> 필드에서 일 할때 CS 박사가 필요없을까요?
It depends on the job. There are positions where having a PhD is preferred, if not required. When you start reading papers from the industry, you will see what kind of work they do. It varies greatly from one company to another. For regular software engineering jobs, PhD is not required. Any life experience can surely be helpful in one’s career development and PhD, being a fairly relevant one to say the least, will definitely be a plus. So if you aspire to be a college professor, it won’t be huge a loss even if you end up not being one.
I had the same goal as you when I entered the college. By the time I finished my PhD in Computer Science in a top school, I’ve gotten sick and tired of academic research. This was a shared sentiment among many other PhD students at that time. One guy had an impressive list of publications since master’s, enough to land a job at a good research university. I was talking to him after his defense and surprised to find out he hated academia and chose to join Apple. There was another guy who did well in research and ended up in Berkeley. But I thought the Apple guy was better at research.
Teaching was fun for me, but I wasn’t exactly thrilled about the prospect of navigating through the disgusting politics of the academic community. If a teaching position paid decent salary, I might have gone to a teaching-oriented college. But being a system guy and a life-long maker, I was looking for more fun and exciting opportunities in the industry. I consider myself very fortunate.
Staying in academia can be a good choice, if you like academic research AND are good at it. It can be rewarding as you produce good results and get recognized. But you need to be good at this research game. You have to understand how to play this game and how to produce the desired results. It’s not what you think is good. You need to figure out what the academic community will like to see. There are people and places where real impactful research is carried out, but I would say less than 10% and I am probably being overly generous. The rest are playing the game. The program managers at DARPA, NSF, NIH, etc. all know this. They expect the ROI from the research funding to be about 10%. They know 90% are sh*t. But new PhD students usually don’t have any idea. Have a good day.
