Former PhD Student Reveals The TRUTH About Graduate Degrees…

What's happening, guys? It's Shane here, and in today's video, I'm going to be interviewing an experienced senior-level software engineer who works at a very prestigious company, and he is going to be talking about his experience going to graduate school. We're also going to talk about the situations where you should go to grad school and when you shouldn't. Now, the person that I brought on the channel is Chris, and he is somebody who gives phenomenal career advice. He helps out in my Discord quite a bit. He's also one of the main mods in a Facebook group that has a like 100,000 people, and he basically just answers career and education-related questions completely free. So he's honestly just a great guy, and on top of that, I think he gives really well-balanced, phenomenal advice. So I think you're really going to enjoy this one, and honestly, I've told Chris before he should probably make his own YouTube channel because his advice is really good. So I'm probably going to have him back on the channel in the future, but go ahead, gently tap that like button, watch this video until the end because he gives great advice, and let's jump right into it. Welcome back to the channel, guys. Shane here, and today, I have a very special guest, somebody who has commented many times on my Discord, somebody who is very knowledgeable when it comes to college degrees, careers, and specifically, I'm bringing them on today to talk about graduate school because they are a former PhD student, and they, well, I'm not going to give it away, but they have some certain opinions on graduate school. So thank you so much for coming on the channel today, Chris. I appreciate it. Well, thank you, Shane. Thank you for having me over. Big fan of the channel. All right. So just to give some context, I know a lot of people probably know you from the Discord, Chris, but just to give a little bit of context, could you maybe tell me a little bit about your background and your professional experience? Sure. So I got my bachelor's in computer science from Brigham Young University a number of years ago. While I was at Brigham Young University, I got in contact with a lot of the professors there, and I really liked the lifestyle that they had. So at one point, I decided that I wanted to become a computer science professor. I finished my coursework, and I have applied to PhD programs directly from a bachelor's degree, and I got admitted to Georgia Tech. Got my shirt here. I started a PhD program at Georgia Tech, which was great. I worked with great people. Great school. I learned a lot of things there. They have really a lot of people that have a lot of expertise, and they have a lot of, they're very well established as experts in their fields. Worked with a lot of great grad students. I enjoyed many parts of my time at Georgia Tech. I enjoyed prototyping things, but I noticed that I wasn't that great at research per se. There were aspects of research work that were pretty disencouraging for me. So eventually I ended up not doing well in the program. I did internships throughout with several tech companies, and eventually I left the program about four years into it with a master's degree in computer science. I went to work in the industry. I think it was a big blessing in disguise. I'm very happy with how things have turned out. I've been a software engineer for over 11 years right now, working for a large tech company that a lot of people probably have heard of, and yeah, I'm very happy with how things turned out. Okay, so Chris is very humble, so let me just expand upon this a little bit. Chris works for one of the best companies, one of the most prestigious companies, first of all. He's a senior engineer, and then on top of that, he specialized at Georgia Tech in probably the most complicated type of software engineering, which is like virtual reality, augmented reality, and machine learning type stuff, right? So this is some seriously like big brain type stuff we're talking about here when it comes to like master's and PhD programs. So I just wanted to kind of put that out there as well. So Chris is a very experienced software engineer. Next question I wanted to kind of get into is you decided to go to graduate school, and you did it originally because you thought, you know, the professors have a really nice cushy job, and this is something I have talked about before. If you are able to land a job as a professor, and especially if you get tenure, it is an awesome job. Like, it is an amazing job, but that's almost like saying if you're able to become a professional basketball player, or if you're able to become like a, you know, own your own law practice, or if you're able to become a professional actor who gets paid like millions of dollars or something like that. Like, yes, it's an awesome job, but getting there is the problem. It's very, very difficult to get into those positions. Now, I made an entire video called why you shouldn't go to graduate school, and I highly recommend checking out that video. I focused mostly on PhD programs in that video. At the end, I say why you should, the reasons you should go to graduate school as well. So if you want more of like a point-by-point sort of thing rather than just somebody telling their story, I would definitely recommend checking out that video. But with that being said, I wanted to ask you your opinions like on your experience of graduate school and how it was like. Assuming that most of you know how it works, you'll have your bachelor's degree, you're going to basically learn how to become an expert on a field, get additional training, and get to the point, especially with a PhD program, where you're creating what's called novel research, things that haven't been done before, so that you can publish articles, either journal articles or academic conferences, basically trying to produce new work. So you have to basically study quite a bit of things, basically learn everything that has been done about a particular subject up to this point, and see what will be the next point that nobody in the world has done before. That has very exciting parts to it. I particularly love the part where I am reading and learning and getting up to speed to what the state-of-the-art is, and maybe prototyping what the next step is. There are other parts to it as well, which I realized I wasn't that great at. One of them was trying to come up with like the new next step. If you're setting up an experiment, you have to iterate many times through it. It gets very tedious in many cases, having to write, submit it to a journal, it'll get rejected. So you change it a little bit, submit it to a different journal, it'll get rejected, and you keep doing it until you get to publish it at a place. And you get evaluated by how many of those things you get published, how big the journal for conferences that you're publishing into it. So there are parts where people think, oh, you have to invent and create new cool things, but that's just one aspect of it. There are parts that are partly rote, there are parts that are very challenging and discouraging at times. And I mention this not because I don't want people to do research at all, I'm just saying it's important people get a complete picture. Everybody that comes into this come with this like rosy colored glasses where they they think it's all easy, and everybody's just going to congratulate you, tell you how smart you are, and that's the end of it. And it's not quite like that. So just giving my personal experience on this, just to get a little bit of an input, I know quite a few people who tried PhD programs, and I know a few people who actually completed them. And almost nobody in private will tell me that they thought their PhD program was worth it. Like, just about nobody. The only people who really think that it's worth it are ones who become professors, in my opinion, or ones who get like a, you know, a job in the government that requires a PhD program, like a job at NASA or something like that, which again, not the easiest thing to do. So that's just my personal experience. And then when you look at the numbers, again, I broke the numbers down in that video, PhD programs on average take over eight years to complete when people begin them. So those are the people who started off with a master's, as well as the ones who went straight into the PhD program. And so if you, you know, did four to five years of undergrad, that's an additional eight years. So that's 12 to 13 years to complete a PhD program. Typically, the average student is graduating with $106,000 in debt, or it might be median. Again, check that video out. Yeah. And so it's important to know that when, if you're going for a PhD program, you have other alternatives. I mean, at any point, you can just leave with a master's. Like it was in my case, I left with a master's degree and get a good job. And what happens after the PhD is the part that a lot of people don't, oftentimes don't do their homework on. I mean, a very small portion of people that graduate with a PhD actually going to become a tenured professor. A tiny fraction. I can't remember what the percentage is, but I'm pretty sure it's in the single digit percentage. A lot of people that graduate with a PhD will have to go on to further try to get more publications to really be competitive for a tenure track position by number one, go and do a postdoc program somewhere. Or you go work for someone for two, three years for a professor, kind of like an extension of your PhD to some degree, and you get paid, but you get paid just a little bit more than your PhD stipend. It's just not that much money. Basically what I determined, and I looked very deep into this, I looked up the stats and everything is, from a financial perspective, it's almost never worth it to do a PhD program. Like you can find like, you know, 0.1%, maybe 0.5% of people can be worth it from a financial perspective. But if they would have just gone a different way, and then they were actually making money during those, you know, eight years, whereas, you know, their friends, their cohort maybe was in a PhD program, they probably would have made just as much money, if not more. And when I give advice to people, like, even if it's like that gold star advice, like, I give practical advice. That is my number one thing. Like, even if it's something that I hate, like the gold star certificates, or if it's like a degree where it doesn't teach you anything, but still most companies require it, that's, I'm going to tell you get the degree, right? Even if I think it's like the dumbest thing in the world, I'm going to tell you get the degree because I give practical advice on this channel. Like I give advice that's going to, in my opinion, from my experience, going to give you the best chance at having a positive outcome. What I tell the people in my group is say, look, our group, for the most part, is a bunch of stressed out gen Zers. They're all stressed out and anxious about school. If you really want to know how grad school is, I can point you to a couple of Facebook groups for grad students, where there's a bunch of millennials basically drowning in alcohol, drugs, and nihilism, and depression. So go compare how it is. This is grad school. It can be tough. It can be tough on the mind. It was tough on mind. And that's what I would recommend to everybody. Like the most basic advice is only go to graduate school if you are sure that that is required to get you to your goal, right? So if your goal is a job that requires graduate school, like if you want to work at NASA, for instance, right? You want to work at NASA as a rocket scientist, probably going to need some graduate school experience for that, right? So you really want to seek out people who are either in the position that you're going for, or recruiters for that position, hiring managers for that position, people who would know what you need to do in order to land that job. And then make sure you get several different opinions. Don't just get one opinion. Get several different opinions from those people about, you know, the best possible course of action you should take in order to get into that position. And I'm telling you right now, 99% of the time, you are not going to need a PhD. 99, probably over 99% of the time. So really, you want to make sure that you need it. I can further tell you, that's also something that I advise a lot, is that reach out to people with the type of careers and the type of jobs that you want, and ask them how they got there, how the preparation was like, how their day in the life is like. And this has three big purposes. One is, they've been through this. They can give you the actual steps in a way that would be much better. It'd be actually much more factual than whatever a career counselor tells you. Sometimes even more than what your advisor tells you. Because these are people that actually went through it. Second, ask them how their job is. Because again, many people come with these ideas that are still very, you know, rosy-colored glasses. And many times, the expectation might be wrong. So if you ask them exactly, I mean, if I feel that the job that I'm looking for, oh, I'm going to have this amazing work-life balance. But then you talk to them and say, you know, yeah, I mean, half of the year is pretty good. The other half of the year, we need to put in 70 hours a week. Okay. Doesn't mean you don't have to do it. But now you've got accurate information. And third, and this is my favorite one, it's a form of networking. If you can reach out to 20 people on LinkedIn and maybe three of them reply, and you get to ask them about them, well, that's flattering. You're already in their good place. In fact, I do this a lot. People approach me and I'm happy to talk to them. I don't know if I'm too vain. But the thing is, is that it's a chance for them to get to know you. And sometimes they might even ask for your resume. But even if they don't, later on after you graduate and you apply for jobs at that company, you can reach out through email to the person that you talked to and say, hey, I'm looking at this particular job, requisition number, blah, blah, blah. Do you happen to know the hiring manager? Do you happen to know more about the team? What that person will do, aside from answering your questions, there's a good chance that they're going to reach out to the hiring manager and say, hey, you know what? I actually talked to that person and they're pretty good. Yeah. If that happens, two things happen. Number one, the person you network with kind of made the hiring manager's job easier. They need to go through 100, 200 applications. Anything that someone can help to cool it, it's helpful. So basically, this interaction means that now the hiring manager probably was going to grab your resume and put it on top of the stack. That's invaluable. It's amazing. On the other hand, the person you talk to, it's to their advantage to do this, because if they feel that you're good, that you wouldn't taint their reputation, then it's to their advantage to get them to hire you, because usually companies have bonus incentive programs for referrals for jobs. So you get hired. A couple months later, they get a bonus. So doing this type of interaction with people, it's basically you're kind of making your own job interview that you already passed. It's a perfect strategy. Can't agree more with you. Absolutely. And that's why I actually, when I give advice to people, I say they should do that right away at the beginning. Right away. Start doing it. Now, the mistake that a lot of people make is they'll watch a video like this. They'll be like, oh, that's a great idea. But they've already graduated. Right. And so they're reaching out to these people. Now, don't get me wrong. You should still do it. But they're reaching out to these people. And when the even if the people, you know, do respond to you, they get that feeling that you want something from them. Right. And that is not a good feeling. But if you're like a freshman in college and you start reaching out to people, you're like, hey, I you know, you are super accomplished. You know, I have a goal of eventually getting into a career just like you have. And I was wondering if you could answer a few of my questions. I would really appreciate it. A lot of you know, a lot of people are not going to respond because let's be honest, who actually checks LinkedIn for one kind of cringy sometimes. But but a lot of people are going to respond. Right. So those people who do respond, they're going to answer your questions. You're going to go back and forth. Many people are very, very helpful and they love to help people out because they see themselves in you. They're like, oh, I was in your exact same position, you know, 10 years back. And so after a while, maybe let's say you're in your sophomore year. Now you start asking them, hey, do you have any ideas on different projects that I can do to showcase my skills? They might give you a great project idea that you can do in order to showcase your skills. They're like, you know what? If I saw this, I would be very impressed by someone who is able to do this project idea. And then maybe in your junior year, you might ask them, hey, do you have any projects that you're working on that I could personally contribute to? Is there anything that I could personally contribute to to help you out? Like maybe you're doing some sort of survey or something like that and I could help you out just because I'm younger or something along those lines. Even if it's just a little bit of help, a lot of the time they might actually have something that you can help them with. Again, that's another thing you can put on your resume. So you see how this works. It's like and then maybe senior year you reach out to them and you're like, hey, I'm looking for jobs right now. Is there any way you could maybe give me some sort of recommendation letter? Or even better than that, maybe I could work at your company and could you maybe put in a good word for me? So that is how the real magic of networking happens is when you reach out to somebody and you're not desperate for a job right at the moment. You reach out to them and you're honestly just trying to communicate with them, talk with them, ask them for advice. And then maybe way later on you just mention to them, hey, I'm looking, I'm on a job hunt right now. I'm looking for a job. Could you put in a good word for me? And they're very, very likely going to say yes at that point. So yeah, go ahead. I would actually further make a, go out and make a statement. Spending three months doing networking as a student, probably nine out of 10 times would work better than going and getting a master's degree. For jobs that don't require a master's degree, network is just better. It's easier, it's cheaper, it's quicker, and immediately likely get you jobs that you like better. It's a much, if I could think of one single alternative that basically anybody, any student can do, that will be more conducive towards the job they want than grad school. Unless grad school is required for that job, it will be networking. Like the way that we just discussed, it really will make a huge impact. Networking is one of those things where it's almost like a cheat code. It's essentially like a cheat code. You don't have to network, but if you do network, you're going to make your life 10 times easier, right? Like you don't have to network to get a job. You can go through the traditional means of just applying to companies, the shotgun approach, right? And that can work. Don't get me wrong, that definitely works. But networking just, it's like a cheat code. It makes your life so much easier. And the earlier you do it, the better. Like it works so much better if you do it earlier than later on. Further, the shotgun approach is basically you're shooting many directions to see what bites. With networking, you actually can, you're sort of picking the companies that you want to try to court and the particular jobs that you like. I mean, there's so many upsides to this, it's just not even funny. Like for example, if you're going to college, a great way of doing networking is through your professors. Professors know many alumni. I got my job because of a professor referral, and I've managed to help two people get hired to six-figure jobs because of networking. One went through a professor that helped me out quite a bit when he didn't need to. Later on, he approached me, hey, I have two masters students in the interest in your company, and I got one of them hired. I mean, the odds are so much better compared to the shotgun approach. It's not even funny. It really is. The problem is, is like people who come to me, they typically want a job right now, right? And so, like I teach the shotgun approach too. There are ways of doing the shotgun approach that work as well. Yes. But if you're a senior year, you have less time to network. I mean, a lot of these relationships, you need to nurture them over a little bit of time. I imagine a lot of people that come to you are coming with an acute problem, not with a chronic problem. Exactly. And the strategies are different. So now it definitely makes sense. Definitely. Awesome. So you dropped some amazing knowledge. And you know what? We're going to have to make some more videos because there's topics that popped up into my head that we could talk about. Everybody comment down below if there's anything you'd like me to make a video about or ask Chris about as well. But Chris, thank you so much for coming on the channel. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me, Shane. I really enjoyed it.