The Myths of Graduate School: What to Consider Before Committing to a PhD Program

I received this writing assignment some time ago, but while trying to leave graduate school in one piece, it took longer than expected to sit down and write it. This opinion piece is aimed primarily at fellow Caltech undergraduates who are considering or applying to Ph.D. programs. Junior graduate students in their first few years, especially those interested in an academic research path, may also find it relevant, or at least unsettling.

I should begin with an important disclaimer. I am writing from a privileged position: I applied to Ph.D. programs for the Fall 2020 cycle and was fortunate to be accepted into one of the top neuroscience programs in the world. My Ph.D. experience has, by many measures, been smooth, rewarding, and enjoyable, though I still often found myself wondering what would happen if things went wrong.

I have close friends who left their Ph.D. programs, some by choice and some by circumstance. Others started their degrees fully intending to pursue academic careers, only to find themselves on very different paths. Through many honest conversations with younger undergraduate students, and with senior professors for whom the Ph.D. was once very exclusive and elite, I decide to offer a set of personal perspectives to those who are about to make decisions about this path.

1. What a Ph.D. Program Is About A Ph.D. in X — short for Doctor of Philosophy in X — is fundamentally about learning how to do research in a specific field, usually within an academic setting. The “philosophy” and X matter: different disciplines train very different ways of asking questions and producing knowledge. In fields like machine learning, students complete multiple short projects that last months and clock their contributions according to the conference deadlines. In others like neuroscience (my field), a single question may take five years and define the entire degree.

A Ph.D. in X is a title in X, but often not a practical certificate to practice X. Outside academia, it is rarely a required permit to work in a field (more on this later). While research itself in my opinion is an innate human instinct that is widely applicable, the academic form of research is quite narrow.

Most Ph.D. programs, including those at Caltech, are designed to train students for academic research careers. As a result, the training emphasizes skills central to universities, such as writing papers and a thesis that situate current work within the literature. Methods and techniques from experiment to analysis are often highly specialized to academic labs, and many Ph.D. graduates entering industry find that they must learn from scratch a different set of techniques. The Ph.D. programs rarely prepare the students for industry job markets — you would have a timeline for passing candidacy exams with project proposals, but not a committee that tells you when and where to find internships or pass code or behavior tests during interviews.

2. The Job Market Reality Every Ph.D. student trains within one or more research groups led by 1-2 senior researchers — often themselves with Ph.D.s. Even a most exclusive senior researcher may graduate 10 to 20 Ph.D. students over their professorship of decades. Research groups rely on a steady supply of graduate students and postdocs to produce papers and secure grants, especially as modern journals increasingly demand larger datasets and longer timelines for publication.

Universities are not expanding at anything close to this rate. Neither are research budgets, especially as research itself becomes more and more expensive. Another way to see this is to compare faculty hiring rates to graduation rates in your field. In my neighboring program Ph.D. in Computation and Neural System, 43 students graduated between 2015 and 2023. Meanwhile, despite the ongoing faculty search, zero new assistant professors have been hired in the same discipline since the last hire in 2015. The gap is striking even at an institution like Caltech known for its low student-to-faculty ratio. The structural reality of the academic market determines that the vast majority of Ph.D. trainees cannot end up in tenure-track positions.

3. Finding Joy in Sparse Rewards If everyone entering a Ph.D. program hoped to become faculty, academia would become a vicious rat race of elimination. Graduate school admission rates are notoriously low, but at least your rejection comes in euphemistic but clear wording by April. In contrast, whether you are failing to get a faculty position is more obscure. You may not realize that it is unattainable until ten or more years later — after a Ph.D., postdoc(s), and repeated application cycles. If you were motivated by fear of failure, you’d be restless with anxiety until you got tenured in your 40s.

In this sense, a Ph.D. is sparse with rewards. This reflects the nature of research: you are rarely rewarded based on hours worked or intermediate evaluations, as in many other jobs. Success is somewhat scalable with the number of publications, but scientific discoveries do not happen daily — not like making money through day trading or being a hairstylist paid by the number of heads trimmed. In my case, I was lucky to reach a major finding in my project as early as Year 2. After that, progress became very incremental — replication, refinement, and scratching my head to understand the mouse heads became the daily routine. Learning to derive joy from daily work is an essential philosophy of a Ph.D.

4. An Advantage or a Sacrifice? If the prospects for faculty positions are slim, what about pursuing a Ph.D. to become more competitive in the job market? It is true that many jobs now require Ph.D. training, or that advancement to certain levels may depend on having the degree. But be aware of the “involution” fallacy. Remember the day when bachelor’s degrees were once rare and valuable. Now a master’s degree and multiple internships are required just for entry-level positions. Similarly, a bit of undergraduate research experience used to be sufficient for Ph.D. applications, whereas students are now advised to accumulate a few years of full-time technician experiences and first-author publications before applying. The job market is suffering from degree inflation, and encouraging more people into Ph.D. programs would only worsen it. In practice, a master’s degree with research experience should be sufficient.

Regarding financial advantage, one undergraduate applicant once told me that a master’s degree is costly while a Ph.D. provides a stipend, making the latter more attractive. A basic lesson in economics on compound interest would tell you how wrong that view is. Saving a steady income early can outweigh delayed earnings later. For example, my best friend from my master’s program started her own tutoring business immediately, while I am still working toward a professorship. She has flexible hours and can work remotely, while even the best-paid postdoctoral positions I have considered do not match her income. If her salary represents the average outcome after our master’s degree, then I have lost tens of thousands of dollars each year throughout my twenties — and will likely continue to do so until, perhaps, a faculty position.

Historically, Ph.D. programs were accessible primarily to wealthy elites, and to some extent this remains true. The Ph.D. stipends are meager even in private universities like Caltech, stripping students from typical American dreams like owning a house and starting a family. Those who carry student loans or family obligations would only have these pressures compound the inherent challenges of research. It is true that many opportunities have opened for underrepresented and underprivileged groups, and these efforts must continue, as they are essential for changing who produces knowledge and whose questions science addresses. A Ph.D. for these groups is not a path from rags to riches, as it’s unlikely to dramatically change one’s financial situation.

5. So Why Are You Still Here? As I said, I come from a privileged position. I do not have major financial worries. While I entered my Ph.D. terrified that I would fail to even find a lab, I have since gained resilience and am prepared to face failure. Curiosity — and inspiring curiosity in others — has always been my calling, and research and teaching in universities fit this well. A Ph.D. also allowed me to study abroad, to immerse myself in a foreign country legally, and to engage in intellectual environments that I deeply value. (Of course, I sometimes wish I had the talent and resources to write screenplays and make films in Hollywood instead.)

I did not write this piece to say you should not apply, but to encourage clarity about your reasons. If what you see in current graduate students or postdocs motivates you, consider how those conditions might evolve over the next ten years in your shoes. I often wish my current self could time-travel back to my junior year and have this conversation. I hope this piece helps someone do that earlier.