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Graduate School in Physics

Writer's picture: Mishkat BhattacharyaMishkat Bhattacharya

This post refers to a substantial and often critical phase in the life an academic physicist - graduate school (I am referring to a PhD). I am pretty sure I will not be able to cover all aspects in this post, but here goes with some important themes:


Why go to graduate school?


Certainly, a doctoral degree is required by most institutions hiring academic physicists (the only exception I can think of is Freeman Dyson). But some people go to grad school for other reasons: to satisfy their curiosity, to prepare themselves better for industry, to be able to display PhD after their name, etc.


What should we expect in graduate school?


Perhaps the first thing I should point out is that doing research will be different from taking courses. From what I have observed, there is often a low correlation between doing well on homework and doing well in research. I suspect this is because research requires students to frame the questions themselves. This is a deep and essential skill, not nurtured by homework sets, where somebody else has already done the hard work of asking the right question.


Second, as a corollary, you may spend a lot of time gaining knowledge and thinking about framing questions and then solving them. I think this is actually a great aspect of graduate school. It allows us to learn to tackle problems that cannot be solved in a day, week or month. Typically it takes several months, sometimes even years. Often you will find yourself with your back to a wall, and will learn how to resolve such situations. As a result, at the end of graduate school the muscles in your brain will become so strong you will be able to lift your cell phone from the table just by looking at it.


Third, graduate school is a lesson in negotiating with other human beings. Unlike undergraduate education, where the university is providing a service (education) to a customer (the student), graduate school is an apprenticeship. During this time, you will be hired as cheap labor but allowed ample time to learn and think deeply. You may have to negotiate with your advisor, your group members, your department head and administration, colleagues at other institutions, probably your spouse, parents and your siblings/other relatives as well. Accidents may also happen during this time: your advisor may lose funding and you may have to find someone else to work for (it happened to me). Unfortunately, some of us (it happened to me) may even lose a (grand) parent(s) during this time.


Fourth, you will experience at least half a decade of lost income, because you will be paid a subsistence level stipend which will hardly allow you to save anything. During this time, your peers who chose to take real jobs will buy (nice) cars and houses. You can have children as a graduate student, but it may be challenging to find time and money for their upbringing. A properly employed spouse can be of help.


What kinds of outcome accrue in graduate school?


The best kind of outcome, according to me, is one where the student goes from strength to strength, producing substantial and compelling scholarship. This action typically comes to a head towards the end of the PhD, with great and many results coming at that time. It is typically followed by a very good industry/government appointment, or a top postdoctoral position. In my opinion, in addition to the conventional academic route, there are nowadays excellent opportunities in all kinds of industries and government labs. I have colleagues who joined the big industrial houses (e.g. GE, IBM, Intel, Motorola, Google, Oculus), or other sectors (Shell and Haliburton for oil; geochemical companies, Wall Street etc. ) as well as federal establishments (Army, Navy, Air Force, National Security Agency).


Often, though, some students struggle (it happened to me). Their doctoral degree performance is acceptable, but not outstanding. They may have no option but to go to industry. If they are able to find postdoctoral position and continue in academia, they have to work additionally hard during their postdoctoral years compensating for their PhD. This is the way they can present themselves as realistic faculty candidates to university hiring committees. Against this struggle we should place the warning that a low percentage of physics doctorates end up with tenure track positions in the United States. Most of those who get hired into faculty positions spend about six years doing postdoctoral work. Finally, only a small number of elite universities seem to produce most of the professors at US institutions.


In exceptional cases, a student may flame out of graduate school. I have known cases where a student left graduate school after seven years, without publishing a single paper, and without a degree. For completeness I should mention I have seen a case where a student was awarded a PhD without having published a single paper in a peer-reviewed journal. But this should be regarded as an outlier.


Conclusion


Grad school in physics is challenging in many ways, including intellectual, emotional and financial. As a Dean said to me many years ago, the PhD is awarded for stamina. But I think it is very rewarding. I personally would do it all over again, though mine was rather challenging. I think it demands a lot of commitment; I have seen a good number of people quit before they finish. I usually tell my students that they should only go the academic path if they cannot live without it, if they cannot think of anything else interesting to do.

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