Q. Is your pay fair?
A. As per faculty-salary surveys conducted by the American Association of University Professors as well as my own personal opinion, professors do not choose a faculty career in research or in imparting higher education for the money. Persons of equivalent qualification (PhD or higher) receive far higher salaries in industry. However, the opportunity cost of moving from academia to industry is the extraordinary flexibility in work schedules, academic freedom and most importantly the inspirational energy in academia. Therefore, salaries in academia are most certainly an excellent trade-off for those PhD qualified individuals with a strong leadership capabilities or an entrepreneurial bent of mind.
Q. Would you choose the same degree again?
A. As a professor in academia and a recent PhD graduate working on funded entrepreneurial as well as non-dilutive grant funded pursuits, if I were given an opportunity to leverage more of my ongoing research to obtain a 'second' PhD degree, I would be delighted to do so. Each year post-graduation, I have generated an equivalent volume of research as that which I did during the 3 year period of my PhD. The process of writing a thesis is equivalent to organizing a series of published research papers into a volume of coherent and continuous scientific material which addresses a real problem - in my example, a clinical problem. Therefore, obtaining additional PhD degrees would be tantamount to obtaining a reward for conducting a successful research program!
A. As per faculty-salary surveys conducted by the American Association of University Professors as well as my own personal opinion, professors do not choose a faculty career in research or in imparting higher education for the money. Persons of equivalent qualification (PhD or higher) receive far higher salaries in industry. However, the opportunity cost of moving from academia to industry is the extraordinary flexibility in work schedules, academic freedom and most importantly the inspirational energy in academia. Therefore, salaries in academia are most certainly an excellent trade-off for those PhD qualified individuals with a strong leadership capabilities or an entrepreneurial bent of mind.
Q. Would you choose the same degree again?
A. As a professor in academia and a recent PhD graduate working on funded entrepreneurial as well as non-dilutive grant funded pursuits, if I were given an opportunity to leverage more of my ongoing research to obtain a 'second' PhD degree, I would be delighted to do so. Each year post-graduation, I have generated an equivalent volume of research as that which I did during the 3 year period of my PhD. The process of writing a thesis is equivalent to organizing a series of published research papers into a volume of coherent and continuous scientific material which addresses a real problem - in my example, a clinical problem. Therefore, obtaining additional PhD degrees would be tantamount to obtaining a reward for conducting a successful research program!
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