Graduate School

How long it takes to get your PhD often depends a lot on the school you're attending, the amount of coursework that's required, and the research group you're joining. For example, at my school, I'm required to take a year and a half of classes, while other departments are only required to take one quarter of classes. That helps them get started faster. If you're in a research group that's got a very strong focus and you're basically assigned a project by your advisor, you can tend to finish faster since there's a lot less of the screwing around trying to figure out what you want to do which is typical in other labs.

I know in my research group finishing in 5 years is fairly rare, and I expect to be here five and a half to six years. Some of my friends off at other schools stand a chance at getting out in less than five due to the nature of their programs and research.

Oh, and also, if you're doing theory you can generally expect to take longer to get your PhD than someone doing experimental work. There are also fields fairly well known for taking a long time to give out PhDs. I think one of the biggest is Astronomy, since if you're interested in studying supernova, but you don't get a good one for a few years, then, well, hope you enjoy your school.

Anyway, I'm in a graduate program doing engineering, so even if I don't manage to land a tenure-track position, there are lots of pretty rad jobs out there. I'm hoping to post-doc in a national lab like Argonne or Oak Ridge to see if that would be a good career alternative for me.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

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Well, I am about to invest another 7-10 years as well as 400k dollars (on top of the 200k I paid for undergraduate) just to end up on an *extremely* chancy field. Doesn't that seem a bit outrageous? Shouldn't we prize more than just engineers at this day an age?

Ask most engineers how they feel about their salary compared to lawyers and those business students that joined JP Morgan and are making more than they ever will with less work.

Also, the reason why many science/engineering students are paid during their PhD work is because they're essentially employees of the school. Once you're done with classes, you're doing research work like you'd do at any other company, and, as such, you get paid for it.

Also, if you're seriously thinking about going $600k into debt, I suggest you take a class in math to figure out how long it would take to repay that.

Quote:

Loan Balance: $600,000.00
Adjusted Loan Balance: $600,000.00
Loan Interest Rate: 6.80%
Loan Fees: 0.00%
Loan Term: 10 years
Minimum Payment: $50.00

Monthly Loan Payment: $6,904.82
Number of Payments: 120

Cumulative Payments: $828,578.37
Total Interest Paid: $228,578.37


It is estimated that you will need an annual salary of at least $828,578.40 to be able to afford to repay this loan. This estimate assumes that 10% of your gross monthly income will be devoted to repaying your student loans. This corresponds to a debt-to-income ratio of 0.7. If you use 15% of your gross monthly income to repay the loan, you will need an annual salary of only $552,385.60, but you may experience some financial difficulty.This corresponds to a debt-to-income ratio of 1.1.

How ya doing, buddy?

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My point is, doesn't it seem like there just is too much of a financial sacrifice to become a professor when I am already putting in so many years of my life?

Professors do their job for the love of the work, not for the money it brings. When I finish with my PhD, I can either look into getting a post-doc paying a little more than I'm making now (not much), or go into industry and make closer to $90k. If I am eventually lucky enough to become a tenure-track professor, then I'll be starting around $60k a year. Less than what I could have made with my BS.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I can see some professors making a lot of money if they've got patents or do a lot of consulting on the side, but I doubt most of those professors are making $500,000 a year.

Here's how much the average full professor makes at some top schools (in 100k).
Harvard: 185
Yale: 165
Princeton: 172
MIT: 152
Caltech: 162
Stanford: 174
Cornell: 148.2
Penn State (Main Campus): 125
U of Michigan: 137

So, yeah, top professors at top universities make decent money, but they're not getting salaried at $500k+ unless they're high demand Nobel Prize winners or famous politicians.

(Data from The Chronicle: AAUP Faculty Salary Survey )

I know my own advisor here at Caltech makes around $190k, and he's seen as one of the top people within his field (as well as a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, which probably help get a pay bump considering they're fairly prestigious things).

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

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I'm wondering if those numbers, as well as what your adviser claims, includes the income derived from their grants. For most science fields, or any field really where there is research being done, I believe a large percentage of a professor's income comes from their grants.

I know for my advisor it's including stuff he can skim off of grants, as we found out about it when one of the other guys in my group was working on some budget stuff with our secretary and she said that 10% of his salary would be coming from XYZ grant. I don't imagine it necessarily includes the money he's making doing consulting.

Likewise, I also know that salary is extremely variable between departments. Typically, when you're in a department where you could make boatloads in private industry (think medical or business) you'll get really highly paid professors. In science/engineering, you'll be paid pretty well, but probably not as highly as you would in industry. In the humanities...well...you take what you can get.

I was speaking idiomatically.