Should I Get a PhD?
Brian Wansink
Director of Research, Consumer Insights, and Scalable Behavior Change at Healthy By Design
If you have an academic itch, you might have asked yourself if you should get a PhD. Since grad school application deadlines are due around January 1, here's some super-short answers to some questions you might have. There's a lot more advice and tips on the website AcademicsOnly.org, and here's the specific page on this topic.)
? “How can I afford it?” Most really competitive PhD programs have assistantships that pay your tuition and living expenses.
? “Should I retake my GRE or TOEFL test?” Probably not enough time. If you think you have a good score, but you think it could be better, go ahead and apply. You can always retake the test next year and really focus on prepping for it.
? “What do I write in my Statement of Purpose?” Four things: 1) Why you want a PhD so bad that you are singing about it in the hallway, 2) what you will do with a PhD, 3) what specific topics or questions you’re interested in, and 4) why that school’s a great fit.
? “Who should write my recommendation letters?” Ask the best-known researchers you know in the field that you are applying. Next, ask anyone you’ve done research with. Third, ask whoever knows you best and will write these before the deadline.
? “How many schools should I apply to?” Since you’re doing this at the 11th hour, I’d limit yourself to three schools: Your dream school, your “best-fit” school, and a safety school. Otherwise, if you had lots of time, you might apply to as many as 10. (The third time I applied, I applied to 14). There are lots of tips on which schools to apply to here.
? “If I don’t get in to my dream school will it hurt my chance for next year?” Nope. They either won’t remember you applied (they might have 100+ applications), or they’ll think you’re persistent. And as someone once told me, "The P in Phd stands for 'Persistence.'"
With three weeks to go before the deadline, the most important part of your application is your Statement of Purpose. At this point, you can’t change your GPA, you can’t retake the GRE, and you can’t hang out at the mall hoping to make best friends with a Nobel Prize-winning recommendation letter writer.
What you can do is to write and rewrite your Statement of Purpose. Then have your recommenders give you comments on it. Many students are too shy to ask for this feedback, but it’s the most important thing you can do right now. I didn’t ask for feedback on my Statement the first time I applied, and I got into exactly -- hmmm -- zero PhD programs.
If after reading all of this, you’re still humming “Yo ho, yo ho, a PhD life for me,” take the plunge. Being an academic is a tremendously rich and rewarding calling. Pick three schools, apply, and when you hear back from them, we can talk about course corrections.
Good luck with a great career.
DM me please when you can. I was going into NPR article about you and read this "But van der Zee was more interested in Wansink's description of the work he was assigning to his postdocs. Those descriptions, van der Zee says, appeared to contain a "strange admission" of "highly questionable research practices." The gold standard of scientific studies is to make a single hypothesis, gather data to test it, and analyze the results to see if it holds up. By Wansink's own admission in the blog post, that's not what happened in his lab. Instead, when his first hypothesis didn't bear out, Wansink wrote that he used the same data to test other hypotheses. "He just kept analyzing those datasets over and over and over again, and he instructed others to do so as well, until he found something," van der Zee says." So please DM as i want to understand this matter more if you do not mind because i believe i have some good insights about this confusing text.