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Considerations for Grad School
Learning Hub › Career Learnings Directory › Dr. Docter's Career Learnings › Making the Most of College
This page is short on purpose — grad school is a big enough decision that it deserves its own research, not a lecture slide's worth of advice standing in for it. What follows are the practical points I actually give students weighing it, plus pointers to the parts of my own story elsewhere on this wiki that prove them out rather than just asserting them.
If you're considering a doctorate at all, it's easier to get funded for one from the outset than it is to get a master's funded — and the reason comes down to straightforward return on investment. Funding a graduate student means paying for a tuition waiver plus a teaching or research assistantship stipend. What the funder gets back for that money is research output and published papers.
A master's student's time in the program is weighted much more heavily toward coursework than research — there just isn't much time left over for a thesis once the class load is accounted for. A doctoral student, by contrast, front-loads most of their coursework into the first year to year and a half, then spends the remaining three to four years full-time on research — getting measurably better at it the longer they're in the role. Year for year, a doctoral student returns far more research and publication output per dollar invested than a master's student does, which is exactly why faculty find doctoral funding more attractive. I saw this play out directly with master's students who did get funded during my own time in grad school: their advisors would practically be begging them to stay on for the Ph.D. by the end of their master's work, because the funding math only really pays off once they commit past the master's.
This isn't theoretical for me on the other side of it, either. My own advisor at Lehigh, Christos Georgakis, had funding for ten PhD students at a time when most of his peers could only fund one or two (see Building Your Network for the full story) — and that funding model is exactly what "commit to a doctoral program from the start" looks like from the inside.
Whoever is funding your advisor's work is one of the most likely sources of your first job after graduation. Talk and present to them every chance you get — a funded research relationship is a standing, recurring opportunity to build your network before you've even started your career, not just a line on a grant budget.
Again, this is the actual network-building story already told on this wiki: my Lehigh research was jointly funded by Exxon, Air Products, Praxair, and BOC, with progress presented to that group every six months. One of the Exxon representatives in that room, AC2, later recommended me to his managers, which set up the interview for the job I landed. He became one of my closest mentors for the next 15 years.
Regardless of how narrow your actual research topic is, a graduate program builds skills that transfer far beyond it:
- Innovation — you're generating genuinely new work, not just executing a known method.
- Communication skills — "publish or perish" and "present or perish" are really just marketing by another name, and grad school forces you to practice it constantly, whether or not anyone calls it that. See No Idea Sells Itself for why that skill doesn't stop mattering once you have a job.
- Analytical skills — the rigor a doctoral program demands generalizes well past the specific problem you studied.
These map cleanly onto the Leadership, Business, Interpersonal, and Technical (LBIT) framework used everywhere else on this wiki — grad school is, among other things, a multi-year development plan you're living through in real time, whether or not anyone frames it that way for you.
Demand for data-analytic skills is increasing at every level of research and manufacturing, and PhDs are showing up at manufacturing sites in increasing numbers — not just in research centers and not just in the field of study they started in, which is where the "pigeon-holed" stereotype assumes they stay.
My own Career Timeline is the counter-example: a PhD in a genuinely narrow academic subfield — reduced-order dynamic modeling and subspace identification for separation processes — turned into a 27-year career spanning global manufacturing sites (Beaumont, Fawley, Antwerp) at least as much as research environments. The degree didn't lock me into one lab studying one class of problem forever. It was the foundation the rest of the career got built on top of.
Related: Building Your Network · Communication & Marketing · Setting and Accomplishing Development Goals · Career Timeline · Who is Dr. Docter?
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