OT: PhD in Electronic Engineering

Generally no, it's a hinderance for the majority of practical industry jobs. You could however always leave it completely off your Resume for some jobs...

Practical work is everything. One you have experinence your qualifications become almost irrelevant. But a PhD can often be a hinderance to getting a practical job.

That generally won't hurt.

Nothing beats real world experience. But on the flip side getting further education later on in life can be tough, better to get that while you are yong.

Dave.

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Don't be a d*****ad - Do the PhD. The only people who will say you don't need a PhD are people who don't have one. You will probably never get another opportunity and you will certainly never get a better opportunity. A PhD will open a vast range of doors that an undergrad degree won't and many doors a Master's won't. If for a particular reason it might be a hindrance than you can leave it out of the resume, but those cases will be rare and will also becoming rarer.

50 year ago a certificate was a "good" qualification and you could get a job almost anywhere, 30 years ago a diploma was "good" but it's not now, in another 10 - 20 years an undergrad degree will not be as any where near as valuable as it once was. The world-wide emphasis in business now is to employ qualifications to ensure compliance to regulations. That won't change unless all the worlds lawyers, politicians, bureaucrats and lawsuits disappear. If you don't have the paper you won't get through the door, regardless of how skilled you are. The practical experience is invaluable to you - but note well the order in which things happen - If you don't have the paper you won't get through the door, regardless of how skilled you are.

On a sunny day (Sun, 23 May 2010 21:10:50 +1000) it happened David Eather wrote in :

A normal person knows a little bit about many things. A PhD know a lot about little. And a professor knows everything about nothing.

The trend, is the writing on the wall, I recently came across an other idiotic publication. Papers are written... Those come in rolls too, as tissue paper.

There are PhDs selling chips, and there is a student who dropped out and became the richest man in the world.

You can STILL be president without one...

In some cases a PhD may be too expensive to hire.

Fully agree.

petrus bitbyter

Hi,

Ok, thanks for your opinion there. But just out of curiosity (and since David Eather mentioned it, too): Wouldn't leaving it off a resume look pretty weird? And after all, I'd imagine the prospective employer inquire about that 3-year gap, so "hiding" won't really work ;)

Good to know...

That's one reason why I've also brought up that taught MSc: Right now I'm still in that whole "student thought pattern", and I could do another year easily. But in ten years perhaps - not so sure.

Anyway, thank you very much so far,

Robert

PS: Looking forward to your EEVblog live show later - good luck with that!

Hi,

That's the exact reason why I'm having a hard time just saying "no thanks": The offer is just so juicy, and it's really an unique opportunity.

True.

Point taken, especially with respect to the "devaluation" of qualifications you mentioned before. But I'm wondering: If there is an employer who is really keen that all applicants have the right paper, surely this could work against higher qualifications, too? In other words, if an employer wants to hire someone and believe they need a MSc, why should they hire (and pay for) a PhD? Just wondering...

Thanks for your good post!

Cheers,

Robert

y.

a , s

One other thing to consider is that over the last couple decades, EE careers have morphed into serial job hunting exercises on a per- project basis. Companies just don't seem too interested in tenured EE's anymore. It used to be an EE (of any stripe) was your ticket to a long, rewarding career. Not anymore.

Now, (with rare exception) you can expect to be shuffled back and forth between companies as their economic well-being flows with the tide, and as their product life cycles play out in the market. -- which life cycles can be exceedingly short these days!! Cell phones (and almost anything telecom-related) are good examples. Ditto if you're into software. Maybe 5x ditto?

A Ph.D. wouldn't hurt of course, particularly if you can somehow manage to start any kind of "part time" gig to at least chip away at the experience curve. In many fields, employers will often value experience over academia, with the exception of certain job functions (many relating to product liability, for example, where a Ph.D. pulls additional weight before a judge.) Another "benefit" of a Ph.D. status is that it will likely shut you out of low-paying, low-advancement opportunities you probably wouldn't want in the first place. An insurance policy of sorts, to keep you from accepting dead-end jobs.

In any event, the better letters to put behind your name would be P.E., not simply Ph.D. I feel that would open up many more doors, and financial rewards for you.

-mpm

If you want to spend the rest of your career designing ICs at the device/materials level, the PhD is probably worth having. Your future employer would probably be one of the big semiconductor or fab equipment companies, likely not in the UK.

If you want to do the kind of electronics design the involves parts, boards, sensors, processors, control loops, optics, power, fun stuff like that, the PhD is useless or less. I design electronics at the board and system level, and I'd be less likely to hire someone who spent that long in school. The best EEs that I know tended to get out of school and get to work as soon as they could, and keep learning as needed.

Today's job market being what it is, it's a close call.

John

[snip]

A PhD is useless for _circuit_ design. Circuit design is an art, either you have it, or you don't

BUT, as John says, given the job market situation right now, hanging out in academia is bound to be better than unemployment. ...Jim Thompson

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| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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      The only thing bipartisan in this country is hypocrisy

What do you want to do?

For getting a "regular" job you can make it not matter: on your resume put an "objectives" section that says "getting real world experience at a (insert your smarmy positive adjective here) company", and when you interview just blush and say it was fully funded and you couldn't resist.

Once you're out there working, there are few times that having a PhD will really hurt. If you're a useless screwup folks will see you as an arrogant, stuck up, useless screwup as opposed to a pitiful sad-sack sort of guy. If you go to work for someone who barely scraped up a BS and feels defensive it'll be a problem. Other than that, just pretending that you stumbled into it will take care of things.

There are jobs for which having a PhD is a real help. PhD's seem to impress the hell out of non-engineers. So if you ever get into a position to be on the ground floor of a startup, folks will like having you in some sort of a technical lead (or technical executive) position:

(Your partner): "This is Bob, our CTO. He has a PhD _in_ _science_." (Venture Capitalists): "Ooooooh!"

Ditto if you're going to be interfacing with military types. Also, if you ever end up managing a group that has a lot of PhDs in it, or is composed entirely of PhDs, they'll see yours as "street cred" and give you a lot more slack when you screw up (this is the opposite side of the coin to what happens if you're working with a bunch of Bachelor degrees and you're a screwup).

One thing that employers of a certain kind _do_ look for, and _do_ hire (and pay more) for guys with PhDs, is when they are doing something that's just entirely new and unique and has all sorts of nasty unknown problems. They understand that, as a PhD candidate, you have already worked for years on intractable problems for little rewards and fewer social benefits, so they'll have a good idea of the kinds of jobs that you'll put up with in industry.

--
Tim Wescott
Control system and signal processing consulting
www.wescottdesign.com

An opportunity to learn analog IC design is something you don't want to turn down, PhD or not. Even if you don't end up doing IC design, the knowledge will be handy if you stick with circuit design.

Some PhDs are unwilling to respect the opinions of non-same. I just don't work with or hire people like that. PhDs tend to be mediocre circuit designers anyhow; too much respect for convention, too much fear of thinking crazy. Ooh, we have a signal, let's use a differential jfet pair, because that's all we see in the literature!

The horrors I've seen.

PhDs tend to be good at fundamental "scientific" problems that involve a lot of math. I say "scientific" in the sense of discovering precisely how nature works, which is not what electronic design is about.

One's best career choices depend a lot on one's personality.

John

I avoided higher education for the same reason I avoided military service: I was worried that it would beat the creativity out of me.

John

All they can do is court martial you for being creative in the military. They tried to do that to me after I made a replacement TV tuner, for a piece of TV broadcast equipment. The original was NLA, and a custom replacement from the OEM was more than the piece of equipment cost new. It was critical to the operation of the station. It was an all tube TV demodulator with a wafer switch type TV tuner. Several of the wafers were broken, and we couldn't look at our OTA signal on the other test equipment without it.

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have a DD214, and a honorable discharge.

Hi,

Yes, that's what I was hoping to be able to do, just to show that I'm not just good at producing stacks of paper.

Good point!

Yes! I understand very well the benefits of a professional engineering status, and I would see that I could obtain one.

Thanks for your comments!

Cheers,

Robert

Hi,

...or one of those infamous university spin-outs ;)

To also answer Tim Wescott's "What do you want to do?" question here: As I've said, I've been doing "classic" hobby electronics (probably 25 years late for that, but whatever), building all sorts of gear, learning from explosive escapes of magic smoke, getting my own small lab set up, and whatnot.

Now I have this quaint image that there may be a small number of electronics design jobs that do around exactly that: Come up with a solution to a problem, try it on the bench, see that it makes it to the real world. The "fun stuff", as you say.

I was actually fairly lucky with my past summer jobs (and that other job I would be able to take for a while) at that small shop, because there I could do exactly that: "We need some special current source" "Yes, can do!" "Now something in MATLAB to control it" "Yes, sir!" and so on. But working there is no real option in the long run ($-wise), and I also fear that a "jack of all trades" in EE is becoming more and more an illusion for most industries thanks to things getting more and more complex (correct me if I'm wrong there).

Fair enough, and good to know.

True. Come to think of it, there is actually a fair number of electronics books that have "Art" in their title... should make one think! ;)

Thanks to both of you!

Cheers,

Robert

They court martialled you for that? For fixing broken things?

I was actually in the Navy for a week, sort of a guest, when I was in high school. They flew (another story) us to the base in Charleston to show us how much we'd like being naval officers. It was fun but the career really didn't appeal to me. I figured that if I had to serve, I'd let them draft me so I could get it over in two years. I eventually got an occupational deferrment (I was designing stuff for the C5A and the LHA ships and some other programs) and then I got a high lottery number. I would have been a pretty bad soldier anyhow.

John

Hi,

That's actually a really good suggestion (in my eyes at least)! Like it much better than just leaving a 3-year gap, and it's actually the truth: It's hard to resist, and I suppose most can understand that.

Good insights on the social aspects there, thanks for that! That's really the kind of angle I'm totally lacking right now as a student with not too much experience out there.

Cheers,

Robert

That's what I do. I've been fortunate in working for a lot of companies that had really, really bad marketing (including my own) so I got hit with all sorts of weird and unrelated problems. Accelerator physics, lasers, motors, AC power, radiation detectors, optics, steam engines, jet engines, piston engines, semiconductor fab, X-rays, superconductors, spectroscopy, thermocouples, waveform generators, cameras, picoseconds, femtoamps, software, nanotech, nuclear weapons, so much stuff I can hardly remember. I get to play with all those toys for a while without the tedium of being a postdoc or working for some big company on the same project for 16 years.

But everybody's different.

John