What are the benefits of getting a Ph.D.? A perspective from a Ph.D. physicist now working in the chip industry

After working as a postdoc for four years, I recently left academia and enjoy my new life working in the industry. As my current role does not require a Ph.D. degree, I sometimes feel regretful about not starting my industry career earlier. Looking back on my decision of getting a Ph.D. in physics, I used to be passionate about doing scientific research and imagined myself working as a physicist in a research institute like my former employer LLNL. I decided to leave academia because I was tired of the uncertainties in both research itself and personal finance as a postdoc, especially after my son was born.

 After watching an inspiring interview with Prof. George A. Constantinides posted by Shilicon (老石) on YouTube, I feel resonated with one of the sentences by George. He said that getting a Ph.D. is a rare chance that you can have a certain block of time in your life where you can focus on a specific research field and dig deeply into it without worrying too much about other things. 

This reminds me of the time I spent as a Ph.D. student at Duke working with my advisor Prof. Gleb Finkelstein. I spent about three years taking Physics graduate courses, and learning all the essential experimental skills in the lab, such as fabricating microdevices with e-beam lithography, low-noise electronic measurement, building up the experimental hardware, and dilution cryogenics to cool samples down to 0.03K. After I was ready both in skills and physics knowledge, I had many fruitful discussions with my advisor about how to improve the device designs and tune the fridge and measurement setups for obtaining higher-quality data that result in a few papers. In the last year of my Ph.D. study, I felt more confident and independent in navigating the research directions along with newly acquired experimental data and debugging the measurement system.

If I just look at the skillsets I built in my Ph.D. from a perspective of an industry job seeker, they are not directly useful and marketable. I might have a diverse skillset but none of them is specialized enough for immediate use in the industry. I had spent a lot of time developing more transferrable skills before landing my current job in the industry.

However, this video inspires me to look back on what I obtained from my Ph.D. training in addition to the hard skills:

• By working closely with an experienced and knowledgeable scientist like my advisor, my mindset of doing work has transformed from following instructions to thinking and tackling problems independently. I also become more analytical and better at allocating resources to solve problems quickly.
• It helped me at least become an expert once in one specific subject. Although the subject might be less impactful to society than other trending research topics like AI or ML, getting a Ph.D. helps me to become more adaptable to new fields. This hidden skill actually helped me to get ready and contribute to my company quickly even if I had zero experience in this field before joining.
• All the communication skills like writing research reports and verbal interactions I developed by working closely with my advisor and my labmates are also the key to success in a collaborative environment.

If I could choose once again, I would still do a Ph.D. Life in academia is not ideal, but it transformed me into a better version of myself.