Manager
Joined: 01 Apr 2008
Posts: 136
Given Kudos: 6
Concentration: Strategy, GM, Energy, Technology
Schools:Chicago Booth 2011
Re: The end is near
[#permalink]
03 Apr 2009, 19:31
As someone who has one (but not in the business field), I can give you a simple litmus test.
Ask yourself, do you want a Ph.D.? If you hesitate, hem and haw over it, I would advise you to look for something else. If you have that "I can just feel it my bones" vibe, and think it's the right thing, do it.
I do not regret my experience in my Ph.D. program, the good memories far outweigh the bad, and more importantly I've built many great relationships during that time.
However, there will be days where you will absolutely *hate* it. Try manually setting up an experiment for half a day, going out for a quick coffee break, then coming back to find out the A/C air has caused some of the precisely placed components to get ever so slightly misaligned. Try swallowing hard and realizing that your 1.5 years of work so far is leading you down a path that you're not sure you want to do a Ph.D. in, so you put all that hard work away and find another advisor to start all over again.
I don't know what the stipend for a b-school Ph.D. candidate is, but it's not very much for an engineering candidate, so I don't even have to go into the financial issues.
You will need every ounce of the passion/the naivety you had when you first started the program to help you through the bad days. If my experience is anything to go by, there won't be too many bad days, but the bad days will be *really* bad. A lot of your Ph.D. experience will depend on your advisor, so choose wisely.
This is a gross generalization, but here's a rough rule of thumb. If you have a young advisor seeking his tenure, you'll work much harder and get a lot more stress (because both of you will make mistakes because of inexperience) but you should finish faster. If you have an older, more established professor as your advisor, you'll get less stress because he'll most likely take a more hands off approach, but if you're not self-motivated you can end up taking all five years (if not more.) Also, this can be considered a good or bad thing, but with a more established guy, you'll have a chance to help out in a plethora of different projects/fields. This is generally how it works in the science/engineering world.
Best of luck with your decisions.