Blog post: swansont: Piled High and Deep

I get this question a lot: "Should I go get a PhD?"

While Joe cites a harsh fact in the conclusion — that a faculty position is what a minority of PhD recipients achieve — I don't get the above quote. (Others often couple this with the sentiment that not getting a faculty position is failure, which is thankfully absent here) It's like there's this great blind spot about research, by most people blogging about research — they imply that it's all done by university faculty. A great many people do research in government labs (well, not so much now in the US, what with the shutdown and all) and in private industry. I'm not sure what Joe would find convincing. When an announcement asks for a certain level of experience, I suppose technically one could argue that it need not come from graduate school or a post-doc, but that just creates a circular argument about how a person got that experience in the first place.

I'm not a prof, and you'd better believe my job requires a PhD. I know/am acquainted with many people to which this applies.
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