Maybe reaching out to international faculties in your field could be an idea?
E.g., in Germany you get the entire spectrum from “be a professors slave for 6 years with minimum pay” to “I don’t care where you are - but the publications count”.
I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that there are quite a few professors in Europe who would be willing to guide you through (the relatively light weight bureaucracy) PhD process as long as you create and publish high quality research.
Usually a PhD process requires SOME formal training (e.g., attending a fee seminars), peer-reviewed publications and a cumulative summary over your research.
Personally I respect somebody who “freestyled” his way through PhD as measured by research output a lot. E.g., quite a few women take that route along with maternity leaves; which is great because of flexibility without compromise on quality.
I mean, in CS, engineering, physics, there are plenty of areas where you don’t need a lab per se but can just simulate etc. I must admit that depending in the field interaction with fellow PhD students can be super great an valuable (that’s just gonna make life harder for you if you don’t take advantage of it).
> E.g., in Germany you get the entire spectrum from “be a professors slave for 6 years with minimum pay” to “I don’t care where you are - but the publications count”.
Yea... I wanted to start PhD this year. Unfortunately it turned out that the only thing that counts, are my previous and future publications. Any work experience seems like a disadvantage. They value more someone with no experience, but with a couple of, usually not very inventive, publications.
I have over 18 years of work experience. I used to make more complicated things at work, than you can find in many published papers or even PhDs. So I asked a professor about how to start it.
It turned out that: the pay is much below the minimum salary + I will be thrown away if I won't have one publication in a good journal after the first year. If you also think that after sending a paper to a journal, they usually reply in six-nine months with a rejection or a list of comments to fix... it turned out that I have to start my PhD with a bunch of papers already written. And to have them count, they need to be exactly about the same topic as my PhD.
So, after rethinking all this, I stopped dreaming about a PhD. I can publish my paper on arXiv without all the academic fun.
This feels basically exactly like my experience too this year and last. I even had a professor tell me straight up when I emailed him that I basically wouldn’t get in since he already had prospective students with publications in the exact area reach out to him. I’ve kind of realized that without a string of publications ahead of time you’re basically out of the game before you even try. It’s like you have to have done PhD level work before you can do the PhD. It’s left me totally lost on what to do from here, getting a PhD has been a life dream for me so it’s hard to ditch the idea. I guess we might be in the same boat.
Don't despair. PhD life looks good from the outside because all parties involved (students, professors, administrators) have incentives to make it look good. The reality can be much different.
Besides, you've got to think how would you use this degree after you finish. Inside academia, you will be locked in a job with a mid-low salary with scarce options to advance. Outside of academia, PhD is less valued than most people think. I know quite a few people who do great research in the industry with only a BSc degree.
> I know quite a few people who do great research in the industry with only a BSc degree.
But what kind of recognition do they get? I know somebody who worked at some really good labs for ~10 years and did great work. He co-authored a couple of Nature (?) papers of which he did most of the work and writing. But ultimately with a BSc you're just a lab tech and nobody takes you seriously.
OTOH, that person just finished his Ph.D at Harvard but this is pretty much the end of the road for him--I don't think he's keen on navigating the cut-throat world of academia or commercial research.
It's kind of a lose-lose. If you love basic research, no recognition and you're stuck following orders. If you want recognition and some autonomy, you're stuck playing politics.
This is something that definitely weighs on my mind, I think. I've got an MSc, but I feel intense self-doubt and feel like I can't be an expert until I've gotten a PhD. In that sense maybe I've internalized the idea, and telling myself I'm not "qualified" to speak on issues of science in my field. And not to mention, doing a PhD brings the benefit of several years of being able to devote full time to learning and development. A full-time job can (should) be a growth environment but one's work will always be subordinate to business needs (most often applying knowledge you have rather than learning new things), and take most of the time of your week.
The quest for autonomy and recognition is rough, it's a very tough game and it's not easy to stay motivated at trying to make progress.
They get paid well. Most of the stuff they do cannot be published due to intellectual property reasons, so they indeed miss out on academic recognition. This is a trade-off one has to make.
Sad to hear the story of that person. Ideally, you should not start a PhD unless you have a burning question to answer and need ample time to study it. Given that a career post-graduation is not guaranteed, it's best to hedge your bets and study something that has immediate applications and/or gives you transferable skills.
The big draw for me is to be able to actually invent and innovate and not just implement old ideas over and over in a boring corporate space. All the exciting research jobs I see in my field (NLP) require a PhD, so I feel like I'll hit a career ceiling at some point and be implementing boring corporate solutions for the rest of my life and never really innovating.
But as you say, appearances can be deceptive and it's like the grass is always greener, so maybe I need to broaden my horizons somehow. It's definitely hard to find that path at the moment though.
Edit: Oh and I do have to admit the fancy title that lets me feel like I'm truly educated and learned, and satisfies credentialism in the world is a draw too... Peer pressure is a hell of a drug
Companies explicitly requiring a PhD is an unfortunate consequence of having too many PhDs being already out there and additionally produced each year. If you have done some interesting work and can get in touch with a recruiter, you can probably challenge that requirement in your case.
If you don't have a PhD, you do have to compete with everyone who has it. But it is still possible to gain an edge on them by simply studying what your prospective employers need. For PhD students, it is actually harder to do that unless their PI is doing something closely related.
Just a hypothesis: that professor would have abused you as a working slave. And he knew that no person in his right mind with significant work experience and “above minimum pay” could be Ok with it.
I suspect it had nothing to do with your qualifications - rather he probably wanted to avoid saying “sorry, but I wont be able to abuse you enough”.
At no institution in Germany have I head of “if you don’t publish in a year, you are out”. Usually you work 2 years as a slave with no context what your research is and after the first couple of years, you are allowed “to think loudly about a topic”.
This encounter is not “normal”... Keep looking. And yes: Academia knows that industry works on hard shit. And they often don’t want “outsiders to take a look under the rug”... They create a fake world to justify themselves more often than not...
>Personally I respect somebody who “freestyled” his way through PhD as measured by research output a lot. E.g., quite a few women take that route along with maternity leaves
Nitpick: You may want to change "his way" to the gender neutral "their way" especially since you use women taking maternity leave as an example. :)
E.g., in Germany you get the entire spectrum from “be a professors slave for 6 years with minimum pay” to “I don’t care where you are - but the publications count”.
I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that there are quite a few professors in Europe who would be willing to guide you through (the relatively light weight bureaucracy) PhD process as long as you create and publish high quality research.
Usually a PhD process requires SOME formal training (e.g., attending a fee seminars), peer-reviewed publications and a cumulative summary over your research.
Personally I respect somebody who “freestyled” his way through PhD as measured by research output a lot. E.g., quite a few women take that route along with maternity leaves; which is great because of flexibility without compromise on quality.
I mean, in CS, engineering, physics, there are plenty of areas where you don’t need a lab per se but can just simulate etc. I must admit that depending in the field interaction with fellow PhD students can be super great an valuable (that’s just gonna make life harder for you if you don’t take advantage of it).
Good luck!