This link has been bookmarked by 18 people . It was first bookmarked on 16 Oct 2007, by Terry Elliott.
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16 Feb 12
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19 Dec 11
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24 May 11
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26 Aug 08
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28 Jul 08
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25 Jul 08
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16 Oct 07
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from the end of my second year I started experiencing a slow deterioration in my work, had a number of crises of motivation and started to feel that I was being overwhelmed by the material and sheer amount of commentary and opinion that I needed to get to grips with
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a vested interest in encouraging you to stay with them
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whether or not you're going to be the person who actually gets the really hard to come by academic job afterwards
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Doctorates don't count for much outside academia
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doctoral work is professional training. You have to think about it like that - you're being made into a lecturer / professor / teacher / researcher.
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around 50% of people who start doctorates don't get a PhD out of it.
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An enormous proportion of people simply never finish the things because it's not quite what they were expecting when they started. And many of these people will feel like failures,
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I one way I feel that I owe it to myself to move on to graduate school so that I can learn about more advanced subjects like General Relativity and more complicated maths.
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You've got to be deeply thrilled by extremely esoteric stuff for it to be worthwhile. If you're thinking about a career and a job and money, you aren't in the right frame of mind for grad school. Even if there is a little bit more security in a science Ph.D. than some others, it's still economically insane
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I came close to dropping out 18 months in, and only a successful stint of fieldwork turned it around for me; if that had gone badly, I'm not sure I'd have made it. And I would have been the same person with the same degree of imagination, thoroughness, or whatever, either way.
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I'm not saying that people who don't finish the damn things aren't determined, or that they lack stamina; I'm saying that determination to finish the Ph.D. is the most important factor in doing so. If finishing it stops being important to you, for whatever reason, or other (incompatible) goals in your life become more important, then you'll be far less likely to make it.
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But if you like research and you can find a department willing to cover your costs, I would say that it could be worth it, even if in the end you abandon the cause. When I was in grad school, I felt like I wouldn't have been doing what I was doing anyway, even if I had all the money in the world, just because I loved ideas and the control over my time that academia allowed me.
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Having finished my studies, I now feel like I basically took a really long vacation and am only now beginning to get my bearings.
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I think it matters greatly *when* you do a PhD. I wouldn't advise anyone to go straight into it from undergraduate studies, without having been in the "real world".
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But I gained a range of skills that have translated well into my new career path. The intense study of a particular subject area over several years has honed an analytical and deconstructive mind. Presenting my work at seminars and conferences has established good communication skills and a confidence in public speaking.
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