Grad School?

It's important to consider marginal costs rather than strictly absolute costs. For example, perhaps the question shouldn't be

What is a waste of time? What is a great use of my time?

but should rather be

What is a waste of time relative to what I would otherwise be doing with that three-to-six year chunk of time? What is a great use of my time?

When I got my B.S. it seemed pretty obvious that my options were either to get a job doing something I knew I wouldn't enjoy or to go to grad school and continue learning and doing vigorous intellectual work. In grad school I was lucky enough to fall in love with my research area. Grad school was the right choice for me because there was pretty much nothing better I could have realistically been doing with that period of time.

I think when people talk about grad school they are really talking about one of (roughly) four distinct things.

1) "Engineering" grad school: A graduate degree in engineering of almost any kind will probably pay off in spades. You will get promoted faster and you will get paid more.

2) "Hard science" grad school: In the modern world, a Physics B.S. qualifies you to go to grad school. A Physics PhD. qualifies you to be a physicist. Replace "physics" with any other science and this pretty much holds true.

3) "Soft science" grad school: Generally speaking, this sounds like a poor life choice if your goals include financial and career stability.

4) "Professional degree" grad school: e.g. med school or law school. It seems like these fields saturated with competition but plenty of people still manage to make a living good here. I don't personally know any young doctors and the young lawyers I know, even those from top law schools, are not doing very well.

So, you really want either (1) or (2), but bear in mind that neither of these options guarantees that you will have a free hand in your own research until you are maybe 40 years old and have established yourself as a researcher. You can always choose to be an iconoclast, but remember that the problems that interest you are not necessarily going to be the problems that people will pay you to solve.

In answer to your enumerated questions:

1) There's nothing to stop you from publishing well-written and well-researched blog posts and publishing your most important findings in peer-reviewed academic journals where they will have a high impact and be taken seriously.

2) As my advisor always said, "It's not the intercept, it's the slope." Having a graduate degree makes available career opportunities which would otherwise not have appeared. This fact is difficult to quantify.

3) All our jobs will be replaced by computers on a long enough timeline, so pick something that at least interests you.

4) Answered tadrinth. To some degree, when you get a graduate degree, you disqualify yourself from certain jobs. For example, if you get an engineering PhD, no one will hire you as an entry-level grunt engineer anymore, because you are overqualified.

Given your mention of RESPs, I assume you're in Canada (confirmed after reading your past post).

You might wish to add to your undergraduate major possibilities the possibility of the UWO Richard Ivey business program, which has excellent graduate placement for Canadian finance consulting, and management jobs. You can transfer from UBC in your third year (applying during your second, regardless of what you majored in at UBC) if you have strong grades and extracurriculars, and take an accounting pre-requisite class, among other things. It's an easily missed but unusually valuable option for Canadians with the right interests.

Regarding the financial prospects of some of the options you mentioned: engineers tend to settle in the high five figures, to very low six figures unless they become entrepreneurs. There are some issues with age discrimination, cognitive decline, and unemployment. Doctors earn more in discounted terms, with basically full employment and more flexibility, but at the cost of a long time as a student and resident. Law has a wide distribution: the upper end of lawyers can out-earn doctors, but a great mass do worse. Finance, for those who can do it and enjoy it, looks better financially than most anything else, even doing well against entrepreneurship in the tails (there are more finance billionaires than tech billionaires), while dominating in the central range.

As others have said, it's a terrible move to get a PhD unless you are going to be working in academia or some field where it is strongly required, but if you have good reason to focus there it may be a pre-requisite.

Outsourcing and automation have ways of nibbling at many fields, I wouldn't take that as a huge differential consideration.

SIAI, FHI, and Overcoming Bias do.

FHI does publish its work in academic journals. It's an academic institute at a university. It's true Robin puts most of his output on his blog.

If you're strong at math, I would tend to push for math/statistics/computer science over biotech and especially cognitive science. Even in the soft areas, people with hard backgrounds tend to do better, and the hard areas have more flexibility (math people can go to psych programs and get good industry jobs, psych/cogsci undergrads can't get into hard science grad programs and are less competitive in the job market). You can learn the results in the psych literature later, but you'll do much better with solid quant and technical skills, as opposed to scrambling for remedial hard skills after a soft undergrad.

Other considerations depend on facts about you, your aptitudes, and your interest. Feel free to contact me via the PM system to set up a counseling session.

Having a graduate degree somehow makes my resume look less attractive than just having an undergrad.

In many cases you have to pay PhDs more. If you can find someone who can do the work who doesn't have a PhD, you save money by hiring them. In many fields, there is much more need for people to do Masters level work than to do PhD level work, so there are more jobs available at the Masters level.

grad or professional schooling can be more time/effort/work than it's worth.

A PhD in biology in the program I mastered out of involves working anywhere from 50-80 hours a week, takes 5-6 years, and typically pays around $30k a year at best. If you could have instead made $50k at a real job, graduate school has an opportunity cost of $100-120k.

Graduate school is bad for you. Most of my friends are in graduate school and they are noticeably less happy and more crazy than they would be otherwise; one friend is going gray at 27 from stress. I was chronically depressed almost the entire time I was in graduate school, and it only went away when I graduated.

One of my fellow teaching assistants last semester was a first year graduate student, taking two graduate level core curriculum classes, trying to start up his research, and also trying to be a teaching assistant for biostatistics when he had never taken any statistics. Both of my fellow teaching assistants this semester are just getting Masters, but they're both taking two classes, TAing biostatistics, and trying to finish their Masters theses.

Do undergraduate research first before making any decisions about graduate school. PhD programs are almost entirely research. You take some classes at the beginning, which weeds out the idiots, and then the entire rest of the program is research. If you don't thoroughly enjoy research, you will hate graduate school.

My standard advice is to not do a PhD unless you have to (because the career you want requires one).

What are your goals? What does the life you want to build for yourself look like? You need to answer these questions, at least approximately, before you can make any reasonable decision about your education. Some things to think about:

• How important is money (beyond basic living expenses) to you?

• How important is independence and autonomy?

• Is discovering the secrets of the universe your deepest desire?

• Are you one of those people who gets a rush from finding a clever solution to a difficult problem? (In computer science we call this an "algorasm"...)

• Do you prefer solving problems that can be attacked with science and mathematics or those that require understanding what makes other people tick?

• Are long work hours OK if the work is interesting, or do you want a 40-hour workweek?

• Do a spouse and children figure into your vision for your life?

In other words, you need to think about your own utility function... and how that might evolve as you grow older. My suggestion is to try to put together a set of objectives that you could call your life goals, and then use this both to evaluate your education options and to suggest new options.

I would also recommend reading something like Smart Choices. If you decide you want to follow the process described in that book, I'd be glad to help you work through the steps.

Unfortunately, your formatting is a bit screwy, probably LW is a little inconsistent and articles don't use the same markdown format as comments, instead, they use a WYSIWYG rich text editor.

I think you can fix this if you copy-paste the text of your article from the editor into a markdown converter and then put the generated text back into the editor over the top of your original text (so you should keep a copy, just in case this doesn't work).

2) 80,000 hours pointed out in one blog post (I forget which one) that grad or professional schooling can be more time/effort/work than it's worth. This would be especially true if I'm saddled with debt and cannot find employment with high renumeration.

Don't get a PhD unless you're fully funded, not only for the obvious financial reason, but also because if the department isn't willing to fund you, then it's a sign that they aren't that interested you as a student and they're less likely to devote resources to you to further your professional development. Not only that, but professors want to work with the best students in their department and the best students are, invariably, the ones with full funding.

None of this applies to terminal master's programs - as far as I know getting funding in a master's program is pretty rare. This is typically the case in both statistics and econ.

If you are already thinking of grad school in economics it would be a bad idea to do economics as an undergrad major. Math or Physics would be superior choices for entry to a graduate programme. Engineering might be better and is at least equivalent. Modern economics is a branch of applied mathematics, even the thoroughly diseased discipline of macroeconomics. Computer Science would be equivalent to Mathematics or Physics in terms of graduate school entry chances provided you do some heavy proof-based courses. For maximum chances of entry do real analysis. For more targeted advice on econ grad school look here but especially here. To get into a good grad school in either Computer Science or Economics you practically have to do undergraduate research and preferably publish something. CS advice, writing an economics paper advice. If you did any quantitative major and wanted to burnish your cv for econ grad school you could go here though the only hardcore courses are in statistics (of which econometrics is a specialised subset).

If the broad field of medicine appeals to you you should seriously consider studying in Europe where medicine and physiotherapy are undergraduate degrees and they're almost free compared to studying in North America. In mainland Europe medicine in Germany takes six years. I can't remember how long it takes in France. In Ireland and the UK it is either a five or six year degree depending on the university, though some universities do not accept North Americans except as second entry students (you do the undergrad degree with the 17 or 18 year olds but must have an undergrad already. ) Note that entry is very competitive and you would either need to already be reasonably fluent in the language of instruction or willing to devote at least three months and conservatively six to full time study of said language if you are not already near fluent. Physiotherapy is a four year undergrad degree in Britain and Ireland and last I checked you qualify to practice in the USA; I don't know about Canada.

If law appeals to you as an area of study then most, possibly all Irish and UK undergrad law degrees (three or four years) qualify you to take the New York bar exam; I don't know if any Canadian provinces accept it, most US states don't.

If you're not sure which of those fields you prefer, a physics undergraduate is a gateway to all of them. I did physics and then ended up getting really interested in biology, and am working on a PhD in bioengineering. Physics teaches you to tackle hard problems with mathematics- a skill that can be applied to any intellectual pursuit.

PhD students in science and engineering are generally paid, so it's not a huge financial burden. It's not a waste of time either, if you choose the right professor you'll be free to work on whatever you think is interesting and important.

Publishing is not as time consuming as you think, and it's much more helpful to the scientific community and your career than blog posts. Good peer reviewed publications will almost guarantee you support to keep working on whatever you think is worth working on.

If you do good work in science but put it just on blogs, it will likely get lost where other scientists will never learn from your work and build on it, and you will be seen as unproductive and will lose your academic career. This could change in the future, but that's how it is now. Many scientists will assume that you didn't publish it because it had glaring flaws preventing it from passing peer review, and therefore isn't even worth reading.

The most important part of an undergraduate degree is doing research. If you don't do any research as an undergrad, you will have a hard time getting into a PhD program, and you'll also have no reason to believe you'd like it, or succeed in it.