Thanks for the lecture about my Serious Misunderstanding, though.
N.b. I'm in a very lucky position career-wise now. If that were not the case, maybe I would feel more regret.
I tried a PhD in ECE before dropping out with an MS, and the last word I would use to describe my experience is "fun".
I'm lucky in a lot of ways and I sometimes forget that.
I wonder if they have family money.
This is actually not a snide comment. The people I knew who did a PhD and liked it had enough money, typically from families and sometimes from a spouse, to not worry about money, or five+ years at substandard wages. I worked part-time as a grant-writing consultant, so I was fine, but I saw financial privations all around me. To the point I wrote this: https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befo...
Granted, science PhDs are often better funded and more lucrative post-degree, but even among people in the sciences financial factors often loomed.
Not a snide comment. I had two friends who entered into PhD programs, one for Math, the other for engineering.
Both dropped out for financial reasons.
One was married and was getting a lot of pressure from his new wife about starting a family, settling down, getting a real job that pays better than what the college was paying him.
The other had been on his own since he was 16. Bad family situation, he was raised by his grandparents. One of the sharpest guys I knew. Just burned out from trying to work three jobs and keeping up with the program. It was just too much and he needed to get a job that paid him better so he didn't have to work 70 hours a week to get by. The funny part was five years later, he landed at Google, was making a lot of money, and was planning on going back with help from Google to finish his degree.
I mean, should you really get a PhD without a serious passion for the subject? I won't disagree one bit that it's not for everybody.
Speaking as someone wrapping up an engineering PhD from a good school though, I enjoyed it quite a lot and I think most of the people I work with enjoyed doing their PhD. It was not easy, but it was interesting and rewarding. The environment varies a lot depending on the school and the adviser. Some programs are indeed quite toxic, but there are also plenty that are challenging, but fulfilling and nurturing.
I'm not sure why passion is particularly important. I would rate work ethic, diligence, attention to detail, and some character (i.e., not lying in studies) as more important than passion.
Generally, making people jump through hoops to get something done doesn't actually get you the best people. It gets you the people who are good at gaming such systems, and people who don't know what they are getting themselves into.
And I don't really see it as jumping through hoops. A good PhD program has a few checkpoints to pass, but everything else is up to you. I strongly disagree that you don't get good people, at least not the ones who finish. People who don't know what they are getting in to or are only good at "gaming the system" tend to wash out pretty quickly, usually because they are miserable and burn out. It varies from industry to industry, though... maybe other engineering fields are worse than the ones I'm familiar with.
A lot of people make the mistake that you have to have a PhD to prove you're "smart", which is wrong. But that doesn't mean that only people with nothing better to do get one.
>Unless you possess a serious passion for the subject, you’re unlikely to survive.
This is mostly a recent phenomenon in engineering. I went to a top school and left almost a decade ago. While advisors like what you described existed, roughly half of them were not like that. It really was fun, and relatively relaxed.
highly bureaucratic and political and often unfair.
So, just like working for any Fortune 500 company then.
To characterize their program is “fun” is a gross mischaracterization, and demonstrates a serious misunderstanding of the rigors involved in any technical/science/engineering PhD pursuit.
PhD programs are hard. They’re often lonely. They’re frustrating. They’re tedious. And there’s a tremendous amount of pressure. And it’s academia: highly bureaucratic and political and often unfair.
Unless you possess a serious passion for the subject, you’re unlikely to survive.
On the other hand, my friends getting the PhDs in subjects such as education (Stanford) and conservation biology (Mississippi State) have described it as the highlight of their life. After their first two years, they’re basically getting paid to do whatever they want. They audit classes. Apply to grants. Travel. And they write.