning with fMRI has some potential in mental health diagnostics.

The big question for me is if these things will take off in the next few years. Currently, I haven't seen any companies really growing in these sorts of areas (though I look at it and think the potential is immense).

the facts are that they expect you to follow the academia path

The bad news here is that while my potential advisor is really great (and probably okay with people not becoming professors) the people that haven't jumped into the post-doc route haven't had any of these sorts of outcomes. The few that haven't gone the academic route have become staff scientists or gone into government (though, those individuals graduated 5+ years ago, and my work would possibly be more technical since the lab has gone down the machine learning path).


The good news for me is that cognitive neuroscience doesn't face those pressures (yet). Most of the students doing cogNeuro and even computational neuroscience are from the US and Canada. In general, I got the impression that competition between students in these programs is much less important than collaboration.

That said, your point is very well taken: cutting edge research will still be very competitive. And, since the stuff I want to do comes very close to bio-medical engineering, I might face more of these sorts of competitive pressures than most people in my field.




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