davi flyingpenguin

A member of the Philip Greenspun's Homepage community since December 12, 1999

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December 12, 1999, on Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists:
Maybe it's not obvious, but the pursuit of a PhD usually doesn't include skills (sink or swim) to live with the overhead of management and bills. Unless a candidate has a strong personality to fight the tide, they will not necessarily end up with even a basic skillset which prepares them for financial realities. On the contrary, I know many people today who hesitated about finishing high-school because they saw job opportunities all around them. They can barely form sentences, but they make more money than graduate students. Almost all they care about is their financial growth. They assume they will do what they want after they've built their fortune; perhaps they will go to a famous college when they are old and try to become part of the elite or upper-class. They see no point to the financial risk of a degree early in life without some guarantee of a position after graduation. A PhD program (perhaps at the fault of the Professors) seems to train people just to be arrogant about the...