Re:The peculiar status of PhD-employees
by neltnerb on Monday September 01, 2014 @11:22AM
(#8253270)
To be maybe a bit clearer, I am not doing a purely financial analysis when I talk about how having a PhD is part of the reward. I would also never recommend grad school purely for the financial benefits! The point to me has always been that it gives more freedom (well, probably not for computer science PhDs) to direct the type of work that you do post-graduation. Instead of being a technician, you get to be much more independent in selecting projects, planning them, and potentially managing research groups whether in industry or academia. It means credibility as a consultant, it means credibility asking for more budget for a project you want to do.
And I am again, not talking about PhD's in computer science, which seem to be irrelevant in industry. I'm talking about things like physics or biology.
I love teaching, and I hate fighting with the computer (especially for dull line-of-business CRUD apps), so I don't particularly want an industry job, but the fact that I'm spending most of a decade (counting Master's) in grad school working well below the market wage for someone of my skillset still rankles. The fact that I'm going to spend 3/4 of my PhD taking no courses, but paying $12,000 a year in tuition grates too, as it's essentially a quarter of my salary clawed back for "job training", which in my case is a (very supportive) mentor and a desk in a windowless room - I may as well be a miner in a company town paying the company for pickaxes and head lamps (on the other hand, I also get all the same tax breaks I did in undergrad, so at least I'm not paying income tax).
When I describe my job to friends and family, I describe it as a sort of apprentice professor, because that's much closer to the truth than some sort of super-student. I'd rather be paid like an apprentice professor too, rather than a ramen-eating subsistence wage, as the original poster suggests.