I would say do a PhD if you love your subject. However, you'll have to really love your subject in order to become an actual, full time academic in that field because the pay is generally balls.

Note: all salaries here are rough estimates and relevant to the UK job market.

IIRC in the UK you can expect to earn about £15k while doing your PhD and immediately afterwards, and I know of fully fledged middle-aged Professors with 35 years experience who are barely scratching £40k. If you'd followed a path into live industry, you could be earning £65k plus by this point. Newly qualified stockbrokers in London can earn £40k as a starting salary which may put this into perspective for you. Also, there's more to computing than programming as well, you know.

I would like to also say that these research papers that are submitted by academics are usually regurgitated, opinionated shite. If you look at the reference list, it's usually about eight miles long and referencing other people so you have to ask yourself about how much of it is truly original, groundbreaking stuff. Fact is, that stuff is a load of bollocks to outsiders and the uninitiated - academics tend to be a very tight-knit, closed circle and I've seen very little of this stuff actually coming out into a live workplace.

To put my (very misguided and likely to be wrong) opinions in a nutshell:

• Don't do a PhD to become an academic if financial stability is your goal (which you alluded to) - teaching is difficult, time consuming and often thankless work and the pay is usually pretty low in comparison to the other things you could be doing


• By all means do a PhD, but it's an expensive and time consuming option and, IMO, some of the theory and things you do will be esoteric, beyond the scope of non-academic work environments and an employer may look down on it


• If you feel that a PhD can enhance your employability, ensure that what you research is directly relevant to current or mid-future trends


• The time you spend on your PhD may be better spent doing some kind of internship or training that makes you more employable - because, let's face it, the Financial Golgotha won't last forever; the job market will re-open and it'll be dog-eat-dog's balls for the new jobs that do appear so you need to stand out. The days of waltzing out of Funkytown University and straight into Faceless Conglomerate Ltd.'s Graduate Program are over for the time being


• Maths is a tool to be used in conjunction with other tasks and I fail to see the value of studying it for the sake of it. Would you do a PhD in screwdrivers and never do any DIY?

Take my opinions as you will: I am very materialistic and believe in anything which can turn a profit.

That said, many employers value diversity and a wide range of (not necessarily) academic interests so it may or may not benefit you. Mind you, a PhD is a very expensive and long-term commitment here for three years, so you'd better be sure of what you're doing before you start.

That's a depressing post, ukdeveloper. [smile]

While I'm sure you have plenty of anecdotal evidence you based your numbers on, I'm not convinced the numbers (at least in the US--I know that yours were in reference to the UK) are quite as abysmal as you made them seem. The Occupational Outlook Handbook writes the following:

Quote: Occupational Outlook Handbook
According to a 2006-07 survey by the American Association of University Professors, salaries for full-time faculty averaged $73,207. By rank, the average was $98,974 for professors, $69,911 for associate professors, $58,662 for assistant professors, $42,609 for instructors, and $48,289 for lecturers. Faculty in 4-year institutions earn higher salaries, on average, than do those in 2-year schools. In 2006-07, faculty salaries averaged $84,249 in private independent institutions, $71,362 in public institutions, and $66,118 in religiously affiliated private colleges and universities. In fields with high-paying nonacademic alternatives—medicine, law, engineering, and business, among others—earnings exceed these averages.

So, it's certainly not a field that one should choose just to get rich, but the numbers don't seem all that bad. Certainly they're not as high as I believe they should be given the amount of training and education required to reach these positions, and that does worry me.

Something I've also been considering is getting a bachelor's degree in math with a minor in computer science. If I took as many CS courses as I could to fill the requirements of the math degree, would it be any harder for me to get into a Master's CS program than if I had a BS in CS? It not, the ideal path for me may be to do a math degree with a CS minor, and then upon finishing this make the final decision about whether I want to pursue a math Ph.D. or a CS master's.

Thanks!

My rather anecdotal evidence of just what I've experineced gaining a PhD is that top academic pay is actually quite reasonable - probably not equivalent to top industry pay but still very good. That's because the real elite researchers are always in high demand. It's not just that they can join the top research groups, it's more that they define the top research groups - the top researchers attract other top researchers and the best graduate students. Consequently there's a fair bit of bidding between labs to lure the big names in a field.

The challenge is that it's extremely hard to be one of those top researchers. You've got to be extremely bright and work extremely hard, developing and publishing new work consistently over a long period.

Academia usually also has the perk of a fair bit more freedom than industry. You're expected to work on your own projects, you've got a lot more flexibility in the hours that you work, and people are generally a bit more laid back about everything (at least at the universties I attended). I think it's the combination of being able to work on your own research and the academic lifestyle tha offsets the reduced income.

My main drawback as an academic was that I was never super passionate about my topic area. I liked it, sure, but it's more that I generally like solving complex problem. I'm not very good at spending years on end working on similar classes of problems; I need to mix it up every now and again and work on something different. I also wasn't that great at the whole publishing and conference scene; I don't like flying and overseas travel that much. I might have been able to get away without too much travel if I was living in Europe, but in Australia an academic has to fly overseas an awful lot.

I can't speak for your professors or your institution, but professors typically do a lot more than just talk to undergraduates. [smile]

Apart from the lectures, tutorials and office hours, a professor would also have to:

• Plan the classes and do all the teaching administration. If they care about their teaching that will be a bare minimum of an hour per week per class just for preparing the material, then extra time to deal with administration, talking to tutors, and so on. There's also preparing the projects and writing the exams, as well as the marking (sometimes that's farmed off to grad students, but often it isn't).
  
• Mentor graduate students. Most professors will have up to about half a dozen grad students, which they'll try to spend a few hours with each week for each student.
  
• Do their own research. This often ties in with the grad students projects, though.
  
• Write papers and journal articles. Extremely important for an academic.
  
• Review papers and journal articles. Academics have to act as reviewers for journal publications too, as they're the ones with the expertise to make the decisions. This is unpaid by the publishers too.
  
• Stay on top of all the publications out there. Got to know what's happening out their in your field. Most will branch out into related fields too to inspire new ideas.
  
• Head out to conferences and visiting other labs. Important for networking.
  
• Deal with a billion other administration tasks, such as writing out grant proposals, and being involved in university administration.

Typically professors say they're "bored" in office hours because they'd prefer to be out doing real work rather than twiddling their thumbs waiting for undergradutes to fail to turn up. [smile]

Quote: Original post by Crazyfool
Which amounts to how many hours? A professor at my school probably has at most 3-5 classes per quarter. Each class is roughly 3 hours per week. 3 hours per week per class multiplied by 5 classes equals 15 hours per week. So he/she has a free 25 hours to do things. No he doesn't need to grade papers, they have a grader. No he does not need to teach labs or discussion sections, he has a T.A.

For number of hours: if they're a leader in their field or otherwise ambitious, I'd bet they're a workaholic, so the answer will be "loads". There's always more research that can be done. [wink]

Classes would take at a minimum (3 hours for contact + 1 hour office time + 1 hour prep) per week per class while classes are in session. That's a minimum of 25 hours per week just for teaching. However if a class has been taught many times before it is possible to skim a bit on the prep, and most professors would double up paper reading with the slow times of office contact hours (which as you've described sound to be frequent).

The grading and tutoring sounds pretty much what it was like for me as an undergraduate and then T.A. Often though my professors would take the labs or discussion of the final year classes, and for smaller classes they would usually grade the exams.

Quote: If he is writing papers/doing research he is probably getting paid HANDSOMELY. There was a big posting on our school web site for a 3 million dollar research for video games in education. This is DURING the economic down turn when schools are screaming about budget cuts.

Uh, that money just doesn't go to the professor [grin]. It goes mostly to paying salaries for postgraduate researchers, graduate students, materials and so on. The money is usually split over multiple years too.

Quote: I have made my school public before, and it is probably easy to find out, but I am trying to keep it out of here. I love my professors and think they are among the best educators in the world (and I have looked up countless online lectures). That being said, I feel its a pretty easy job considering their intelligence, their compensation, the amount of actual work they must do.

The reason I brough it up is that titles differ wildly depending on the institution. What you call a "professor" mightn't be the same sort of job I call a professor. For example, there would be no doubt in my mind that a professor will be doing research - if they weren't doing research, the highest position I'd call them is "senior lecturer". Professors are primarily researchers in my book.

Quote: Edit: I overlooked some of your points. If mentoring and such takes as much time, then its possible they do have a full schedule.

Well to be fair, mentoring and personal research usually go hand in hand. A professor and his or her students will work on the same projects, co-author papers and so on. But that is a lot of what a professor will do.

Quote: My point is "administrative tasks" and the like are complete nonsense. Half the time the professors ask students on school policies, etc.

Not really. How do think those professors get those million dollar grants? Writing grant proposals take a large amount of time, and co-incidently tend to be the things that cause a professor the greatest amount of stress due to how supremely important they are.

Quote: Keeping up with the latest publications is also nonsense as I, you, and many other gamedev'ers do this on our own time, for our own entertainment (yes, learning about academic things is interesting to many people, often including professors ;)).

Except for a professor, being on top of a research area is pretty much in their job description. [wink]

Quote: Needless to say, I have rethought my position on "professors have it so easy!" a bit :)

Most professors I've known tend to work hard. It's a lot like high-school teachers - if you just count the time they're actually teaching, then it looks like they've got short hours. But there's multiple levels of work that go on behind the scenes that students usually don't see.

Quote: Original post by Crazyfool
Well, I have no real sympathy for any teacher (non-professor). It's probably one of the best jobs for anyone with a notable exception. The notable exception is those who strive for more, more, more. It is a completely lenient environment, you work 3/4th of the year, you have a GUARANTEED job, which is as far as I know, pretty unique.

Ahahaha [grin]. I once spent eight months earning my Graduate Diploma of Education. I thought "I really enjoy teaching people new things, so maybe high school teaching is the career for me." Once I got my diploma, I quickly scurried back to academia.

I don't know what the schools are like in your state and country, but I sincerly doubt teaching as cushy as you think. You've got kids who don't want to learn, parents who blame you for their bad parenting, and every politican wanting to be seen to be doing something about children's education - which is completely different from actually doing something about children's education. So you've got layers upon layers of bureaucratic mess to deal with as every government puts in another new initiative, all of which has to be administered by the teacher. About the only big perk is the extra long holidays, but since most teachers seem to put in 60+ hour weeks during school term it balances out. And the face-to-face contact hours in teacher were some of the most intense hours of work I've put in ever, much more so than teaching much harder material to university students. I guess you get used to it, but I doubt I'd have survived the first year.

Quote: I think you and I differ on our view on academia. I think my practical nature is obstructing the "sake of learning" mentality. I am sure there are a lot of great professors, but it just seems like such a simple job. You know the material, you teach the material. I don't think there is much preparation because its mostly lecture and no real interaction. Anyway, good to read someone else's thoughts, thanks :)

From my experiences, a typical professor's job will be more like "Coordinator and lead researcher of the Bionic Eye project". And that's at most a quarter of their total job. [grin]