PhD v work

[Dearlittleflo]

I have a place to study for a PhD starting in September- I am really interested in my subject and am confident that I would love to spend three years working on it.

However, I'm worried about what this will mean for my working life. The PhD is only very vaguely related to my profession- I'd be doing it in order to make a move into a new career in academia. So my plan is that I'd do the PhD then post-doc research somewhere and so on. However, I don't know how realistic this is- presumably lots of PhDs leave academia straight afterwards and post-doc positions are hard to get (especially in arts subjects). I'm 38 so will be in my early 40s when I start looking for post-doc things, which presumably won't help.

I'm really worried that I could end up without an academic position at the end and then find it hard to get back into my old profession, as the PhD would effectively simply count as three years out.

Any thoughts? I'm really struggling to decide what to do.

[ragged]

what is your current profession, is 3-5 yrs away some kind of death cut to that career?

[BoysofMelody]

I did a PhD in my mid 30s and submitted two years ago (Humanities). In career terms it hasn't been great, I have a one year research assistant post that is about to end, but spent a year looking for that and it looks bleak for September. There's even fewer jobs knocking around than this time last year. If you are thinking about it, I'll say this: be prepared for it not to work out and have a Plan B (I didn't) and only do it if you have funding for a PhD and can support yourself for an additional 9 to 12 months (very few people get it done before the three years of funding runs out).