is a phd in philosophy worth it reddit

• Jul 22, 2022
• 11 min read

Is a PhD Worth It? The Pros and Cons of Getting a Doctorate

To get a PhD or not to get a PhD? That is the question.

Valerie David

Lifestyle and Career Expert

Reviewed by Hayley Ramsey

Entering the job market for the first time can be a stressful experience, especially if you don't feel completely prepared. When deciding how to take those first steps toward your ultimate career , and how to give yourself a chance at the best jobs, you may find yourself asking: “Should I do a PhD?”.

While academics looking forward to a life of learning may consider this a no-brainer, there are important factors for everyone to consider. Finances, job prospects and quality of life issues can greatly affect the success of furthering your education.

To help you decide if the time and effort of a PhD is worth it, here are the major benefits and disadvantages of getting that doctorate.

After four or more years of intellectual pursuits, adding a PhD may seem like overkill. Before you make your choice, let's look at all the benefits that are exclusive to earning the most advanced degree.

1. You can contribute new knowledge to the world

Embarking on a PhD programme means delving into your preferred subject in a much deeper way than you have in any of your previous studies. The beauty of this advanced degree is that it allows you to sail in uncharted waters. Your goal is to find new information, draw new conclusions and, hopefully, make a significant contribution to your field.

Your intensive research, travel, collaboration and study will lead you on an unpredictable path to telling a story that no one has heard before. For some students, this pursuit of knowledge and discovery is enough to make all the hard work of earning a PhD worth it.

2. You'll have access to more prestigious jobs

One of the key benefits of a PhD is that it opens doors to careers at the highest levels. This can include leadership positions in science and engineering, government roles in economics and political science, and prestigious teaching posts for English and arts majors. Even if an advanced degree isn't required for the job you want, that PhD can give you an extra air of authority in your field and an edge over other candidates.

Another obvious upside to continuing your postgraduate studies is that landing these powerful positions can lead to large financial rewards. Some areas of study, like medicine and the law, tend to be more lucrative, but it can also depend on the type of job. For example, a university professor or researcher post can pay well for a wide variety of disciplines. Check out sites like the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Careers Service to investigate potential salaries.

3. Employers look for candidates with your superior writing skills

A study arranged by the National Commission on Writing discovered that blue-chip businesses (long-standing companies with stable stock growth) are spending more than $3 billion a year on remedial writing course for current employees. This includes staff with undergraduate degrees.

So, when a hiring manager peruses your résumé and sees that you've earned a PhD, they'll know immediately that you've spent years honing your skills at compiling research, organizing mountains of data and writing about your results in a cohesive and persuasive way. This will clearly set you apart from your competition, while landing your dream job will prove that pursuing that advanced degree was worth it.

4. You'll improve on all your soft skills

While pursuing your undergraduate degree, you likely noticed that you were learning more than just the subject matter taught in each class. Completing your studies also required time management skills , focus and problem solving .

Getting a doctorate degree requires even more of the soft skills that employers look for in applicants . Your intensive study and finished thesis should lead to improvements in your problem solving, critical thinking , patience and adaptability . These desirable skills won't just help you land a job but also excel in whatever career you choose to pursue .

5. You'll collect an extensive network of professional colleagues

When weighing the pros and cons of earning a PhD, consider all the professional contacts you'll make during the course of your studies. Working closely with professors, department heads, experts in your field, as well as fellow researchers, helps you develop an important resource. This network of colleagues can provide continual assistance with references, job leads, career advice and collaboration.

6. You can wait for a more favorable job market

Job prospects may not look that promising when you've completed your undergraduate degree, or even after you've been in the workforce for a few years. While there's no guarantee things will improve after a delay, some students may appreciate the benefit of a steady graduate assistant salary while they work on enhancing their résumé with a doctorate.

If you couldn't get a good internship during or after your undergrad studies, the PhD work also gives you the time to build that professional network . These contacts could prove to be the key to breaking into a specialized or highly competitive field.

You may still be thinking about all that time and commitment and wondering, “Is a PhD worth it?”. While there are always positive results from improving your education, there are some downsides to getting your doctorate.

1. It's expensive

This is a substantial factor for many students when weighing the merits of pursuing a PhD versus entering the job market right away. If you already have student loans , continuing your education will just increase your burden and add substantial pressure when you eventually begin your job search.

If cost is a concern, investigate graduate assistant jobs that help with expenses. Some programmes offer tuition assistance in return for teaching or research work. For those who already work full time and are hoping a PhD will help them advance in their career, consider keeping that job and pursuing your studies on a part-time basis.

2. Getting a PhD can be a lonely experience

Despite your interactions with professors and other students, pursuing a doctoral degree is ultimately a solitary pursuit. Your thesis topic is unique to you, and you'll spend a lot of time alone doing research and writing. Your social life can suffer, especially if you're also working in addition to your studies.

Career experts often talk about the necessity of work-life balance for physical and mental health, and this is just as important for PhD students as anyone else. It may take you a little longer to complete your degree, but it's worth taking the time to visit family and hang out with your friends. These positive interactions can help you stay motivated through the most tedious parts of your work.

3. You'll experience extreme stress and frustration

Pursuing a PhD may seem like a noble and interesting endeavor, and extended life as a student can appear more attractive than wading into the job market. You must be aware, however, that getting a doctorate can be a very stressful and frustrating experience.

A topic that seemed intriguing at first may not live up to years of scrutiny, causing boredom at best or requiring a complete thesis change at worst. Not all programmes are well-run, either, and you may have a supervisor who is too critical, offers poor advice or is just unavailable and unhelpful.

The difficulties of a PhD programme lead to rather substantial dropout rates. In the US alone, only 57% of PhD students obtained their degree within a decade of enrolling. If you want to be in the successful half of those stats, take extra time to review your choice of supervisor and topic focus. Ask every professor you have for advice on making the right decisions and talk with current graduate students to see what their experience has been.

4. There may be limited job openings

While getting a PhD can qualify you for better and higher-paying jobs , it can also put you in a position where you're competing for an extremely limited number of job openings. This is especially true of university jobs, where the number of advanced degree graduates far outpaces the need for full-time instructors, researchers and administrators.

Earning your PhD with a very obscure thesis in a niche speciality can also limit your options. When there are only a handful of jobs that suit your expertise, and they're already occupied, it can make you feel that your doctorate was a waste of time. Consider the job market before you make decisions about getting another degree. If you're determined to study in a niche area, think ahead of time about related fields or industries where your knowledge and skills will also prove useful to employers.

5. There may be little to no financial reward

While most studies concur that having a PhD increases your income potential substantially over the lifetime of your career, it's not a guarantee of job security or a financial windfall. A study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that 5 years after earning their doctorates , 45% of grads in Germany were still on temporary contracts and 13% ended up in lowly occupations.

Other European countries, including Slovakia, Belgium and Spain, had similar results. In the US, in fields like engineering, the difference in pay scales between employees with a master's degree and a PhD was a mere 7%. When that small bump in salary is weighed against the amount of debt taken on in order to get your degree, you may decide it's not worth it.

6. You could lose out on valuable job experience

New forms of technology continue to change how organizations operate, and those changes can happen fast. If you've already spent several years in school, toiling away in solitary study of obscure subjects can cause you to fall further behind in learning the skills you'll actually need for a future career.

Before you invest in getting a PhD, research your chosen field and learn which type of degree will give you the most value. Many scientific, financial and computing careers rely more on skills acquired on the job, rather than in coursework that can quickly become outdated.

Questions to ask yourself

You’ve listed out the pros and cons, but that still may not be enough to help make your decision. When it comes to a life-altering change like getting a doctorate, it’s okay to take enough time to ask yourself specific questions to ensure you’re making the right move. Consider asking yourself the following:

• Why do I want to get a PhD?
• Do I have the pre-requisites to move forward to a PhD?
• What are my strengths and limitations?
• Am I financially prepared?
• Am I mentally prepared?
• How will this affect my relationship with my family or friends?
• Where will I study?
• What am I trying to achieve?
• What jobs will be available to me after I get my PhD?
• Are there other options or avenues to consider?

Unfortunately, you may not have the answer to every one of these questions, because let’s face it, you don’t know what you don’t know. You might not know how it will affect your relationship with family or friends, but why not ask them? Reach out to those closest to you and see how you pursuing this degree could trickle down to them and allow that to play into your decision. Evaluate the answers to these questions and use it to help you make an educated decision on your future moving forward.

The best PhD degrees

If you’ve weighed out the pros and cons, asked all the important questions, and now you’re set on getting your PhD, congratulations! To help you along the way, let’s look at a list of the most valuable PhD programs to start you on your way to this degree.

• Criminal Justice
• Engineering
• Cybersecurity
• Business Administration

These fields are rapidly growing and are among the highest-paying doctorate degrees in 2022 , so they might be worth considering as you start your journey.

Key takeaways

Pursuing your PhD requires an incredible amount of commitment, and it's important to take the necessary time to make the decision. As you’re evaluating a doctorate degree, remember the following:

• Evaluate the pros and cons list right from the beginning to ensure you’re weighing out both sides of the coin.
• Ask yourself the necessary questions. A doctorate degree commitment can affect more than just you, so be sure you’re factoring that into your decision.
• Review specifically which PhD would be best for you and your field progression.
• Research your chosen field carefully and evaluate the job market before you finalize your degree choice.
• Once you’ve selected your degree, stay focused and stay driven. It’s going to be a hard few years, but it will be worth the work!

Who knows, this may prompt you to move on to postgraduate study — never stop achieving!

Have you decided to pursue your PhD, or are you still considering your options? Join us in the comments below and let us know what’s stopping or encouraging you from getting a PhD.

Originally published on July 24, 2019. Updated by Shalie Reich.

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Is doing a PhD in philosophy with a master's in an unrelated discipline viable?

I have a master's degree in computer science, and have been working as a software developer outside of academia for about a decade. I'm considering trying to transition into academic philosophy with the ambition of having an academic career, as far fetched as this may be. I'm evaluating the following two options:

• Pursuing a ~1-year MA degree in philosophy first (e.g. at Birkbeck College ), followed by a PhD.
• Trying to apply directly for a PhD (in Europe, which officially means 3-4 years of study) in a somewhat related subfield (philosophy of technology and science).

Option 2 is something that was mentioned to me as a realistic possibility only recently: apparently, people do get directly accepted for philosophy PhDs with e.g. a math background, and no formal philosophy education. However, I'm not sure if skipping a relevant MA could hurt me in some way.

• Would it be a faux pass if I, with my lack of formal philosophical background, tried asking individual professors about the possibility of doing a PhD under their mentorship? I fear that this could earn me a black mark with them and impact my chances for future collaborations (after obtaining an MA). I have a pretty good idea about a topic I would want to work on, and have studied extensively on my own, but I have zero relevant publications. I do have some publications in other scientific disciplines, though.
• Even if I were accepted to a PhD program directly, would not having an MA in philosophy worsen my chances when competing for academic posts after having finished my PhD? My intuition tells me that in most case, not having an MA would be negative (I'm no prodigy and am not going to produce some ultra-extraordinary publication record that would outshine everyone else).
• graduate-school
• changing-fields

• 1 I retagged it to add Europe since this would be different elsewhere (such as US). –  Buffy Commented Aug 31, 2022 at 22:58
• @voidptr Just a question: Will people who are in philosophy be writing your LOR's or it would be by people from CS background? –  user157501 Commented Sep 2, 2022 at 18:49
• @XZYZ that would be CS and natural science people. Which obviously doesn't bode in my favor without any other formal qualification. –  voidptr Commented Sep 3, 2022 at 0:12

3 Answers 3

This really depends on how much accompanying self-learning in philosophy you have already done prior to starting a formal program. Unless you have a substantial amount of self-learning already in philosophy, it seems to me to be premature to do a PhD program, having come from a background in computer science. At a minimum, PhD candidates in philosophy would be expected to have learned undergraduate-level material in metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics, aesthetics and political philosophy. If you have already covered those through self-study then you might have the necessary preparation, but if you haven't then you are probably behind the expected level for an incoming PhD candidate. (And if there are any of those terms where you need to look up the meaning, then you don't have the required background yet.)

It is true that there would be some overlap in your computer science background and aspects of the field of logic and foundations of mathematics/computing, but this is only one branch of philosophy, and even there the overlap would be relatively small unless you have already done a substantial amount of self-study going beyond your field.

Unless a university has a policy to the contrary, there is nothing wrong with making preliminary inquiries with academics in the field to get their advice on whether you know enough to enter a PhD program, and if so, whether they would be interested in supervising you in a topic of interest. In order to avoid looking silly, I recommend you begin by making some tentative inquiries to see if the academic in question believes that you have sufficient background for a PhD program, or if you should do an MA program first. If it is the latter, you can still flag your interest in future PhD study under their supervision and then come back to them in a year or two when you're ready for that program. You aren't necessarily expected to have publications on intake to a PhD program, but some applicants will, and this is an aspect of the competition for places (which is another advantage of doing an MA first --- you might get a chance to write some publications before applying to a PhD program).

Unless you can demonstrate having a reasonably well-rounded background in undergraduate-level philosophy through self-study, I doubt that you will be admitted directly to a PhD program in philosophy. In the unlikely event that this were to occur, you would find that there is an early period where you are behind your peers and have to rapidly learn material that they learned as undergraduates. This harms your chances of successful completion of the PhD candidature, but if you were to complete it successfully, it would not worsen your chances of competing successfully for later academic posts.

Not a European philosopher, but....

Would it be a faux pass if I, with my lack of formal philosophical background, tried asking individual professors about the possibility of doing a PhD under their mentorship?

Like most things, it's all about your tone. It is certainly not a faux pas to humbly ask questions when you are well-informed but open about your weaknesses. Though even given this, your response rate may be somewhat low.

Even if I were accepted to a PhD program directly, would not having an MA in philosophy worsen my chances when competing for academic posts after having finished my PhD?

No one cares about your MA (or lack thereof) when you have a PhD. However, skipping this step would likely reduce the amount of interesting things you have published by the time you apply for post-PhD positions. Even if most students in your field don't publish during an MA (not sure), they will likely be able to "hit the ground running" faster than you will be able to.

as far fetched as this may be

You certainly know already how long the odds are (and how low the salary is if you succeed!). I would just ask you this: if you were 100% sure that you would not get a philosophy faculty position, would you still go down this road? Or would you just study philosophy in your spare time as hobby? In the latter case, I would think very carefully before proceeding.

• 4 Thank you for confirming my intuitions. "[I]f you were 100% sure that you would not get a philosophy faculty position, would you still go down this road?" - I have been trying to talk myself out of this for about a decade, and it only resulted in misery with severe consequences for my wellbeing. Studying as a hobby has failed to meet my needs, and a regular job takes away too much time and energy. So yes, this is something I'm willing to try, even though I realize the chances of ending where I'd like to be are practically zero, something I've been warned about constantly. –  voidptr Commented Sep 1, 2022 at 5:03

Coming in very late on this and you may have already made a decision but… I recently returned after a 35 year gap to do an MA in Philosophy (Exeter Uni) having graduated in Pholosphy originally. I struggled for about a term before finding my philosophical feet again. One of my colleagues graduated in English two years ago and moved to philosophy. She has struggled more. The primary reason is the mass of basic concepts, schools of thought, philosophical methods etc that are taken ‘as read’ even at MA stage.

A lot of are instilled by debate, lectures and colloquiums with very good philosophers who will knock all your rough edges off and point you in the right direction when you stray down paths that aren’t going to help you. Without this kind of experience, you may struggle.

Take for example the ability to compare different methods such as conceptual analysis, phenomenology, historical epistemology and XPhi. There’s a lot of philosophy to read and understand to get this basic toolkit.

Without the toolkit a PhD would be like trying to make a table with wood but no saw: you might fashion something but it would be hard to sell as a table.

Sorry if this sounds hard but it’s how the PG world tends to work and why it may be difficult.

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What You Need to Know Before Getting a PhD in Philosophy

Is a getting PhD in Philosophy an attainable career option in today’s world?

Whether you are interested in influencing academia or becoming a scholar at a think tank, obtaining a doctorate degree in philosophy can be a rewarding and realistic step in your career—if you are willing to work hard.

Even getting into a graduate program can be competitive. Dr. Bill Glod notes that there could be over 200 applicants for every five spots at some of the top schools. But with the proper planning, you can be successful despite the competitive field.

In the podcast below, Dr. Glod walks you how to get into a good PhD program—and what to expect once you enroll—so that you can succeed in this field.

A few things you should think about before getting a PhD in Philosophy:

• Whether a PhD in Philosophy is really right for you, and how to prepare for a career in Philosophy as an undergraduate.
• Different types of programs in Philosophy.
• Different methodologies you’ll encounter within the field.
• How to approach the application process if you are sympathetic to classical liberal ideas.
• How many programs you should apply to, and what you should be looking for in a program.
• What classes to take once you enroll.

Previous Post The 5 Significant Advantages of Interdisciplinary Research

Next post how to choose a phd program: 3 tips.

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Is a PhD worth it? ( self.academia )

submitted 1 year ago by [deleted]

What are your thoughts and perspectives, I am considering to pursue a PhD in computational biology/neurogenetics but not sure it it worth it in long run (also for jobs after finishing PhD program)

• 14 comments

Want to add to the discussion?

Post a comment!

[–] DangerousBill 8 points 9 points 10 points 1 year ago *   (2 children)

If you stop at a bachelor's or master's, your eventual boss might have a PhD. The advanced degree isn't for everyone, but it opens up depth and variety in your career options.

My PhD took me into six different specialties at five different employers ranging over government, industry, and academia.

A friend of mine worked on a single enzyme for his entire career, ending up as president of his university. Anything is possible.

[–] [deleted] 0 points 1 point 2 points 1 year ago   (1 child)

True, thanks for the insight. Your career path is really amazing, in what field was your PhD?

[–] DangerousBill 1 point 2 points 3 points 1 year ago   (0 children)

Biochemistry, but post docs in virus genetics and enzymology.

[–] [deleted] 2 points 3 points 4 points 1 year ago   (2 children)

40-60% of graduate students don’t finish their PhDs. The only reason to do a PhD is if you are sufficiently passionate about a field that you want to devote 4-5 years to mastery of a highly specific component of it. If you don’t have that level of passion, you won’t finish. As for career prospects: it’s a crapshoot.

[–] _XtalDave_ -1 points 0 points 1 point 1 year ago   (1 child)

Woah, where are you where the drop out rate is so high? Here in the UK the combination of failure and drop out rate is ~20%

[–] [deleted] 1 point 2 points 3 points 1 year ago   (0 children)

[–] DeepSeaDarkness 3 points 4 points 5 points 1 year ago   (1 child)

Do you want to do research as a career?

[–] [deleted] 0 points 1 point 2 points 1 year ago   (0 children)

Yes, but doing research is also possible in companies for example so that’s why it seems difficult to decide

[–] FOXO1_IGMBC 1 point 2 points 3 points 1 year ago   (0 children)

If you have to ask, you already know the answer. Once you start, you will continue to ask that question every year, and it will get harder and harder to justify the answer. Many will talk about the benefits after but you need to remember that you have to finish first, and if your asking this question as a graduate student the answer for just yourself is inevitably no.

[–] CptNemo55 0 points 1 point 2 points 1 year ago   (2 children)

Well, it depends, what is the reason you want to get a PhD?

I want to get it as it allows for my research to have more societal impact, and the focus lies more on the research than just profit and money which can be the case in companies. And I enjoy going to conferences and am passionate about the topic

[–] CptNemo55 0 points 1 point 2 points 1 year ago   (0 children)

Ok, all good reasons. What do you plan to do for a job after you have PhD?

[–] sbby31 0 points 1 point 2 points 1 year ago   (0 children)

I think that, unfortunately, it is a personal decision. Your career aspects in that field are probably decent with or without a PhD. You can definitely get yourself into a role that supports research (research that greatly benefits society, if you are lucky) with a bachelors/masters degree, and many people are very happy in that kind of role.

I assume you are relatively young (20s-ish). Doing a PhD will rob you of the experience of having money pretty early in life, and that is a dealbreaker for some (no judgement, there is no right or wrong answer). The job market for PhDs is no longer a "sure thing" that guarantees you wealth/tenure later in life.

I got my PhD in a roughly comparable field- I did it mostly because I wanted the option to lead research efforts or teach afterwards. I do not think I would be happy in a bachelors level role working under PhDs who lead the research efforts, or in an industry role where I have very little autonomy, and I stand by that decision. I decided that was important to me and endured 5 years of BS getting another slip of paper. I am not far along enough in my career to know if a PhD was the right call, but so far it has worked out well for me and I am glad I did it.

[–] marcopoloman 0 points 1 point 2 points 1 year ago   (0 children)

I did my PhD a few years ago. It did get me a much higher paying teaching position.

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Philosophy academia

On this page:.

• Introduction
• 1 What this is based on
• 2 What is this career path?
• 3.1 You can do important research
• 3.2 You might be able to become a public intellectual
• 3.3 Being a philosopher allows for a great deal of intellectual freedom
• 4.1 Chances of success are low
• 4.2 The transferable career capital you gain is relatively poor
• 4.3 Career incentives often do not support impact
• 5.1 Testing your fit for philosophy
• 5.2 What are the best alternatives?
• 7.1 Getting in to the strongest programme you can
• 7.2 Choosing a programme
• 7.3 During your PhD
• 8.1 Options outside academia
• 9 Should you do an undergraduate degree in philosophy?
• 10.1 Top recommendations
• 10.2 Further recommendations

Some of the most important questions that arise for people trying to make the world a better place are philosophical. What does it mean to live a worthwhile life? What are our obligations to future generations? And how do we decide what to do when we are uncertain about the answers to these questions?

In our view, investigating philosophical questions like these — as well as other questions in ethics, epistemology, and other subfields of philosophy — can be extremely valuable. Thus for some people it can be high-impact to pursue philosophical research as a career. Professional philosophers can sometimes also have a substantial impact via advocacy as public intellectuals. For example, the priorities of the effective altruism movement have been — and continue to be — shaped in large part by philosophers.

However, the academic job market for philosophy is extremely challenging. Moreover, the career capital you acquire working toward a career in philosophy isn’t particularly transferable. For these reasons we currently believe that, for the large majority of people who are considering it, pursuing philosophy professionally is unlikely to be the best choice. Almost all professional philosophers who have written publicly on this topic advise against aiming to become a professional philosopher unless “there is nothing else you can imagine doing.” 1

We would recommend pursuing philosophy as a career only if you’ve tested your ability as a philosopher and you find that you are an especially good fit for it. Two tests we think are helpful here are: being able to get into a top-15 PhD programme, and being able to write a high quality research paper in philosophy before entering graduate school. Even among people who are able to do these things, we think most should only get a PhD in philosophy if they have already explored and rejected other career options.

• • Potential to do important research in a variety of neglected areas.
• • Potential for advocacy through teaching or public engagement.
• • If successful, a high degree of autonomy and intellectual satisfaction.
• • Extremely competitive, and job prospects are often dim even for PhDs who graduate from top programmes.
• • The PhD takes a long time to complete (4-8 years), and has poor transferable career capital compared to other similarly competitive options.
• • Highly autonomous work and long timelines for projects can be stressful or demotivating for some people.

Key facts on fit  

Because philosophy is so competitive, we would encourage most people to explore other career options before beginning a PhD. A high degree of personal fit for philosophy may suggest a good fit for other less professionally risky and potentially higher impact paths as well, such as a PhD in economics or a career shaping public policy. We discuss more options below .

If you do decide to get a philosophy PhD, you should probably have a bachelor’s or a master’s degree in philosophy. Learn about PhD programmes by reading about them online and by talking to professors and current graduate students at your home institution or the programmes you are considering. We provide tips for getting into the best programme you can later in this article .

Contenders for the top-15 PhD programmes in philosophy include: New York University, Oxford, Rutgers (New Brunswick), Princeton, Michigan (Ann Arbor), Pittsburgh, Yale, MIT, University of Southern California, Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, University of California (Berkeley), University of California (Los Angeles), and Toronto.

Note that this advice relates most directly to careers in philosophy in the US and the UK.

Sometimes recommended

We recommend this career if it is a better fit for you than our other recommended careers.

Review status

Based on a shallow investigation 

Table of Contents

What this is based on

This article was first drafted by Oxford philosophy professor Will MacAskill in 2015, and then greatly revised by NYU philosophy graduate student Arden Koehler in 2019. It is based on desktop research, consultation with supervisors, conventional wisdom within the field, and personal experience. It was checked over by another six past and present philosophy graduate students.

What is this career path?

Becoming a philosopher almost always means becoming an academic who specialises in a subfield of philosophical research, such as ethics, epistemology, or decision theory, and who publishes and typically teaches in that subfield.

It is a subset of ‘academic research’ as a whole, about which we also have a detailed career review .

A common timeline for a successful philosopher is: 5-7 years in a PhD, 2-3 years in postdocs or other short-term positions, and 5-9 years in a tenure-track position before gaining tenure. Usually, these positions are at different universities, often in different parts of the world.

Professional philosophers divide their time between research, teaching, and administrative work. The distribution of your time varies from institution to institution: at prestigious research universities, you may spend over 50% of your time on research; at teaching-oriented universities, you may spend less than 20% of your time on research.

The topics junior professors and PhD students can teach are constrained by university requirements, but they still have considerable discretion with regard to the specifics of their courses. Senior professors, especially in research seminars, can teach on whatever interests them.

Research in philosophy normally involves a lot of time on your own. Collaboration on articles does happen, but is the exception rather than the rule. Philosophy research can also go quite slowly — although there is wide variation here, it is common to spend a year writing a paper before submitting it to a journal, and the time it takes for a paper to go from initial submission to publication is in most cases between six months and a few years.

We’re most excited about philosophers focusing on ‘ global priorities research ‘, which is an emerging field primarily in philosophy and economics that investigates questions about what causes are most important to pursue, how we ought to pursue them, and how we can know the answers to these questions. We discuss high impact research topics more below .

Reasons to do a PhD in philosophy

You can do important research, ideas matter.

Philosophers can have extraordinarily large impacts on the world. A few examples from history illustrate the point: Aristotle’s influence on Christian ethics and medicine (among many other things!); John Locke’s influence on the founding and governance of the US; Karl Marx’s influence on communism; Friedrich Nietzsche’s unwitting influence on National Socialism; Ayn Rand’s influence on libertarianism; and Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell’s work on logic, which aided the development of computer science.

It can sometimes be hard to say whether a philosopher’s influence is positive or negative, but it is clear from some of these examples that negative as well as positive influence is possible. Unfortunately, whether or not harmful movements correctly interpret the views of philosophers that influence them is beside the point. The real risk of ideas being misappropriated by others lowers the expected value of developing them and is something that needs to be guarded against.

Examples of contemporary philosophers having broad, significant influence include: Judith Butler changing people’s understanding of gender and sexuality; Peter Singer shaping the animal welfare and effective altruism movements; and David Chalmers and Daniel Dennett reigniting debates around the nature of consciousness.

Global priorities research

What does it really mean to make the world a better place? The interdisciplinary field of ‘global priorities research’ within philosophy aims to break down this question and rigorously investigate the philosophical issues that arise in the course of answering it.

Because it can determine what we should aim to do morally, we think this kind of investigation can be extremely valuable. For example, even if we know we want to make things better for everyone, in trying to decide what we should do in order to achieve this goal, we run into questions like the following:

• How should we prioritise between interventions that improve human lives and interventions that improve non-human lives?
• What sorts of entities have the capacity for sentience, and how can we know?
• What should we do ethically, given uncertainty about the moral criteria by which we should evaluate our actions?
• What reasons do we have for and against thinking that we are living at an especially pivotal moment in history , such that our actions right now might have especially significant consequences?
• Is expected utility theory the correct approach for dealing with decisions that involve very small likelihoods of very positive or negative outcomes?
• What are the merits and drawbacks of the ‘ longtermist paradigm ‘ — the idea that because of the potential vastness of the future of sentient life, what matters most in ethical decision-making is an action’s impact on the long-term future?

Answers to these questions — among others — are crucial for determining which problems we should prioritise solving, and what actions we should take to do so. If we turn out to be wrong about which entities are sentient, for example, we could end up wasting a lot of effort trying to improve the experiences of beings that can’t feel, or, without realising it, we could do a lot of harm to beings that can in fact suffer.

The field of global priorities research spans multiple disciplines and subdisciplines. Philosophical subdisciplines linked to global priorities research include ethics, decision theory, political philosophy, epistemology, and philosophy of mind, among others. New research questions are still being uncovered, and interdisciplinary work may be particularly useful. Combining the analytic tools of philosophy with work in other disciplines — such as economics or biology — seems to us to be a fruitful and neglected type of research. 2

For more details and additional topics in global priorities research, see the Global Priorities Institute’s website and research agenda , and check out the 80,000 Hours Podcast’s episodes with Hilary Greaves , William MacAskill , and Michelle Hutchinson

Research on artificial intelligence

Another category of potentially valuable philosophical research topics, which overlaps partially with global priorities research, is research relevant for creating beneficial artificial intelligence (AI).

Possible topics include:

• How should our current preferences or moral beliefs shape the development of AI, and when does it make sense for us to defer to the preferences or moral beliefs of other agents, such as future people or the AI itself?
• What decision theory should guide us in the development of AI, and what decision theory should guide the behavior of potential advanced artificial agents?
• Is it important for AI systems to be able to understand normativity or normative concepts? If so, how might we ensure that they do?

Philosophers may also be able to contribute to investigating the merits of specific proposals for helping to create beneficial AI. For example, in an episode of our podcast AI researcher Paul Christiano discusses a question about the strategy ‘AI Safety via Debate’ for which the tools of philosophy may be useful:

• If a less informed/intelligent human judge is observing a debate on some question between two more informed/intelligent artificial agents, what debate rules or dynamics (if any) will reliably allow the judge to be able to know which one is right? ( See some recent work on this question. )

If you want to work on topics like these, you may be able to do so outside a philosophy department, for example at an AI lab, so it’s worth keeping in mind options outside of traditional academia .

Read more examples of potentially high-impact philosophy research topics .

We also encourage prospective graduate students to explore the possibility of doing valuable academic research on these topics or others in fields other than philosophy .

You might be able to become a public intellectual

If you’re successful as a professional philosopher, it’s also possible to have impact through advocacy rather than research. Although it’s hard to assess the impact of public intellectuals, and public engagement is not common among academic philosophers, the case for aiming to have an impact via becoming a public intellectual seems fairly strong to us. We suspect that public engagement among philosophers is rare in part because it’s rarely seriously attempted. There are philosophers who do regularly engage large, public audiences on ethically and politically important ideas. For example, Cornel West has a series of popular books , is a frequent podcast guest, and is a regular columnist for The Guardian ; Peter Singer has a large readership through his popular books and newspaper columns , and Julian Baggini has appeared on dozens of podcasts and radio shows, as well as at events. These philosophers are able to engage so many people due to a sizable public appetite for philosophy. BBC Radio 4 has a philosophy feature , and The New York Times regularly publishes short essays by professional philosophers in its column The Stone .

Moreover, popular works by philosophers William MacAskill , Toby Ord , Singer, and Nick Bostrom have influenced and helped to grow the effective altruism community. The ability of these people to draw substantial media attention to their work suggests there is interest in philosophical ideas relating to effective altruism among the public, which other academics may also be able to harness.

Other contemporary philosophers who have been influential as public intellectuals include Jürgen Habermas, Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Pogge, Michael Sandel, Slavoj Žižek, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Damon Horowitz.

Of course, it is not easy to become a public intellectual. You must usually already be successful professionally to be credible with journalists; and you must be engaging and industrious to get public attention. Moreover, as we discuss below, the career incentives for philosophers generally discourage spending time on public engagement. As a result, it is hard to both do very well in academic terms and do effective public engagement at the same time.

However, having a professor at a respected university willing to comment on a topic is highly appealing for journalists at many magazines, blogs, radio shows, and podcasts. Thus, if you can comment engagingly on philosophical topics that are of interest to the public, and if you can become known within journalism, it seems possible to have considerable impact through public advocacy. This is a topic on which we would like to do more research; if you are an outstanding fit for this path, 80,000 Hours would be interested in talking to you about your plans.

Being a philosopher allows for a great deal of intellectual freedom

Philosophers have much more autonomy than is typical in other professions. You don’t have total freedom, because your future prospects are determined largely by where and how much you publish, and that’s in part determined by which philosophical topics are currently highly valued in the field. But how, with whom, and on what schedule you work is often completely up to you, and you usually have a great deal of discretion over your research topics.

Philosophy offers greater autonomy even than other areas of academia , because you aren’t generally working in teams or with a lab, you don’t have to apply for grants as often as you do in many other disciplines, and because it is such a wide-ranging discipline — if you’re interested in x, you can probably work on “the philosophy of x.”

Many philosophers also find their work highly intellectually satisfying. You’re working on very deep, abstract problems, which you are largely free to choose for their interest and importance, and you get to discuss them with very intelligent, intellectually curious people. Moreover, discussing a wide range of philosophical ideas in colloquia and at other events is traditional in philosophy, so you will likely end up engaging with arguments from most corners of the discipline even if your own research is highly specialised.

Reasons not to do a PhD in philosophy

Chances of success are low.

The case for becoming a philosopher is dampened by the fairy low chances of being professionally successful. When professional philosophers discuss whether you should pursue a career as a philosopher, they almost uniformly refer to the poor odds of eventually landing a permanent academic position after a very lengthy training process.

Top PhD programmes have low acceptance rates. In general, you need strong grades, very strong letters of recommendation, and an impressive and original piece of philosophical writing to get in. Michigan Ann Arbor, for example, has an average acceptance rate around 6%; at UCLA, it is 8%; at Yale, 4 – 5% of applicants were accepted last year. 3

The completion rate for students admitted to these programmes seems to be about 75% on average. 4

Based on data collected as part of the Academic Placement Data and Analysis project between 2012 and 2016, the chance of getting a permanent academic post — including but not limited to tenure-track — at a research-focused university after graduating from one of these programmes approaches 30%. 5

The odds of doing important philosophical research as a professor are a bit lower again, because you can get on the wrong research track, become disillusioned, be limited by academic incentives, or burn out. 6 But by this point we would guess you have something like a 75% chance of contributing to useful research.

Multiplying each of these figures through, our very rough estimate is that at the point of applying to a top PhD programme someone has a 1-2% chance of becoming a successful and impactful philosophical researcher, rising to just over 20% if they’re admitted. 7

About 25% of graduates from top programmes take roles at non-PhD granting institutions. However, these roles are often heavily teaching-focused and allow little time for research. If your goal is to have an impact through research, taking one of these roles may make that very difficult.

These figures should be compared with the fact that prospective philosophy PhD students have higher GRE scores for verbal reasoning and analytical writing than students in any other field, suggesting that they would be likely to have very good prospects had they pursued a different, less competitive, path.

However, if you think you have a considerably better than average chance of being able to do excellent research, and that the impact you can have as a professional philosopher is high relative to your other options, it may well be worth applying to top programmes to see if you can get in. (We discuss some ways of assessing your prospects below .) And if, after testing out some alternatives, you still think it stands out as the most promising path for you, you may want to accept an offer as well.

Outside of the better PhD programmes, the chances of having a successful academic research career decline substantially. Out of 133 institutions surveyed as part of the Academic Placement Data and Analysis project , 90 had a placement rate at research-focused institutions under 10%, and 41 had a rate of 0%.

It’s worth noting that, although disciplines vary significantly in this regard, most other areas of academia are also extremely competitive .

The transferable career capital you gain is relatively poor

Getting a philosophy PhD is weak in terms of transferable career capital compared to other options that are likely open to someone who can enter a top philosophy programme.

A philosophy PhD is a big time commitment: in the US, a PhD with a concurrent master’s degree typically takes 5 to 7 years; in the UK, the PhD typically takes 3 to 4 years, but you are expected to have completed a master’s degree before starting.

In a PhD you develop clear writing, reasoning, and communication abilities that are very useful in many areas. However, you will also need to spend much of your time gaining skills and knowledge that are very specialised to academic philosophy and not transferable to other areas. The credential you’ll receive and personal connections you’ll build are also substantially less useful if you decide to leave philosophy academia.

If one completes a PhD in philosophy and then pursues a different career, it becomes very difficult to re-enter academia. This is because hiring committees care a lot about your recent publication record and consider a “stale” PhD to be a bad sign.

In contrast, having worked outside of academia for a few years after your undergraduate studies is not in general counted negatively at the PhD application stage. This generates a very strong case, in our view, for exploring other career options before entering a PhD programme. 8

All that said, a PhD in philosophy is an impressive credential. Because it is difficult to get into a strong programme and because it requires talent, grit, and hard work to complete, a PhD in philosophy is a strong general signal of aptitude and dedication. Though it doesn’t seem that common for people who have finished a PhD in philosophy and gone on to a non-academic career to regard the PhD as the best thing they could have done with the time they spent on it, it does provide a way to stand out when applying for other jobs.

One unique reason for doing a philosophy PhD may be that it can help you think in a clearer and more critical way about important topics, including how you should live your life. Which problems you choose to focus your career on radically affects the value you are able to add to the world. And in our view, the choice of which causes to support is highly dependent on which views in ethics you think get closest to the truth. It’s possible that studying philosophy can help you think more rigorously about these kinds of important questions.

However, this seems to be a relatively weak reason to do a philosophy PhD. For one thing, the evidence that studying philosophy improves critical thinking in particular more than other fields is lacking. 9 And even if studying philosophy can improve your thinking on important topics, it seems likely that you can get much of this benefit from reading and discussing philosophy while pursuing a different career, or from studying philosophy as an undergraduate.

Doing a master’s course in philosophy is a shorter time commitment than a PhD, and if your credentials are not good enough to get into a top PhD programme at the end of your undergraduate degree, doing well in a master’s can improve your chances. But master’s degrees can also cost a lot: £11,800 — £55,000 or $15,000 — $70,000 depending on the programme .

The Oxford BPhil is widely regarded as the best master’s programme in the field, and many people continue on from it to top PhD programmes. Many BPhil students obtain financial aid of some kind, but without it the BPhil costs £25,140 for EU citizens and £50,765 for people from outside the EU.

It is usually possible to leave a funded PhD programme after 2 years with a master’s degree, though not all programmes support this option. And it is not considered appropriate to begin a PhD programme if you plan to leave after 2 years.

Career incentives often do not support impact

The professional incentives you face as a philosopher rarely push you toward more socially impactful work.

The main thing that helps your career in philosophy is publishing lots of rigorous papers arguing for theses that are novel, especially on topics that are interesting and intellectually challenging. Defending conventional views, supporting others’ work, or researching applications of existing work is less prestigious, even if in many cases it is more socially valuable.

Seeking to do high-impact research means being less focused on doing work that is inherently interesting to others, novel, and intellectually impressive. Since these qualities are highly prized in philosophy, it may be especially hard to succeed professionally working on questions that are chosen for their practical importance.

On the other hand, interest in and funding for global priorities research seems to be increasing. This is particularly true at Oxford, which is unusually supportive of applied ethics and which houses the Global Priorities Institute, which employs and supports global priorities researchers. But because it is a new field, the prospects for global priorities research elsewhere in academia are not as clear.

Interest in philosophical research relevant to AI is also clearly growing. For example, the Cambridge-based Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence supports philosophical research related to AI safety and ethics, and a new Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence will be a major part of the forthcoming Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities at Oxford.

There also seems to be an increasing focus on social impact at the institutional level that may enhance incentives for highly practical research. For example, the Research Excellence Framework — which drives considerable funding for research in the UK — now bases 25% of its assessment of university research on the potential for social impact.

The professional incentives around being a public intellectual are likewise murky. If you are very successful as a public intellectual, this seems to be good for your career as a philosopher; but getting there may be risky. Since philosophers are professionally rewarded primarily for producing original and often quite specialised research, pursuing public engagement risks being detrimental to your career, both by taking time away from this kind of research and by potentially creating a perception that you’re less intellectually rigorous or focused in your work.

Is this path for you?

People who do well in philosophy are very intellectually curious and are drawn to a philosophical way of thinking, which involves a willingness to think abstractly, to state arguments clearly and logically, to approach problems from new perspectives, and to challenge assumptions that most people take for granted. Strong verbal and writing skills, as well as a capacity for independent research, are essential. For some sub-areas, you need strong quantitative reasoning skills as well.

If you haven’t already, you will want to learn about philosophy independently — from books, podcasts, and other sources — in order to explore the subject. Some good introductory books are Think by Simon Blackburn and Normative Ethics by Shelly Kagan. One of the most influential books among philosophers thinking about how to do the most good is Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons . Popular philosophy podcasts include Philosophy Bites and Partially Examined Life . Pea Soup , Daily Nous , and The Philosopher’s Cocoon are helpful blogs for learning about professional philosophy. For a broader and more advanced introduction to topics in philosophy, you can read articles in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , which is an unusually comprehensive and well-respected online source for philosophical issues, positions, and debates.

You can also listen to the 80,000 Hours Podcast episodes with Hilary Greaves , William MacAskill , and Amanda Askell to learn about their research and experience as professional philosophers working on global priorities research.

Academic philosophy is still mostly male and mostly white, which may add challenges for women or people of colour 10 , though active work is being done in the philosophical community to improve this. Two organisations working to improve diversity and inclusiveness in academic philosophy are Minorities and Philosophy ( MAP ), which has chapters across the UK and the US, and the New York Society for Women in Philosophy ( NYSWIP ).

Testing your fit for philosophy

Unfortunately, it’s hard to judge ahead of getting your PhD whether you’ll be a successful philosophical researcher. However, we think two reasonable tests are the ability to write a high quality philosophical research paper and the ability to get into a top-15 PhD programme.

Try to write an original piece of philosophical research before graduate school — as a term paper for an advanced course, as part of an undergraduate thesis, or in your spare time. If you can, work the piece into a thorough, polished research paper between 4,000 and 10,000 words — the length of a professional journal article — and discuss it with professors you know, especially any who are recently tenured or who are interested in high-impact research. Ask them to tell you honestly what they think. If they say that the piece has the potential to be published at some point in a respected journal, that is a good sign.

If you are writing an undergraduate thesis, you also might also try submitting it to the undergraduate thesis prize offered by the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research , which also offers funding opportunities for PhD students.

If you do decide to apply to PhD programmes, you can use this piece of writing, or a part of it, as your writing sample.

As for getting into a top programme, we discuss that more below .

Other indicators of personal fit for philosophy that you can look for before you begin a PhD include:

• Being obsessed with working out answers to important and difficult philosophical questions
• Being able to work mostly without guidance from others
• Doing well in graduate courses — professors will sometimes let you take these as an undergraduate if you ask
• Having established relationships with professors who are fans of your work

Some suggestions for how academics in general can assess their fit at different career stages can be found here .

What are the best alternatives?

People who are able to enter a top PhD programme in philosophy are likely capable of doing well in a number of other careers, many of which have high expected impact and better chances of professional success.

One area to consider is jobs in policy. We think these careers are well worth considering for someone who wants to maximise their impact. Someone with the strong verbal skills needed to succeed in philosophy could likely succeed in many of the options in this area .

Another path to consider is retraining to enter another academic field. If you did well in mathematics in high school (as many philosophers did), then you may be able to enter economics or machine learning , which are two of our most recommended paths due to their relevance to global problems and their strong back-up options. This will usually involve studying maths on your own and then applying for a master’s degree in the area.

See below for more career options outside academia.

Based on this summary and a quick check with professional philosophers, salaries for philosophers in the US and UK seem to be roughly the following:

• PhD students: about £15,000 – £28,000, or $19,000 – $35,000, per year
• Postdocs: about £24,000 – £47,000, or $30,000 – $60,000, per year
• Tenure-track professors typically start at about £33,000 – £75,000 or $42,000 – $95,000 per year, and gradually progress up to about £99,000 – £158,000 or $125,000 – $200,000 per year (though these higher salaries are generally only offered in the US).

The most well-paid philosophers receive over $300,000 per year, but this is very rare. In general, you get paid more in the US than in the UK.

I’ve decided to go into philosophy. What should I do?

Talk to professors and current graduate students who know your work about going into philosophy. They can help you get a sense of your chances of getting into a strong programme, as well as help you develop a plan for where and how to apply.

Getting in to the strongest programme you can

The most important factors for getting in to a philosophy PhD programme are:

• Your grades from philosophy courses — these should be almost entirely A’s
• Your letters of recommendation from professors
• Your writing sample (which should be approximately 3,750-5,000 words)

Your writing sample is the single most important part of your application. You should seek extensive feedback on it from graduate students and professors, ideally as part of a thesis or an advanced course.

You will also have to write a personal statement and submit GRE scores, but these are less important. A sub-par GRE score or a bad personal statement can hurt you, but a very good one won’t help you much. For top philosophy programmes, GRE scores in Verbal tend to be in the 95th percentile and above. Quantitative GRE scores should be similar if you intend to do something more technical, but can be in the 80s if not.

If you aren’t sure about applying for a graduate programme in the last year of your undergraduate degree, it may be wise to spend a year trying to write a piece of research in your free time and getting feedback on it. If you find this to be very unpleasant or unreasonably difficult, this might be a sign that you should pursue other options. On the other hand, if writing the piece goes well, you can use it as a writing sample.

Choosing a programme

Throughout this article we’ve referred to the ‘top-15 PhD programmes’ in philosophy. Which are those?

There are a different measures you could use to evaluate PhD programmes, but we think the most useful single measure in this context is an assessment of faculty quality. Faculty quality rankings track programme prestige generally and are highly correlated with placement into jobs at the best research-oriented institutions. For faculty quality ratings we turn to the Leiter Reports , which gives us the following top 15 programmes for philosophy in the English-speaking world:

New York University, Oxford, Rutgers (New Brunswick), Princeton, Michigan (Ann Arbor), Pittsburgh, Yale, MIT, University of Southern California, Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, University of California (Berkeley), University of California (Los Angeles), and Toronto.

While we think this is a helpful guide, it should not be taken as a definitive, all-around top-15 ranking. When you look into faculty quality in just ethics or applied ethics, for instance, the list looks somewhat different .

It’s also worth noting that you don’t have to go to a top-ranked programme to have a successful academic career, and some programmes that are not as highly ranked stand out in terms of doing research on important problems. For example, we know of several students at The Australian National University who have successfully focused their work on topics in global priorities research.

Finally, while they are correlated, faculty quality doesn’t perfectly predict programmes’ placement of graduates into research-focused institutions. If we ranked programmes by their placement rates into these universities, we would get a top-15 of: University of California (Berkeley), Pittsburgh, University of Sydney, Rutgers (New Brunswick), University of Cambridge, Princeton, University of California (Irvine), MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard, New York University, Oxford, University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), University of Pennsylvania, and then Yale, University of York, and University of Chicago tied for 15th. 11

All that said, attending a programme with a top faculty quality ranking does provide significant research and professional opportunities. And because these programmes are typically the most competitive, being able to get into one of them seems to us to be a useful concrete test of your fit for philosophy.

Other things to consider when choosing where to apply, or where to go if you get into more than one program, include: how much teaching it requires (this can range from 4 semesters to 10), how many years of funding it guarantees (which can range from 5 to 8 at US universities; funding is generally not guaranteed at all in the UK), and the range of research areas faculty and graduate students there are interested in. Also consider carefully whether the programme will be a good environment for pursuing high-impact research. Faculty and peers who consider social impact to be a compelling reason to pursue one research question over another won’t be available everywhere.

To the extent that you intend to work on an unusual topic — and many topics within global priorities research are still somewhat unusual to work on — the openness and flexibility of your department matter more. This is especially important if you have an interest in doing cross-disciplinary work, such as research that uses both empirical methods from economics or social science and philosophical analysis.

Ultimately, graduate students and professors at a prospective programme, particularly if they are less than 10 years out from their PhD, are your best resource for finding out if a particular programme will be a good fit for you.

During your PhD

While you are a PhD student, you should focus on writing the best possible dissertation and sending out articles to top-tier journals for publication as soon as you are able to. When you are on the philosophy job market, your publication record will be very important. Often it is easiest to adapt your first articles from chapters of your dissertation.

According to the Leiter Reports, the most prestigious general philosophy journals are: Philosophical Review , Mind , and Nous . For ethics and political philosophy in particular , they are: Ethics , Philosophy and Public Affairs , and the Journal of Political Philosophy . Getting an article published in a highly-regarded journal is an extremely competitive process, but it can help you a lot on the job market.

If you can, find a PhD topic that’s both potentially of great value to the world, and which will also look good when you apply for jobs. Fortunately, topics in ethics and political philosophy often fit this profile. There are a number of important questions in these areas, and there are also more jobs available in ethics and political philosophy than there are in other subfields. Some useful advice for finding a high-impact research topic can be found here .

Currently, the best university for pursuing global priorities research specifically is the University of Oxford. The Global Priorities Institute at Oxford hosts seminars and talks on global priorities research, and PhD students from other institutions can visit during their degree through Oxford’s Early Career Conference Programme . Visiting Oxford though participation in this programme or by other means can be a great way to get to know the issues in global priorities research and the people working on them. 12

If you might try to become a public intellectual, test out writing for a popular audience during your PhD, for instance by keeping a blog or by submitting to online magazines, such as Aeon or The Conversation .

What if you’ve already done (or are currently doing) a PhD in philosophy?

If you want to stay in academia, you can probably have greater impact by focusing your research on the kinds of topics in global priorities research discussed above , or on other socially impactful questions. However, insofar as shifting your focus to socially important research seems likely to derail your professional advancement, it may be advisable to wait until after you have tenure to do so.

Another possibility is focusing your time on public engagement, such as by talking to journalists or podcast producers, or by writing books for popular audiences. Even if most of what you talk about in public forums is different from the focus of your academic research, this can be a high-impact option. Many ideas that are mainstream within academic philosophy and thus unlikely to impress fellow researchers, such as arguments for the moral status of nonhuman animals or against pure time discounting , remain relatively unknown among the general public. Although, as we noted above , pursuing public engagement in your career is not without risk, popularising these kinds of important ideas is one path to impact.

You may also be able to have an impact though teaching, as there are many ideas in philosophy that are important for young people to think about. Although your best students will often learn about these ideas from somewhere else if they don’t learn about them from you, if you focus on teaching the ideas you think are really important you may be able to have a significant impact on what some members of the next generation of thinkers and leaders do with their lives. Check out this syllabus to see an example of a philosophy course designed for teaching high-impact topics.

One path that philosophy PhDs sometimes fall into if things don’t go well on the job market at first is adjuncting part time while applying for full-time jobs. As many universities are hiring fewer full-time faculty, a greater proportion of available jobs are adjunct jobs. But these positions tend to pay very badly, allow very little time for research, and often do not help or can even hurt you on the tenure-track job market. If you find yourself deciding between adjuncting and exploring options outside academia, we think you should seriously consider choosing the latter.

Options outside academia

If you want to work outside academia, there are a few possibilities for which the skills you built in philosophy may be helpful. The array of people with PhDs in philosophy (or who started a PhD but dropped out) who are pursuing other, potentially high-impact career paths is somewhat encouraging. You can see a few examples we’ve heard about here .

We discussed some careers above that might be a good fit for people who are attracted to philosophy. Here are some more options outside academia in which having a PhD in philosophy might prove helpful:

• Working for an effective nonprofit (Indeed, one of our own staff members, Michelle Hutchinson, has a PhD in philosophy!)
• Working in journalism or other non-fiction writing
• Working in a policy role
• Research outside academia, such as in a think tank or foundation

We think work on issues related to AI safety or AI policy have the potential to be particularly high-impact for someone well suited to them. Some AI labs, including DeepMind and Open AI , have divisions for research on philosophical questions about AI (although working at leading AI labs could, in some cases, cause harm ). And some research projects at AI safety organizations like MIRI , the Center for Human Compatible AI , and AI Impacts also make important use of philosophical thinking and expertise.

Check out this 80,000 Hours Podcast episode with Amanda Askell to learn about her transition from Philosophy PhD to policy researcher at Open AI, and this 80,000 Hours article for the case for working in AI policy.

Should you do an undergraduate degree in philosophy?

In our view, philosophy is a good subject to study at the undergraduate level because it teaches you to write clearly, makes you practice thinking logically and abstractly, and encourages you to consider certain issues in ethics that seem to us to be crucial in determining how to live your life.

However, for most people we are more excited about them studying philosophy when it is combined with a major in a more quantitative subject, such as maths, computer science, or economics. Of course not everyone who would excel in philosophy will do well in more quantitative classes, and — especially if you plan to go to law school or another graduate programme — grades can be important. But if you think you might enjoy a more quantitative subject, we encourage you to explore it: it will provide you with valuable career options you likely won’t otherwise have. Moreover, the tools that philosophy provides you with can often help you think more clearly and deeply about issues that arise in other disciplines.

If a joint option isn’t available, then lean toward doing something more quantitative all else equal. It’s usually easier to enter philosophy after your undergraduate degree than it is to do philosophy and then transition to a more quantitative subject later.

Enjoy this career review?

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Top recommendations

• Our career review of academic research as a whole
• Podcast: Hilary Greaves on harnessing the brainpower of academia to tackle the most important research questions
• Our career review of global priorities research

Further recommendations

Other resources and articles.

• Examples of promising philosophy research topics
• PhilPapers — an online archive of published academic philosophy
• How to be a high-impact philosopher, Part I
• How to be a high-impact philosopher, Part II
• How to be a high-impact philosopher, Part III
• Utilitarianism.net — an online moral philosophy textbook cocreated by William MacAskill
• Video: Talks from the Global Priorities Institute
• Problems in AI alignment that philosophers could potentially contribute to
• Should you become a professional philosopher (now)?
• Should you go to grad school?
• Should we discourage undergraduates from going into philosophy?
• The Philosopher’s Cocoon
• Karen Kelsky’s blog
• You and Your Research — a famous talk by the mathematician Richard Hamming about working on important research topics
• Master’s degrees for Economics PhDs

80,000 Hours podcast episodes

• Will MacAskill on moral uncertainty, utilitarianism & how to avoid being a moral monster
• Will MacAskill on balancing frugality with ambition, whether you need longtermism, and mental health under pressure
• Tackling the ethics of infinity, being clueless about the effects of our actions, and having moral empathy for intellectual adversaries, with philosopher Dr Amanda Askell
• Jonathan Birch on the edge cases of sentience and why they matter
• Dr Owen Cotton-Barratt on why scientists should need insurance, PhD strategy & what if AI progresses fast
• Prof Yew-Kwang Ng on anticipating effective altruism decades ago & how to make a much happier world
• Dr Hutchinson on global priorities research & shaping the ideas of intellectuals
• Andreas Mogensen on whether effective altruism is just for consequentialists
• Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value
• Bob Fischer on comparing the welfare of humans, chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and more
• Eric Schwitzgebel on whether the US is conscious

Notes and references

• A collection of views from professional philosophers on becoming a philosopher can be found here . ↩
• Doing high quality interdisciplinary work is challenging and uncommon, partly because it requires mastery in multiple disciplines, and partly because there are few institutional resources available for it. However, this may be changing. The Global Priorities Institute, for instance, fosters cooperation between philosophers and economists. If you are determined to work with thinkers in other disciplines, you will likely be able to do so. ↩
• Yale received over 300 applicants last year for its PhD programme; Michigan Ann Arbor has received a 5-year average of 256 per year. Most programmes do not publicize the number of students they admit each year, but in typical cases the figure ranges between 10 and 16. This yields acceptance rates of around 4% or 5% last year for Yale and an average of around 6% for Michigan Ann Arbor. UCLA has full programme statistics here . ↩
• Most programmes give no data on completion rates, some that do give incomplete data, and rates vary considerably from programme to programme and from year to year. This estimate is therefore very uncertain. It is based on information from five top programmes: New York University, Michigan, MIT, University of Southern California, Stanford, and UCLA. You can see our data and calculations here . It’s also worth noting that in general, completion rates are likely higher at more prestigious institutions, and that it’s not true of everyone who drops out of graduate school that in retrospect they shouldn’t have started — though this seems to be the more common case. ↩
• These estimates are based on data from the ADPA project from the period of 2012-2016, adjusted to take account of post-docs leading to permanent positions, for the Leiter Reports ‘ top-15 programmes in philosophy. Some errors have been found in the APDA data in the past. For that reason and others, the figures here should be taken as highly approximate. You can see our data and adjustments here . ↩
• It’s also worth noting that even at PhD granting institutions it can be hard to get much research done if the teaching load is too great. Many find it challenging to find time for research if they are teaching a 4-4 (that is, four courses each semester). A 5-5 would make research close to impossible. ↩
• These estimates involve a lot of uncertainty. If your chance of going to a top programme conditional on applying is somewhere around 0.07 (most people who apply apply to more than one programme; however, many top programmes have admission rates slightly lower than 7% and acceptance to different programmes is highly correlated), and your chance of getting a permanent position at a PhD granting institution conditional on being accepted into a top programme is close to 0.22 (this is the nearly 30% approximate chance of such a job conditional on graduating, multiplied by an approximated 0.75 programme completion rate), and your chance of being a successful and impactful researcher in the long-term conditional on having a permanent position — meaning you are able to stay in the profession and your research turns out to be useful — is something like 0.75, then your chance of doing all this conditional on applying is somewhere close to 1%. This estimate should be adjusted somewhat upward however based on the chance of doing very successful research while coming from or working at a wider range of universities. ↩
• However, if when you are at the end of your undergraduate degree you think you might pursue a PhD in philosophy later on, it can be a good idea to talk with professors and ask for letters of recommendation before you leave, while their memories of you are fresh. ↩
• Some argue that it has not been established that studying philosophy improves reasoning outside of philosophical questions at all . For discussion, see this Daily Nous article. ↩
• The data here are a bit spotty, but the percentage of tenure or tenure-track positions at top-50 departments held by women looks to be about 25%. Women get around 30% of philosophy PhDs. People of colour made up around 10% of full-time faculty at all degree-granting institutions in the US in 2003 (the most recent year from which we could find data) and currently get around 15% of PhDs. Compare: people of colour make up an estimated 40% of the US resident population. These dynamics can sometimes make women and people of colour in academic philosophy feel out of place . ↩
• If you are applying to PhD programmes, it is probably worth exploring more the data available on different programmes. You can find the full results of the Academic Placement Data and Analysis project here , and the Gourmet Report here . Two alternative programme rankings can be found here and here . ↩
• Note: one author of this piece participated in the Global Priorities Institute’s Early Career Conference Programme in summer 2019. ↩

Psy.D. Vs. Ph.D.: Which Is The Right Fit For You?

Updated: Jan 2, 2024, 3:22pm

Committing to a Ph.D. or a Psy.D. program can have a significant impact on your career path. Both will prepare you for a career in psychology , but there are significant differences between the two programs you should know about. In general, a Ph.D. in psychology focuses more on research and a Psy.D. focuses on practical application.

While both programs can lead to becoming a licensed psychologist , taking a closer look at what each degree track will provide will help you determine whether a Ph.D. or Psy.D. is best for you.

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What Is a Ph.D. in Psychology?

A Ph.D. in psychology, or a Doctor of Philosophy in psychology, is a doctoral degree that primarily focuses on training students in scientific research. Compared to a Psy.D, the Ph.D. is more common and can be found at many public and private universities.

Students in a Ph.D. in psychology program can expect to obtain and build on the knowledge and skills within general psychology or in a concentration. The American Psychological Association (APA) has an extensive list of subfields that range from clinical psychology to climate and environmental psychology.

Benefits of a Ph.D. in Psychology

A significant benefit of a Ph.D. in psychology is that it offers more financial aid options. Many programs offer scholarships, teaching assistantships or even full or partial tuition remission to cover expenses. Some programs also have research grants and fellowships that are sponsored by government agencies and private companies that you can apply for and become part of a research team.

Another benefit is that some programs offer training in both applied practice and in research, rather than focusing heavily on application as a Psy.D. program would. Having dual training may provide you more opportunities on the job market.

What Is a Psy.D.?

A Psy.D., or a Doctor of Psychology, is also a doctoral degree that focuses on application. A Psy.D. program prepares students to provide services for patients and clients, rather than a focus on research.

Unlike a Ph.D., Psy.D. programs are often found in professional schools of psychology that may be university-based, free-standing or in medical or health and science institutions.

Benefits of a Psy.D.

While a Psy.D. may not have the same financial benefits of a Ph.D. program, a Psy.D. will give you more experience with patients earlier in your program. Candidates will often begin coursework and clinical training in the first year of their program.

A Psy.D. program, such as one for aspiring clinical psychologists , features an intensive focus on client-focused skills. Courses can include supervision and consultation, treatment and assessment and other classes that will cover disorders.

In some Psy.D. programs, you may be expected to complete a doctoral-level research project instead of a dissertation.

What to Consider When Choosing a Program

The first consideration you should make when choosing a program is the kind of work you want to pursue post-graduation. Do you want to do research or teach? Do you want to provide services to clients and patients?

Here are some considerations you should make when making the big decision.

Look at Time Spent in School

Both Ph.D. and Psy.D. programs require a heavy investment of your time in school. Programs often require applicants to have an undergraduate and master’s degree. However, some programs have combined master’s and doctorate degrees, reducing years of education and allowing students to enter the workforce sooner.

Students can expect to spend five years in school before obtaining a degree, with four years of coursework and one year of internship. Many candidates, however, take between five to seven years to graduate.

Find Your Focus

Your academic focus and concentration choice may sway your decision in applying for one doctoral degree over the other.

Concentrations in a Psy.D program are typically in clinical, counseling, school or industrial-organizational psychology . In contrast, the options of subfields within a Ph.D. program are more broad and focus heavily on research and experimentation to build knowledge within a discipline.

Consider Your Career Path

Considering your career path or interests will help you decide whether a Ph.D. or Psy.D. is right for you. While the most familiar psychology careers are commonly found in education and healthcare, psychologists are needed in other industries, such as business and technology. These in-demand specialties contribute to high psychologist salaries .

Accreditation

Accreditation of your Ph.D. or Psy.D. program ensures that your program is recognized by the governing bodies for licensure. While completing an accredited program will not guarantee you employment or licensure, it will equip you with necessary skills and knowledge.

The APA has a tool to help students find accredited doctoral programs, as well as internships and postdoctoral residencies across the country.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What can you do with psy.d..

A Psy.D. focuses on working directly with patients to provide psychological services. For example, a clinical Psy.D. will prepare students to provide mental and behavioral healthcare to individuals and families across all demographics and over individuals’ lifespans.

Which psychology field is most in-demand?

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects strong job growth for psychologists from 2022 to 2032, with a 6% increase overall. Clinical and counseling psychologists will see the highest demand, with an expected growth rate of 11%, followed by industrial-organizational psychologists at 6%.

How long does it take to earn a Ph.D. in psychology?

Many Ph.D. programs project a five year completion time. However, many students can take upwards of seven years.

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Brandon Galarita is a freelance writer and K-12 educator in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is passionate about technology in education, college and career readiness and school improvement through data-driven practices.

History Phd: Is it really worth it?

<p>I’m a history major, in my sophomore year of college. I’ve been looking at numerous careers post-college, and one of them is a history professor or historian. Is it worth it to get a Phd in History and become a professor? Does it pay well, and what exactly do you get to do? Do you publish a lot, write many books, travel to seminars, etc? All help is greatly appreciated. (Btw, I’m interested in general U.S. History).</p>

<p>Also, would it be better to just get a Master’s in History, or not?</p>

<p>Dont bother with a PhD unless you want to work in academe.</p>

<p>No, a pHD in History is completely worthless. </p>

<p>Careers in academia are extremely competitive and you’re more likely to come out working an entry level job, such as a cashier at Walmart.</p>

<p>If you somehow feel that a pHD in History would be a fulfilling aspect of your life and your family has money to throw around, I wouldn’t see the harm in working toward a degree. </p>

<p>Just be aware of your career prospects and keep your expectations in line.</p>

<p> Is it worth it to get a Phd in History and become a professor? </p>

<p>So first, you have to separate those two things.</p>

<p>The job market in history is <em>abysmal</em>. Many people are finding that once they finish their history PhD, they cannot find a tenure-track position, so they end up teaching adjunct classes for low pay or no benefits - or they do something that they didn’t have to use their degree for. I don’t think it’s all getting down to Wal-Mart cashier level - certainly some history PhDs are doing that, but most aren’t. Even still, few people want to spend 7 years earning a degree they’re not even going to use.</p>

<p>So you have to consider whether it’s worth it for you to earn a PhD in history knowing that chances are quite slim that you’ll get a tenure track position as a professor. They get better if you go to a top history program, but they are extremely competitive.</p>

<p>Now for the second part.</p>

<p>*Does it pay well, and what exactly do you get to do? Do you publish a lot, write many books, travel to seminars, etc? All help is greatly appreciated. (Btw, I’m interested in general U.S. History).</p>

<p>First-year assistant history professors can usually expect to make around $50-60K, depending on their university and the area of the country in which they live. It’s lower in places with lower CoL and salaries, obviously, and higher in urban areas.</p>

<p>History professors do scholarship and research in history, in addition to teaching history courses. You do all of the things you just listed: you will be expected to publish a lot (in history I guess that would include monographs, a few books, and some scholarly articles in historical journals), travel to present at seminars, and participate in the grander discussion of your field. You will also be expected to teach some courses. How many courses you teach will be dependent on the university - if you teach at a top-flight research institution you may only be expected to teach a 1/0 or 1/1 load (that means 1 class in the fall, and 0 or 1 class in the spring). If you teach at a middling research university, maybe 3/2 or 2/2. If you teach at a more teaching heavy institution, you’d be expected to teach a 3/3 or 3/4 load, or higher.</p>

<p>However, the kind and caliber of your research will also change based upon that. While you will be expected to do research at a teaching institution, the kind of research you’d be expected to do will be different than if you were at a Harvard or Yale.</p>

<p>Explore all other options is my first piece of advice. Second, read through American Historical Association’s publications on graduate school and jobs with a history PhD. </p>

<p>US history is the most competitive field. Largely, IMO, I is because so many American students don’t have strong language skills to do a non-US field. You really have to work at your languages to be competitive. Think about why you want to do American history and not any other geographical field. </p>

<p>As for the profession, julliet has the facts right. American historians rarely travel abroad for research and conferences.</p>

<p>My DH wanted to be a history prof. back in the early 70’s. He went to a top PhD program, but saw brilliant students around him graduating and taking one year temporary assignments in tiny rural outposts, if they were able to find jobs at all. (no offense to the rural posters…lol) Academia has always been difficult and very political…that’s something many students don’t understand until they get to the graduate level. Don’t think that just because it’s a university and not a private company that politics don’t exist.</p>

<pre><code>DH quit grad school after he passed his generals exams, with what they call an “all but dissertation”, or an M.A., on the diploma. He’s now making a very good living in business doing something completely unrelated to his major. He still loves history, but he wanted to support a family. Times were tough then, but I think they are even tougher now. Honestly, the only people that should be going into academia right now, in my humble opinion, are those who truly can’t imagine doing anything else. There are so few jobs, especially in the humanities. </code></pre>

<p>I got sick of my PhD in Pol Sci in like a semester. I am sticking with it until MPhil level just to have some return on my investment. Oh, and Grad School has fine honies.</p>

<p>Which makes it all the more imperative that, perhaps even more so than a humanities undergrad degree, a humanities PhD degree should best be pursued at a school with an elite brand name and high-powered alumni network and recruiting base. Qualifying schools would be the Ivies, especially Harvard, but also even those with relatively weaker graduate programs, Stanford, Berkeley, Duke, Chicago, and the like. That way, even if you can’t find a desirable academic position, you can still be competitive for a strategy consulting or - yes - even a finance position. {If Ibanks will hire Harvard history undergrads, why not Harvard history PhD’s?} </p>

<p>You can also use a PhD program as an opportunity to learn marketable skills, even in an ostensibly unmarketable discipline such as history. For example, some history scholars utilize statistical analyses to prove/disprove various hypotheses. If that is the type of research that you perform, then that’s a golden opportunity for you to develop useful and marketable skills with a statistical software package such as R, SAS, or Stata that you can utilize as a fallback career. Nowadays, even an entry-level worker who is SAS-certified can earn a highly respectable salary. </p>

<p>As for whether you should spend time developing such skills as opposed to concentrating on your research in order to obtain an academic position, while I don’t know the history job market well, I would surmise that by year 4-5 of your PhD program, you probably have a decent sense of whether you have a truly legitimate shot on the market or not. If you don’t, then that’s the time to begin developing marketable skills while still finishing your PhD.</p>

<p>Sakky, what a great response!</p>

<p>Instead of discouraging outright a difficult career path that he wants to pursue, teach him to go for it in such a way that there is a viable Plan B so that it would NOT be a waste of time regardless. </p>

<p>Bravo!</p>

<p>There is a really good article online called “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go!” by Thomas Benton. It does not, as I recall, address history in particular. But, in some ways, the market is worse in history. English PhDs can find nontenure track full time jobs teaching the composition requirement, and foreign language PhDs can find nontenure traxk full time jobs teaching introductory language classes; but there is no such equivalent for history. Here is thelink to the article: [Graduate</a> School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education](<a href=“ Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go ”> Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go )</p>

<p>Sakky’s answer is SO full of errors. S/he is not in the discipline and has no idea what is going on these days. I’m not even going to go into details because I’m not going to go into an endless debate that Sakky seems to like to start around here.</p>

<p>Agree with Juillet except that the 1/0 or 1/1 is reserved for the topmost profs with reps extablished over many years (or decades,) at schools with high endowments. Mid-schools can expect 6 or so classes/year and my friend at a CSU teaches 8/year. Until you have been at it a while, you mostly teach surveys- same material over and over, to a bunch of kids with a variety of intended majors and, in many cases, small or middling comprehension or interest. And, each class needing papers and exams graded, plus all the official school administrative duties (faculty meetings and an expectation to serve on committees.) Then, for tenure and standing in the field, an expectation of profesional productivity. If your employer doesn’t have a grad program, you won’t have these kids to run into at the watercooler, hobnob with, give advice, share ideas, etc.</p>

<p>Sakky is right that the quality of the grad program matters. But, IMO, the background skills that matter (research, including work with primary sources, analysis and high-level writing) all should be developed as an undergrad. The grad years are specific/intensive; you identify your special interest niche and plow forward.</p>

<p>In many respects, it’s your interest niche that makes you marketable, draws attention- but here’s the rub: general? more openings, but there is too much competition. specific? the colleges may not be interested at all in that focus. Most PhDs we know locally teach at 2-3 colleges or teach hs or teach a class or two, but earn their keep at something else.</p>

<p>And, publishing is not a matter of having something to say- it has to be of interest to the field and reflect intense original research.</p>

<p>*Agree with Juillet except that the 1/0 or 1/1 is reserved for the topmost profs with reps extablished over many years (or decades,) at schools with high endowments. *</p>

<p>Not always. I go to Columbia, and here even untenured assistant professors have 1/0 loads. My advisor is an untenured assistant professor who teaches one class in the fall and none in the spring, and I don’t know any untenured assistant professors in my department who teach more than 2 classes a year.</p>

<p>However, I’m not in history - so if you meant more specifically that in <em>history</em> only hotshot full professors have 1/0 or 1/1 loads, then I don’t know anything about that.</p>

<p>@Juillet: those professors are probably research professors who bring in grant money. Besides, Columbia is one of those highly-endowed universities. </p>

<p>Most humanities departments, even at mid-tier colleges and LACs, have a maximum 3/3 teaching load plus university service and graduate advising, even though the official full-time load may be 4/4. Professors in the sciences and social sciences generally teach less than that unless they have abandoned research altogether. It’s unusual for a research professor to teach more than 2/2; those with grant money more likely will have a 1/1 or 1/2 load. Except at the most highly-funded programs, it’s also unusual to have a 1/0 load. </p>

<p>Assistant professors often have a lighter teaching load in their first year (or more) because they are expected to establish themselves in the field, and departments acknowledge that the process takes a lot of time. </p>

<p>All this varies from university to university, of course. Some community colleges have a ridiculously high course load. I have a friend who teaches 6/6 to be full-time.</p>

<p>If Juillet is describing untenured…I’d guess they are part-timers, not covering the rent, possibly with no benefits- and sometimes, no guarantee, year to year. They could be emeriti, yes. But, part-timers. </p>

<p>The concept of “research profs” doesn’t necessarily exist at a LAC. Schools cannot necessarily afford these folks. Nor do they always value supporting a new person with benefits and etc, while they establish themselves. Schools have to have folks to teach the intro surveys and lower level classes. No new person I know was given a lighter load, just because. There are contracts where, every so often, a prof gets a one-course reduction (separate from sabbaticals) - but ime, these are for senior (or at least, established) faculty and not all schools have “contracts” with the faculty.</p>

<p>Assistant professors are not adjunct (part-time) professors. They are tenure-track professors at the beginning of their careers.</p>

<p>There are “asst prof” jobs available that are non-tenure-track.<br> OP’s question was: is it worth it? And he/she is interested in general US history. My point is, sure, some people get dream deals. There are more recent PhDs in humanities than FT, decent opportunities.</p>

<p>As a reference point, one university I’m familiar with has an official teaching load of 1/1 for the first year. No newly hired assistant professor teaches more than this for his/her first year. Some departments at this university have an <em>unofficial</em> teaching load for newly hired assistant professors of 1/1 for the first <em>two</em> years. If a professor of any level supports a lot of graduate students, the load is usually 1/1. Other professors teach 1/2, 2/2, 2/3, and 3/3, depending on their research commitment. This university is considered just below the top tier for undergraduate, lower for graduate studies.</p>

<p>The new hires at DH’s school are expected to earn their keep, so to speak, hit the boards running, in both teaching and research. To interact with grad students- and possibly have teaching load reduced- it has to be a school with a grad program, in the first place. Most LACs don’t have these. Most schools are reevaluating the whole nature of tenure, keeping sufficient numbers of PT faculty involved, because they are more easily set aside when budgets are tight. And, to get a job at a top school with these modified teaching loads available (while still being decently paid,) you have to be, somehow, worthy. You have to stand head and shoulders above the scores of other applicants- and that’s not always easy to plan.</p>

RIT offers new master’s degrees in chemical engineering, biomedical engineering, and project management

Courses designed to give credit for prior related education and allows remote learning.

Scott Hamilton/RIT Photography

RIT has added three new master’s degrees to its portfolio: chemical engineering, biomedical engineering, and project management. Students pursuing graduate degrees are able to combine advanced coursework with hands-on opportunities in laboratories alongside faculty-researchers.

RIT is offering three new master’s degrees designed to meet industry needs.

Chemical engineering and biomedical engineering programs in the Kate Gleason College of Engineering will include new master’s degrees as part of the engineering portfolio this year to meet demands in increasing renewable energies, personalized healthcare technologies, and diagnostic system improvements.

National trends indicate a growing need for graduates with the combined skills in engineering and in the chemical and biological sciences, engineering processes, and ‘smart’ technologies.

The graduate programs will have a mix of students from the established undergraduate programs, as well as new-to-RIT students from regional, national, and international chemical engineering programs seeking advanced degrees. With the flexibility of the degree program, the department also is seeing interest and enrollments from students from other science disciplines such as physics , said Patricia Taboada-Serrano , Graduate Programs Director.

“This will be achieved through a bridge program designed to provide the appropriate engineering background required for successful completion of an advanced degree in chemical engineering,” she said.

A dozen students have been accepted for the new program and will begin chemical engineering courses this fall. There are also eight BS/MS students enrolled in the program who are completing undergraduate work.

There will be several emphasis areas: chemical and mechanical engineering applications; microelectronic focus on semiconductors, photovoltaics, microfabrication; microsystems and quantum level systems; materials science; and advanced mathematics and simulation.

“The strength of our program is the design of its curriculum, as we are able to provide depth in content and advanced skills in one year of studies in the case of full-time students,” said Taboada-Serrano, associate professor of chemical engineering. “The timeline of the completion of the graduate degree enables our MS graduates to rejoin the workforce quickly if they delayed or interrupted careers to obtain a graduate degree. The compactness of our curriculum also enables working professionals to pursue our MS degree and complete it in two to three years.”

Similar to chemical engineering, the biomedical engineering program has grown substantially since it began 10 years ago. Today, 15 students in biomedical engineering (BME) are being integrated into graduate study through the BS/MS options. There are five new students in the stand alone master's program . It is a one-year, course-based program that features a Capstone design sequence.

Biomedical engineers combine knowledge of engineering with biology, anatomy, and physiology to create devices and systems to address the need for sophisticated diagnostic and therapeutic equipment and solutions.

In addition to the advanced engineering degrees, 10 RIT students this semester are the first to enroll in classes for a project management master’s degree .

The 30-credit degree is approved for both in-person and online delivery.

Project management is a process for managing the successful execution of new initiatives within an organization for the sake of expanding the breadth of capabilities, services, and products offered.

“You can use this discipline in almost any field,” said Peter Boyd , senior lecturer and graduate programs director for RIT’s School of Individualized Study , which is overseeing the program. “It’s akin to software engineering in that you could work in numerous industries, from IT to construction to aviation or health care.”

“Project management is a growing discipline. There’s a growing demand in a wide range of industries,” Boyd said.

A  RITx MicroMasters in Project Management, offered by SOIS on the edX.org platform, is an additional pathway into the program that allows students to earn RIT course credit at a reduced cost, that can be applied toward the requirements for the MS in project management. 

RIT’s master’s degree in project management differs from others across the country because he said RIT developed a curriculum “that is responsive to a wide range of student academic and professional needs, employs non-traditional teaching models that place a greater emphasis on project-based learning, and similar active learning experiences.” RIT’s degree also promotes strong student/faculty mentor-mentee relationships and brings project management to industries that would benefit from it but have otherwise not traditionally embraced the discipline.

The degree program allows students to customize their courses for their degrees, providing a natural path of interdisciplinary study. This allows students the ability to better specialize to their specific interests, giving them a competitive edge in their field of interest and making them more valuable to an employer.

Of the 10 courses required to earn the MS degree, four are elective, so students may use advanced certificates or other courses already offered at RIT. The remaining six classes focus on the core topics of the project management discipline and align with the standards set by the Project Management Institute, the governing body for the field.  

One of those students is Dana Harp, who is taking the classes online from her home in Lewes, Del. She does clinical research remotely for Pfizer.

She received her edX project management MicroMasters in 2020 and transferred those credits toward a project management advanced certificate with RIT in 2021. She took a couple of years off from education and was pleasantly surprised when she learned RIT now offers a master’s in project management.

“I was always interested in getting my master’s degree,” Harp said. “My company has a great program to reimburse for education, so I have the opportunity to continue learning without having to pay for it all myself. And it will definitely open up more opportunities for promotion by having that degree. It will give me a leg up for the trajectory I want to be on. This is going to help me moving forward.”

Harp hopes to receive her master’s degree in the spring or next fall, and she’s excited to be one of the first students receiving the RIT degree.

“I’m lucky all of my earlier classes transferred over, and it’s really cool to see that some of the professors I’ve had in previous classes are teaching in this program as well,” she said. “I think it’s going to be really fun.”

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