Should I go to graduate school and study physics? It’s a very important question that deserves careful consideration. The stakes are high: 6.3 of the most productive years of your life. Ultimately, only you can answer the question, but making the most informed decision possible offers the best odds of being happy with your choice. Note that I am equating graduate school with a PhD program, as many people do. Master’s degrees in physics are covered here.
The place to being understanding if you should go to graduate school is considering why you want to go. Yes, I know you want to learn more physics, but that is the proximate reason. Is it also the root cause for your interest? Is it possible that your desire to go to graduate school is more about seeking a challenge, garnering prestige, or simply inertia taking you down the obvious path in front of you? I mention those reasons because (if I am being honest) they all had a role in my decision to attend graduate school. In truth, however, I did not “decide” to go to graduate school in physics. I wanted a career in physics, which I equated with being a professor, so I just assumed I would go to graduate school. Therefore, I skipped over a critical examination of if I should go and jumped right into worrying about where I should go. That was not the best plan in retrospect. Carefully examining the proposition of physics graduate school from first principles probably would not have altered my decision to go, but it would have opened my eyes to a lot of things and saved me considerable angst later on. There are many reasons for going to graduate school that come up repeatedly (either explicitly or implicitly) when I talk to and mentor students. Let’s state them and examine the assumptions surrounding them to help inform the graduate school decision process:
A PhD Will Get Me A Job
Yes, it probably will. The job a PhD is most likely to get you directly is a post-doctoral position or “post-doc.” Post-docs are term positions, i.e. “temp” jobs, at modest pay that are supposed to let you further your training. Obviously, you still need more training after being in graduate school for six or seven years, right? Frankly, in many cases you could have made as much money taking a private industry job after your B.S. as you will as an academic post-doc. In any case, you certainly don’t need a PhD just to get a job. There are some jobs that you can only get with a PhD: professorships, many research scientist jobs, some management jobs in large scientific projects or organizations. However, these are a tiny fraction of the employment opportunities out there.
A PhD Will Get Me a Professorship
Probably not. The odds are something like ten to one against. You also need to be cognizant of the fact that graduate school does not necessarily cover two vital parts of being a professor: bringing in grant money and running a research group (which is a lot like running a small business).
A PhD Will Be a Great Intellectual Adventure
Absolutely it will. Your mind will expand in ways you never imagined. You will also learn how to learn things from scratch, whether they are previously known or not. Becoming a knowledge creator is a powerful experience you will never forget.
I Will Learn a Lot of Physics in Grad School
Yes, you will absolutely learn an enormous amount of physics in graduate school, along with a host of mathematical, experimental, and computational techniques. It is a challenging and incredibly enriching experience to learn how the universe ticks to the limits of humanity’s knowledge.
A PhD Will Train Me for My Career
Only if you put in a lot of extra work to ensure that it does. Yes, extra work on top of the normal course work, research, and dissertation writing. The PhD program will teach you a lot of physics. That’s great, yet knowing physics is a necessary but not sufficient condition for having a successful career. Knowing physics will get you a post-doc, but if you plan on having a career in physics much beyond that, you will need broader skills in at least one of two categories: handling people and dealing with money. Otherwise you risk losing your strictly technical job to the large number of fresh PhD graduates and post-docs coming behind you. To be sure, some people do manage to turn their mastery of a single type of instrument, simulation code, or technique into a full career, but it is a risky strategy. What if something new supplants that instrument, simulation code, or technique? At that point, who is the expert, you or a younger PhD that just came out of the lab where the new way of doing things was invented? Even if you kept current and offer equivalent expertise in the new development, the younger PhD is likely willing to work for less. Your greater technical experience in other areas may or may not be considered sufficiently valuable to justify your higher cost. Expanding your skills into the two areas noted above will make you more versatile and less vulnerable.
A PhD is a Ticket to a Comfortable Life
No, it is not. A PhD is an asset that will cost you a great deal of the most valuable thing you possess: your time. No asset is a ticket to a comfortable life unless you use it correctly. There are innumerable stories of people who have earned or received valuable assets (e.g. a million dollar inheritance) and then proceed to lose or waste them. A PhD is no different. If you determine that you need a PhD for the career you want, and optimize the value it brings you once you earn it, then it could be the best investment you ever make and the cornerstone of a comfortable life. Earn a PhD without this level of clarity, however, and it could be more of a liability than an asset. In any case, I highly recommend taking the time to study personal finance so you can avoid the financial traps that plague even the most successful professionals.
I Love Physics
This is the best possible reason to go to graduate school. Love of what you do transcends mere cost / benefit analyses of career options. If you truly love physics, then graduate school can make a lot of sense. However, you can go right on loving physics without going to graduate school.
This list is not exhaustive, nor is it meant to be, but I think it covers the major bases. In closing, I will pose a question that I ask every student I mentor who is considering graduate school: If you end up earning your living in a way that doesn’t use your physics PhD, then would you still be happy with your choice to go to graduate school?