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Blog post: swansont: Should You or Shouldn't You?

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Should you get your PhD? (in science)

 

I added the parenthetical in science because I'm not sure how well the advice works well outside of it — it may have less applicability outside of physics. I have quibbles with a few things, as I'm an experimentalist and an atomic physicist, and Ethan is a theorist and is trained as an astrophysicist. There are bound to be some differences, but I think most of it is going to hold up for science PhDs in general.

 

There are plenty of brilliant people who get them, of course, but there are also plenty of people of average or even
below
-average intelligence who get them. All a PhD signifies, at the end of the day, is that you did the work necessary to earn a PhD. There are many people who have PhDs who will dispute this, of course. There are plenty of people who are insecure about their lives, too, and base their entire sense of self-worth on their academic achievements and accolades. You probably have met a few of them: they are called
jerks
.

 

This was probably the biggest surprise in grad school to me — how much the ratio of intelligence to stubbornness actually was in the student population, vs. the larger value I had naively expected it to be.


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