Hack#7: Get a Ph.D.
High impact on skills, personal branding, network, wisdom & wealth for high effort
Get a Ph.D.
High Impact, High Effort
Overview:
Ph.D. is a great way to build deeper understanding of a field(e.g. artificial intelligence) and contribute to the knowledge creation itself. During Ph.D., you get a chance to interact with very smart people and spread your research. Your research skills, teaching skills and technical communication skills improve significantly. This does require full-time dedication to research/study for up to 5-7 yrs. You get paid little to nothing during this period and the effort to reward ratio remains comparatively low. Getting a PhD degree, however, opens door to new research opportunities in academia as well as better and higher paying opportunities in tech companies. Having said that, getting accepted for Ph.D., earning the degree and early years after Ph.D. are quite challenging than people usually expect it to be. Many factors make it hard to pursue a PhD, for instance, it takes longer time to gain deeper understanding of your respective field, obtaining desirable and useful results are sometimes a matter of luck, peer-review and publication of a single research article can take from few months to even year. As this can be highly rewarding and highly frustrating, it's better to do a thorough research before going for this option and understanding if you're ready for it or not.
Inspiration:
James Gosling earned his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University and later on joined Sun Microsystems and created the popular programming language Java
Get started:
Understand whether Ph.D. is for you or not
Research available Ph.D. positions, universities
Prepare for GRE and get a good score
Apply for Ph.D.
Get recommendation letters
Complete the selection process
Move to the university
Stay alive till you get the Dr. in front of your name
Moving to next level:
Build strong relationships with your colleagues, professors and industry people
FAQs & resources:
Understand if Ph.D is for you or not, a guide by Dr. Ronald, a CS Ph.D.
In the end, academia is a business(a different kind of business) and Ph.D. is a job
Current opportunities: