A PhD is a huge waste of time- aibu

[Bluffysummers]

I’d quantify this and say in the humanities.

I did one, worked hard to complete it, stress, time and money. I was totally duped into it, lecturers telling me how good I was and blowing smoke up my arse and implying I’d get a job at the end of it… in my subject there were 3 jobs nationwide when I graduated none full time…and god knows how many candidates.

I left academia and guess what, no one cares if you have a PhD, in fact I think it’s more of a hinderance than an asset. I spent 10 years in education and all it did was delay my industry and career experience, so basically hinder me.

Aibu to say If you’re thinking of doing a humanities PhD don’t.

I've got a science PhD that I did 30 years ago in my 20s. I did stay in academia though I'm a civil servant now. My opinion is that they are like apprenticeships for becoming a research academic. You won't do the best research of your career because you are training, you might not get any high quality papers out of it. I advise people only to do it if they want a career in research. And those are few and far between.

I did mine as I loved studying and the world of corporate work didn’t suit me. I’m in a field where my skills are in very high demand. I could earn a shit load of money in the private sector but life in academia at a top uni suits me very nicely for now as single mum. It also suits my personality as a mostly introverted person, with the benefit of being surrounded by amazing colleagues. My PhD definitely paid off.

My Ds is undertaking a Maths PHD in a Nordic country in a beautiful snowy area .He is paid around the average salary for the country and can afford a small but nice flat with blcony overlooking woodland. He is paid to spend his days thinking , talking about and teaching what he loves, travelling to and speaking at conferences around the world and he has coauthored papers with wellknow professors from world leading universities including Oxford.Whatever the future holds i feel he would have been a fool to pass up this opportunity.

I'd never considered this before. I don't have a PhD, but for a few years I was managing a team where, with my MSc, I was the least qualified team member. I had always envied my team members for the years they spent working on their own projects. I hadn't thought that this would put them years behind in career progression.

That lack of insight probably shows why I wasn't PhD material.

@fUNNYfACE36

My Ds is undertaking a Maths PHD in a Nordic country in a beautiful snowy area .He is paid around the average salary for the country and can afford a small but nice flat with blcony overlooking woodland. He is paid to spend his days thinking , talking about and teaching what he loves, travelling to and speaking at conferences around the world and he has coauthored papers with wellknow professors from world leading universities including Oxford.Whatever the future holds i feel he would have been a fool to pass up this opportunity.

That does sound lovely! STEM v humanities in general is a different ballgame. I do believe a STEM PhD or a science PhD would be worthwhile unless it’s self funded and then you’ve got to ask why you’re not on a funded program when there are substantially more funded opportunities available in sciences

@fUNNYfACE36

My Ds is undertaking a Maths PHD in a Nordic country in a beautiful snowy area .He is paid around the average salary for the country and can afford a small but nice flat with blcony overlooking woodland. He is paid to spend his days thinking , talking about and teaching what he loves, travelling to and speaking at conferences around the world and he has coauthored papers with wellknow professors from world leading universities including Oxford.Whatever the future holds i feel he would have been a fool to pass up this opportunity.

He's being paid to do a job he loves.

He's not paying someone £5k a year and missing out on earning and work experience himself.

@Dsisproblem

I have a friend who has a physics PhD and they now work in patents earning a bomb. Obviously not a humanity subject though.

Patents has always been a good career option for PhDs in STEM subjects.

I don't understand the comments that people with PhD's lack of work experience comments but maybe it's different in different disciplines?

I think in science a PhD is very much like a job. I was in the lab 8.30 to 5pm, was collaborating with others, had to book annual leave, and had a list of practical skills I could talk about in interviews. I got as many practical and transferable skills from my PhD as I did from my other early career jobs. But that's not the case for people with humanities degrees, it's a much more individual pursuit.

@IlFaitBeau do you think the fact that both your parents were academics helped you in your own journey? I find it interesting that so many of my colleagues have/had academic parents (I’m sure it’s similar in other professions though), and purer anecdotally, those who have something of a family history of academia seem to have better luck in securing posts.

@Piper22

YANBU. I think it’s mostly a vanity thing

Yup. A PhD in the humanities is only good for bragging points.

[quote LegMeChicken]@SarahAndQuack there aren’t many jobs which require education beyond a bachelor’s degree.
So many PhD’s enter the job market in their mid-late twenties. At which point their peers with 3+ years experience have been promoted/switched jobs for £££.
There are also professional qualifications which make your earning potential jump enormously. Peers will have been qualified for a few years while a new PhD is just starting.

Of course it depends on sector. I have worked across tech, finance and policy research. There are people who have gone into a highly paid job commensurate with PhD (economics, politics, computer science, statistics) but most just start at the bottom.
Accounting, tech etc graduate schemes take anybody.

It’s really a logical function of time. If your job needs X skills and someone else has been collecting that for more years they will progress more quickly. If you’re a high achiever PhD holder and progress quickly. Great - but you could’ve done so much more if you’d started earlier![/quote]
YY, it depends on sector. I can absolutely believe that you wouldn't go from a Humanities PhD into tech or finance and expect to go in at a higher level/be promoted faster than anyone else. Because tech and finance don't really use the skills you learn in a Humanities PhD.

But if you go into a sector where you can make a better case for having amassed skills during your PhD, I think you will find you don't have the same career trajectory as a someone who's just finished their undergrad degree. I am probably thinking about the very traditional things Humanities PhDs do, like civil service, publishing, editing etc. I also have a few friends who've gone into teaching after a PhD, and though they started at the same level as everyone else, they've all been promoted much faster than the 20-somethings.

I'm not trying to say it's always wonderful to have a PhD on your CV, or that no one ever struggles to get a job, just saying that it's not a disaster.

Perhaps In humanities outside of academia ... but they are required in academia and in science they are valued beyond academia, they certainly open doors. Everyone, excluding office staff, has doctorates at exh's work, even lab techs

[quote Bluffysummers]@SarahAndQuack I don’t get what you mean by willingness?

I’d have gladly taken a job that was equivalent to M level[/quote]
Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to make you feel criticised. I just meant, my experience has been that some people expect to finish a PhD and fall into a job - I know, for example, someone who had no librarianship quals whatsoever, who applied for quite a senior role and was shocked he didn't get it, because he presumed his PhD would count for a lot. However, I also know someone who went from her PhD into librarianship and she did a year that wasn't very well paid, then got a much, much more senior/well-paid job, which she wouldn't have got without the combination of the PhD and the year's experience.

That's what I mean by willingness really - but I do see that often there's just no job out there for you and no amount of willingness helps!

No @KeepAgnusSafe, I don't believe that everyone in an office job does admin. But I'm pretty sure they're not spending many of their days on the street in a 'less developed' country learning how to get on with a whole range of people with completely different cultural backgrounds? (Which is the amazing experience that my PhD afforded me).

As someone with an arts PhD, it hasn't actively hindered my employment. It's made my CV stand out in specific situations in fact and I've had opportunities off the back of it I wouldn't have had otherwise.

Timing matters though, and attitude. Someone fresh out of a PhD, who is willing to start at the bottom (or thereabouts) is very employable. What's less good is if you've a string of post docs/short term academic jobs and are then trying to make the move. Or if you think your PhD means you should be several rungs up the ladder compared to others.

I think like anything you do have to look at it with critical eyes.

DH did his PhD when it was funded - it nearly went wrong his first supervisor was shit and after 12 months he was panicking and thinking of stopping - due to internal politics he got a better one and did mange to finishs - 12 months were a write off and it was hard work to finish in remained funded two years and wrote up while working.

He is science based and wanted a career in academica. It has been hard though - short term contacts lots of moves - period into indursty with associated massive pay cut - most of his contemportes were same not getting permanat positions till mid to late 30s.

My MSc was a risk and a lot of debt but put me in new area and I did get work - my Dsis had post graduate courses pushed at her that she did that just gave her more debt - and she didn't have personal contacts to make it in that field.

DD1 at 16 - AS levels at minute - career plan has meant she's looked at master to get into field she wanst - there strangley all two years - there's loads of time to change her mind - but I also think a hell of a lot more research would be needed before spending that time and money.

@DrSbaitso asked who does a PhD at 18? Surely after 4years on the ward Doogie Hoowser MD went into research.

The education chip on shoulder is often around. My mum uses it for our National Trust card and any post arrives to Dr & Mrs Tuna but she also mutters about all those qualifications and you ought to see the car they drive.
A friend who worked her way up in industry would certainly benefit from an MBA but is aggressively anti qualifications. Can't back a trailer, what good is your doctorate now!

There's a lot of people out there stuck in the wrong jobs - gregarious people working by themselves, loners in customer service, slap dash making a mess of attention to detail roles and vice versa.
If we ever manage to fall into something that's a decent fit it's a miracle.

I had to Google Doogie Howser. Seems to be a fictitious character in a sitcom?

There's no chip about PhDs here (that's quite funny, actually). But someone spoke about PhDs at 18. Who starts their PhD when they've just finished their A levels?

YABU because it totally depends on why you are doing it.

I’m a consultant in a London teaching hospital, and you are not appointable in my department without a PhD. You won’t even get an interview. So it definitely wasn’t a sunk cost or a waste of time for me (and I do actually use the knowledge and experience I gained during my PhD to run my own clinical trials now, though not everyone uses theirs).

If you go into any PhD with no clear idea of how you are going to use it, yep that is a waste of time. It would also be a waste of time to do Chartered Accountant exams, or any other qualifications, if you didn’t plan on using it afterwards.

If you did your PhD planning to be a career academic and didn’t do your research on likelihood of success, again that is kind of down to you. I know it is hard to get an academic post in the humanities and I work in STEM, if you are literally planning on doing that as a career you should be well aware of how hard it is to progress to a post-doc.

If you did your PhD planning to be a career academic and didn’t do your research on likelihood of success, again that is kind of down to you. I know it is hard to get an academic post in the humanities and I work in STEM, if you are literally planning on doing that as a career you should be well aware of how hard it is to progress to a post-doc.

I do get this general point, but to be fair, I think the job situation has changed so much recently that even people who did do their research got caught out.

(Progressing to post-doc isn't, btw, the difficult bit of getting an academic career in arts/hums.)

But @Changechangychange key point you’re in stem. Your PhD makes perfect sense from where you’ve said you work.

As you can see from my subsequent posts I was only 23 when starting and was all but promised a job, I also had a plan b that fell through and a plan c I was talked out of by my academic advisor so whilst I definitely in my nativité allowed myself to be seduced into thinking I’d be one of the chosen few, I wasn’t an utter numpty about it

@SarahAndQuack

If you did your PhD planning to be a career academic and didn’t do your research on likelihood of success, again that is kind of down to you. I know it is hard to get an academic post in the humanities and I work in STEM, if you are literally planning on doing that as a career you should be well aware of how hard it is to progress to a post-doc.

I do get this general point, but to be fair, I think the job situation has changed so much recently that even people who did do their research got caught out.

Yeah that’s a key point right there, the academic landscape changed so much from when I started to when I finished esp in the humanities and languages. Now it’s declined even further all my peers that secured that promised post PhD job were furloughed and then made redundant, now most wait tables

@Bluffysummers

But *@Changechangychange* key point you’re in stem. Your PhD makes perfect sense from where you’ve said you work.

As you can see from my subsequent posts I was only 23 when starting and was all but promised a job, I also had a plan b that fell through and a plan c I was talked out of by my academic advisor so whilst I definitely in my nativité allowed myself to be seduced into thinking I’d be one of the chosen few, I wasn’t an utter numpty about it

Is it not possible your supervisors genuinely thought that, though? Maybe I am naive, but my supervisors also told me these things, and so have a lot of mentors, and I have generally assumed they were speaking in good faith. I honestly do think that senior academics in Arts/Hums are also shocked about what's happening. Certainly in my field, I know people who are taking early retirement or resigning and who're furious about what's happened with ECRs (and then they're being replaced, not by new permanent staff, but by more people on short-term contracts ...).

Cross post.

That's really rotten, @Bluffysummers. But familiar. An awful lot of really good colleagues of mine have had threats of redundancy hanging over them in the last few years. It's awful.

Academia is a snooze cruise really. I just did it for ego reasons so can't say it was a waste of time entirely