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| tggzzz:
--- Quote from: Omega Glory on May 31, 2021, 04:10:11 am ---It's been a while since I made the original post here, but since then I made the decision to go to college, and I've now just graduated a few days ago, so I thought I would put down some of what I learned about the experience. --- End quote --- Thanks for writing this up. It will be valuable to other people, partly because I'll refer to it when other people raise such questions or the perennial "degrees are useless because I knew a graduate that tried to measure the mains impedance with a multimeter" argument :) It seems that you have had the experiences I would have hoped you would have. Or rather that you explicitly ensured that you made good use of your your time there. I'm sure such an attitude and diligence will stand you in good stead during the rest of your career. Keep on learning, have fun, and don't let ten years of experience be one year repeated ten times :) Congratulations on graduating, of course. |
| Zero999:
Thanks for following up. It's rare someone will make this kind of thread and come back four years later! I'm glad you had a positive experience at university. Presumably you're much younger than me. I'm even less likely to go back to study, now at the age of 39, than I was when this thread started. The idea of going to class with a load of freshers, young enough to be my children seems strange and somewhat intimidating now and I've forgotten a lot of the maths, so would struggle to get back into it. Apprenticeships are also a good route and some even go up to degree level. The apprentice where I work has just left and found another employer who pay more and will fund him to do an HND, followed by a degree and good for him! Again it's good you want to study further, but why not spend a year, or so on the job, before going back to university again? I have had experience with those who have spent a lot of time in education, away from industry and they can be challenging to work with. |
| Omega Glory:
--- Quote from: tggzzz on May 31, 2021, 07:32:04 am ---Keep on learning, have fun, and don't let ten years of experience be one year repeated ten times :) --- End quote --- I have not heard that before! Good advice, thank you! --- Quote from: Zero999 on May 31, 2021, 01:13:36 pm ---Again it's good you want to study further, but why not spend a year, or so on the job, before going back to university again? I have had experience with those who have spent a lot of time in education, away from industry and they can be challenging to work with. --- End quote --- Yes, in some ways I think going directly into a PhD program without industry experience will work against me if I decide to enter industry afterwards instead of academia. I'm not sure there's a way around that if I continue this route, but I'm hopeful that if I'm humble and always willing to learn, then it will be less painful for those I end up working with, and I will be okay in the end. For me, the PhD program is also less about taking more classes or improving my chances of employment, and more about having the freedom to do interesting research with some really talented people. One of the things the lab I'll be working with is doing is helping to develop the free and open source FPGA design flows. I got into FPGAs because of the free tools like Yosys, nextpnr, iceprog, etc, which just recently become available (2018 ish), and it excites me that I might have the opportunity to make useful contributions to the community. The lab is also experimenting with new dynamic partial reconfiguration techniques on FPGAs, and I'm also very interested in that as well. So while this program may not make me a more employable engineer with lots of real world industry experience, I think it will allow me to explore certain areas with more freedom than if I went directly into industry. Looking back to my original post on this thread, I suppose my goals and interests have shifted. Originally I was very concerned that I might not make it through an undergrad program, and wanted to know if it was necessary to get a job. I thought PhD programs were completely theoretical, and I wanted nothing to do with them. Now I know I could probably get a job, (just about everyone else in my class got an offer), but now I know a bit more about the sorts of things I would get to do in a PhD program and it really appeals to me. |
| tggzzz:
When working in HPLabs, we once mused about what were valid and invalid reasons for doing a PhD if you wanted to be employed in industrial R&D. We came to the conclusion the only valid reason was "because I wanted to". An academic career is, of course, different. (BTW, "only" is an exaggeration to make the point) Getting a PhD * delays you entering the workforce for 3+ years, so you are 3 years "behind" your classmates * won't increase your salary; unless the PhD's subject is directly relevant you will be on a new graduate salary scale * will be in a narrow subject that is unlikely to be of direct relevance to an employer (unlike a first degree) * if it is of direct interest to an employer, you have to be careful they don't suck out your experience, then discard you * will indicate that you can independently learn in depth about a subject. By implication that will be relevant to some industrial jobs, but there are other ways of demonstrating that You might care to test the waters by having interviews with some potential employers, and asking them whether a PhD would be useful. They might be put off by a "lack of commitment", but if offered a job, you don't have to accept! |
| IanB:
I have been surrounded by PhD's in jobs where I have worked, and the number of people with higher degrees may depend somewhat on the industry. In engineering disciplines there can be something akin to "an industrial PhD", often undertaken with sponsorship and collaboration with an industrial partner. Research is definitely a component of industrial operations, especially when developing technologies to obtain market advantage and gain a lead over the competition. So PhD training does have industrial relevance beyond the specific research subject. Just as a first degree is about "learning how to learn", a higher degree should be about "learning how to investigate". |
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