I have traumatized yet another grad-student-to-be, methinks.
This time Tam's got a high school student who's shadowing her for a few weeks, who's interested in genetic research, so Tam's set up me and her to have coffee together so the student can ask me questions about what it's like doing genetic research. Again, when I mentioned the average years it takes to graduate is 5.5 years, she was a bit shocked. I reiterated "pick something you really like" a lot and realized that no one ever explained career options after undergrad, not to me, and definitely not to her, where the knowledge would do vastly more good.
See, the thing is, we know we, in theory, should be able to have more job options if we attend college than if we didn't. And aside from law school and med school (and teaching, if you're a science / math major in the US), all the other post-bacc options are sort of easy-to-miss fine prints along the side. People tend to look to grad school as what happens if med school, for instance, doesn't work out. With the assumption that if you get a grad school degree you'll get more job options than if you didn't, and so the higher the degree the better, right? That should be how it logically would work?
Except that isn't how it works, at all.
A doctorate sounds fancy, sure, but outside of academia its utility doesn't translate in a linear fashion to career opportunities. It's true that in theory, with a PhD, you can progress further UP in the career ladder than if you didn't have one, assuming the company highers people with all levels of education. HOWEVER, companies generally don't like to pay people more than they absolutely have to, yeah? It eats into their profit. So if a job can be fulfilled by someone with a BS they're not going to higher someone with a PhD, because someone with a PhD requires a higher start up salary and possibly promotion or something and are more likely to switch jobs if they don't get those. They're not going to higher a PhD unless they really need a specialty-expert in that area. Then there's the fact that like how not all high school are equal, not all colleges are equal, not all graduate programs are equal, either. The highest barrier to getting a PhD is actually entry into program (VERY FEW people flunk out of qual or candidacy exams), and if you can stick it through the up and downs of research, you can just do exactly what your professor says and still obtain a doctorate. Which means that not all PhDs are equal. Which means that companies (and my now-graduated upperclassmen have assured me of this during their job interviewing process) generally won't hire someone without a few years of post-doctoral fellow experience, to ensure that person actually is capable of handling an independent probject.
In conclusion: PhD will get you higher up than a BS, but you'll have fewer job options, since PhD limits you to a narrower field where you're overqualified for all the BS / MS only positions but not experienced enough for any of the other spots available. (Commonly seen in biomed are hiring ad requiring 2-3 year minimum of post-doc or equivalent experience in industry.)
I don't think the student is happy with the idea that she'll be nearly thirty by the time she's done, but you know what, either the lure of having her very own shiny project to work on is enough, or it isn't. She's still young, she's got time to figure it out. (Heh it makes me feel so old to type that.)
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