Why do a PhD?

In this post, I describe the challenges of the Computer Science PhD, and I believe they are ultimately why they are worth overcoming.

This post is a follow-up to a talk I gave at Sonoma State University earlier this month, after my collaborator Dr. Suzanne Rivoire invited me come and present a guest lecture on graduate school life to her undergraduate students. Huge thanks to Dr. Rivoire for inviting me to share my experiences, as well as to my advisor Dr. Paul Gazzillo for giving me the idea to follow the talk up with a blog post.

The first half of the talk was about the challenges that the PhD program presents, and why I believe they are ultimately worth surmounting. In this post I am only going to be discussing this first half of the talk. In the second half of the talk I told my story as a CS PhD student at UCF for the past five years. I plan to publish a blog post about my PhD journey after I graduate, so check back in one or two years hence for that if interested.

PhD overview

The PhD is a great opportunity for one to not only become an expert in a specific field, but also to improve their communication and problem-solving skills, and ultimately grow as a person. The PhD program is not without its challenges though, and I want to talk about these obstacles first before discussing the reasons why I think the PhD is still worth pursuing.

Challenges of the PhD program

Sense of opportunity cost

When you begin the PhD there, you may feel like you are letting many opportunities to accelerate your career and make a high income slip by you, especially if you recently graduated with an undergraduate degree in a STEM field. At least, this is what happened to me: when I graduated, two of my friends who had graduated at the same time as me immediately went to work in the software engineering field; one of them for Amazon, and the other for Instagram. The friend who was working at Amazon has since left that position, and is now at Meta working his way to becoming a senior principle engineer, the highest title one can get in software engineering. I also have another friend who, despite not having a degree in Computer Science, was dedicated enough to teach himself C programming over the course of two years, and now makes six figures as a programmer for a bank.

Meanwhile, I’ve been spending the last five years in graduate school making nowhere near as much money. This doesn’t bother though because, while I wouldn’t mind working as a software engineer and making a ton of money in the process, what I really want to be is a professor, and the PhD is the best way for me to achieve that dream. Just be aware though that if you are considering a PhD because you think it will help you achieve a higher-income job, you will have to first spend several years making just enough money to live comfortably.

Criticism can be harsh

At many points throughout the PhD program, you will be inundated with criticism. Most of this, at least at first, will come from your advisor, who will (hopefully) be perpetually challenging your research ideas, and giving you copious amounts of writing and presentation advice. If you are a proud person, or just don’t generally like receiving advice that you may not have asked for, then it can be difficult to accept this advice without feeling a little insulted by it. Your advisor and colleagues aren’t trying to demean you though, and if you can set aside your pride and take their recommendations to heart, then you will vastly improve at conducting research, and at communicating your results to others.

The PhD can be lonely

One of the most exciting parts of the PhD is that it enables you to become the most knowledgable person in the world on one ultra-specific topic; however the potentially scary part about this is that it means that if you run into unexpected problems during your research (and you certainly will), there isn’t really anyone you can turn to for help. While your advisor and lab members will be there offer you general guidance and support, there likely won’t be anyone you can ask for assistance with the particular problems you are facing. Ultimately, you must discover your own novel solutions.

Besides feeling isolated in your work, you may also feel isolated socially. This is especially true if you are pursuing the PhD in a foreign country or state, because your friends and family are less likely to be nearby for you to spend time with. The solution to this problem is of course to simply make new friends at your university, but it can be difficult to set aside time to make new friends during the first year or two of your PhD when the pressure to publish is often at its peak, especially if you aren’t an outgoing person to begin with. Thankfully, social isolation was never a problem for me since throughout graduate school I’ve lived with my friends, my brothers, and my girlfriend; plus I’m only a few hours’ drive away from other members of my family. I don’t know how common this situation is though (and I suspect its rather uncommon), and if you are considering moving to a new country or state for graduate school, plan to make new friends after you arrive.

Benefits of the PhD

Despite all these obstacles, I still contend that the PhD is worth pursuing, because it gives you the chance to do all the following activities:

Explore

During the first year of the PhD, you have the chance to explore all the currently unsolved problems in your chosen area of research, and then, once you’ve discovered one that speaks to you, plan to spend several years working to solve it. The fun of exploration does not end there, however, as once you select your problem, you then explore all prior research related to your chosen problem, and synthesize that information into a novel solution.

Think

The PhD program promotes deep and critical thinking skills, which are immensely useful skills to have not just for graduate school, but for life in general. During the PhD you will invest years of your life trying to solve one ultra-specific problem. You will encounter all sort of obstacles; some of which are to be expected and some of which may be unforeseeable. To overcome these challenges you will usually need rich technical knowledge of your chosen research area, which you can only truly obtain by spending hours reading papers, textbooks, reference manuals, documentation, and more (while AI tools can help you circumvent this tedious learning process by synthesizing available research for you, I personally would not recommend using them to automate the research process very often, because by doing so you are essentially sacrificing the opportunity to learn something the hard way in favor of immediate results). Once you perform this process of conducting deep research on a topic the first time, you will realize that you can apply it to basically any area of your life to accomplish a variety of goals totally unrelated to your research (e.g., to become financially savvy, to master a hobby, or to learn how to fix problems with your car or home without needing to always call a professional).

In addition to deep thinking, the PhD program also sharpens your critical thinking skills. When you first begin conducting research, you will be overwhelmed with papers from a wide range of sources, and you won’t yet have the ability do discern the high-quality papers from the low-quality ones. As time goes on however, and you participate in reading groups and mock program committees which give you the chance to see how more senior researchers judge the merits of academic papers, you will construct your own criteria for grading research. You will then start to appreciate papers and presentations that are simpler to understand for their clarity and concision, and realize that research that is more difficult to understand is not necessarily more sophisticated or “better”, but perhaps just poorly-presented. This ability to discriminate between high-quality research from less-quality work will prevent you from accidentally getting tricked into believing ideas that may not actually be all that credible, so that you don’t waste time trying to prove them, and also don’t end up looking like a fool later for doing so. On the other hand, being able to recognize when a work that has merit is just poorly-presented enables you to be more gracious when reviewing others’ work and when giving criticism, which helps improve the quality of research in the field overall.

Communicate

Communication skills are vital to achieving success in many areas of life, both professional and personal, and the PhD is no exception. The PhD program provides you with many opportunities to hone your communication skills in the following three forms:

In writing

You will become much better at explaining technical information clearly and concisely, and at persuading others why the work you are doing is meaningful and useful. This is because in order to graduate from the PhD program, you will need to write academic papers. It is very difficult to write high-quality technical papers, especially if you haven’t done so before, because they are extremely dense: each sentence in a conference paper needs to either motivate your work, justify your experiment design, explain your methods and figures, discuss your results, or do some combination of all these actions. Your advisor will be giving you critical feedback and advice on how to improve at all these skills.

In conversation

You will improve at explaining technical content to others at various levels of complexity.

First, you will learn to explain your work in simple terms in order to share what you are up to with your family and friends, since they likely have no technical knowledge of your research area.

Next, when speaking with lab members or experts at academic conferences, you will be able to dive into more detail about your work, and will also need to speak persuasively about it if you hope to gain collaborators or professional connections. This can be tricky, since while you can expect this audience to have more technical knowledge about your area than the average person, you can’t be sure exactly how much knowledge they have about your particular subject.

Finally, you can delve into the greatest detail when discussing your research with your advisor during your weekly status updates. However, even in this situation it is crucial that you avoid getting caught in a tangle of technical/implementation details because this eats into your advisor’s precious time, and reduces the amount of valuable feedback that they can give you.

When presenting

Lastly, the PhD gives you many opportunities to hone your public speaking and presentation skills (though unfortunately, in my experience many PhD students graduate without improving much in these areas).

You will likely need to work as teaching assistant at one point or another during the PhD, and by doing so will gain lots of experience explaining technical content to classrooms full of students while leading labs. You will quickly overcome any fears of public speaking, and improve at explaining concepts and answering questions directly and clearly. You can even create a review form for students to fill out and distribute it to your labs at the end of the semester to receive feedback on how well you did as as TA and areas in which you can improve.

Next, you will have the chance to practice public speaking in more high-stakes environments at academic conferences. If you submit a paper to an academic conference and it gets accepted, the conference organizers will expect you to attend the conference to present your paper to other experts in your research area. Each of these presentations provide a chance to make a good impression on your research community, and to garner potential collaborators or employers, so it is crucial that you take them seriously. Be willing to spend weeks preparing conference presentations, and practice presenting as often as you can, especially in front of colleagues who can provide meaningful feedback. If you are planning on giving academic presentations in the future, check out my post on how to give a great academic talk.

Finally, collaborators may occasionally invite you to give a talk to their colleagues or students. Take these opportunities when they present themselves, as they allow you to network, travel, and practice presenting all at the same time.

Network

The PhD program not only provides a way for you to become an expert in a specific field, but also to meet, speak, and work with other experts as well. While it’s sometimes easier or tempting to work like a lone wolf and collaborate with only your advisor, it is in your best interest to socialize with and collaborate with others, because each person you work with opens more opportunities for yourself later on down the line. Each person you meet could potentially lead to new job offers and research ideas. In any case, it’s nice to have more people to turn to for writing you letters of recommendation for job and funding applications.

You may have heard the phrase, “It’s not what you know that’s important, but rather who you know.” I don’t really like this saying, because it assumes that you don’t need to be very well-informed about your work in order to develop a strong professional network. Instead, I think what’s important is that you know your research area well, and can speak clearly and convincingly about it others - if you achieve this, then other people will want to get to know you. Then you have the best of both worlds.

Grow

All the above skills are not just useful for obtaining the PhD, but help you achieve greater success, enjoyment, and fulfillment in life more generally. Cultivating a sense of exploration helps keep you engaged in your work, so that you don’t burn yourself out too quickly, and are thus able to be more productive. Deep and critical thinking skills enable you to solve more complex problems by breaking them down into smaller ones, and help you recognize the validity of all the information available to you when conducting research. Communication skills are paramount to success in just about all aspects of one’s life, because if you can speak intelligently about what you do and persuade others that it is important, more people will want associate themselves with you, and either work with you or even for you. Finally, the ability to network and develop connections with people in, e.g., industry, academia, and the government unlocks more professional opportunities.

It’s free… sort of

OK, the PhD isn’t exactly “free”, but more like “complimentary” so long as you can obtain funding for your research. There are three main ways to do this.

Graduate teaching assistantship

The most common way to fund your PhD is to work as a graduate teaching assistant (GTA) for your university. In this position you typically spend hour to eight hours a week grading assignments, holding office hours, and leading labs (often for courses that your advisor teaches). In return, the school pays for your tuition and gives a stipend just large enough for you to live comfortably. If you enjoy teaching, then the GTA position can be an entertaining way to pay for graduate school; however if you don’t like teaching then it can be an annoying to need to set aside some time each week on GTA responsibilities when you’d rather be doing research (which could help you graduate faster).

Graduate research assistantship

With a graduate research assistantship (GRA), your advisor uses their own funding money to directly pay for your tuition and stipend. The upside to this is that you no longer need to spend time each week on teaching, and may instead devote more time to research. The downside is that if you enjoy teaching, then with a GRA position you have fewer opportunities to do so. GRA funding is also more difficult to obtain than GTA funding for two reasons: first, it requires that your advisor have funding (which is something you should ask about when searching for an advisor early on in the PhD), and second, it requires that you prove to your advisor that you are deserving of it (since they will be paying for it). These challenges are simple to overcome though so long as you make sure to choose an advisor who has funding, and demonstrate to them that you have basic time management and organization skills (seriously, if you just maintain your own time sheets, research journal, and task checklists without needing constant reminders, your advisor will probably be glad to give you a GRA position).

Fellowships

Fellowships are funding sources that organization like the NSF and companies like Google offer to graduate students who demonstrate strong research skills and potential. This is the hardest funding source to obtain since the fellowship application process is usually highly competitive and often requires three or more letters of recommendation from your research collaborators (and early on in your research career you may not even have that many collaborators, or done enough work, to obtain strong recommendation letters). However, fellowships are also perhaps the most desirable source of funding, because they enable you to pay your own way through graduate school without needing to rely on your school or advisor to pay for you.

Having a fellowship also makes you a more desirable candidate for potential advisors, since having a fellowship not only means that they don’t have to pay for you, but also indicates that you are already capable of doing research (since strong research skills are required to earn most fellowships). This in turn provides you with more freedom to work on whatever research problems you want, instead of needing to work on a problem your advisor has already picked out (which isn’t always a bad thing) for you in order for them to be willing to fund you.