Trying to decide whether to do a PhD or not? It’s a tough one we get that! That’s why we share the key reasons why to get a PhD and whether PhD matters!
Considering doing a PhD? Do you know why you want to be a PhD student? Do you need a PhD degree to be successful in your career? These may be the questions that go through your mind as a prospective PhD student.
Unless you’re committed to working in higher education or research, a PhD may not be something that you need to succeed. Therefore, it’s important to answer yourself question whether you need to do a PhD in the first place. If you need it, you need to answer yourself – WHY why do you wish to pursue PhD in the first place. It is also crucial to think about what to do after a PhD degree.
Why it’s so important to know your WHY? Well, as you may know, each PhD program takes a quite significant amount of time and lots of hard work. Getting a doctoral degree is exciting, stimulating, yet one of the most time-consuming endeavours in one’s life. That’s why you need to know why do you want to do a PhD degree. What’s the good reason for you to do a PhD?
And why do people actually decide to undertake a PhD program, regardless of the requirements? Well, there are many good reasons why someone actually does a PhD degree. From advancing knowledge, personal ambition, change career direction, future career prospects and job market requirements and so on. But I did want to say that no reason is better than another. At the end of the day, what matters is that happy with your decision to do a PhD. It may give you a purpose, make your life better, and by extension, make other lives better. That’s a wonderful place to be.
Why did I decide to do a PhD degree?
Why did I decide to enrol for a PhD program? That’s a very good question! And let me answer that very quickly before I’ll talk about the good reasons why you can do a PhD degree.
What did I want to achieve in my career? At the very beginning, I didn’t consider actually doing a PhD degree. It wasn’t on my agenda. As an engineer at that time, I just wanted to make a positive change in our society. I wanted to contribute towards solving global challenges. I wanted to contribute to solving climate change.
I knew that global warming was an issue and I knew this would remain an issue for people in the future. I started looking into getting masters degree in an area that will help me to make such a contribution. I already had a background in power and environmental engineering, and this background helped me understand that the power industry is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.
To understand how we can decarbonise this industry, I started to dig deeper during my masters in clean coal technologies and carbon capture. As I progressed through my masters, I realised that there aren’t many solutions that we can actually implement now.
There were so many challenges that still need to be resolved.
There were so many unknowns. We didn’t know how to do carbon capture at scale. We didn’t know how to make it cost efficient.
So the only way I could contribute towards solving these challenges was to was either to get a job in industry and start discussing that with other engineers and researchers, or to focus on an academic career path. At that time, I didn’t even consider the academic path. But I realised that in order to progress through the industrial R&D career path, I will need to do a PhD degree at some point.
And then this question came to my mind. Okay, I need to do a PhD, because that’s what we require for my career development and progression so important. Will I have enough energy to do it in a couple of years or will I simply change careers? I came up with a list of good reasons to do a PhD to weigh the pros and cons. I particularly focused on answering the question of what to do after a PhD!
And you know what? This helped me to decide to do my PhD right after my masters.
I started exploring what does PhD mean, what it takes to do a PhD. Also, during my masters, I realised that I actually like doing research and this career path is quite appealing to me. It was appealing that I can focus for several years on my project and explore solutions to a specific research challenge. I thought this would be enough time to actually progress in that research area. I found it really encouraging, motivating, and inspiring at the same time.
So that’s why I decided to do a PhD. I felt the need to actually find answers to the challenges that the industry is actually facing now. That was the main reason for me. I was motivated to solve climate change. I was motivated to help the power industry out. And I knew that a PhD would be a requirement at some point in my career.
I was able to secure PhD funding and a position in the PhD program at a university with an industrial focus. And that’s how my academic career actually started.
At the beginning of my PhD, I didn’t know that I would stay in academia, mostly because my background was in engineering and I like to do practical stuff as you might know. That’s why I never thought I will be an associate professor or an editor. I just wanted to solve challenges and solve problems.
As you can see there are many reasons why I decided to do a PhD. Let me unpack this and let me talk about other reasons to get a PhD, what are the main motivations and reasons for you to do a PhD. I trust this will be useful if you are at the stage where you’re about to decide whether to do a PhD or not.
Reason to do a PhD #1: Advance the current state-of-the-art and produce new knowledge
One of the main reasons why people decide to do a PhD is to advance the understanding of the research area that you’re interested in.
It means that you recognise that there are some recent problems, which we like to call knowledge gaps or research gaps, that you would like to contribute to solving. You know that there are some challenges yet to be solved that will make our lifes better in one way or another.
And more importantly, you’ve got some good ideas about how these problems can be solved. Or maybe you are just eager to dedicate your career t