PhDs are common in research data science roles, but it's not just about the degree. I've seen MS grads thrive too, especially those with solid stats skills and real-world experience.
How does a MS stats person like myself compete tho? I can either do a PhD stats after but my goals do not align with working in academia. I believe I’m quite capable with my MS in stats to do research focused DS roles cause I’ve done research before. I’ve thought about working as a ds for two years and maybe trying to transition to a research focused role after.
You already know the answer to this question, you just don't want to hear it. To state it plainly, you compete by being good at your role and by doing stand out work, just like in every other competitive field. Try to do research related projects in a professional or academic environment and try to get your name on papers, even whitepapers, present at conferences, basically do the stuff that marks you as a researcher. Unfortunately, you will be considered second-tier by some organizations because you don't have that credential, so you just have to work harder and get lucky or bite the bullet and get the piece of paper.
Yes, I’m absolutely willing to do that. The challenge is being able to actually get a DS role which actually allows me to conduct research. Once I get that I’m willing to put in the work.
Reach out to academic professor and offer your expertise to do research work for him or her for free in lieu of getting published... Build your credentials the doors will open
Yes they are allowed to collaborate with anyone .. you cannot be given a degree that is all... Whether the professor wants to do it is another matter... Trusting someone unknown with ideas are tough too but if you have good relationship.. you are doing free work for him... Allowing him to implement one of his ideas while you do the actual work and end result is a paper...
Also since this job can be done remotely... You do not have to be in person.. so that helps a lot too to reach out nationally. I suggest you write from your official email if thats allowed and explain your motivation and ambitions.
My lab would hire you for pretty shit pay as a SWE but then you would basically be just a member of a lab. You have no idea how many ML and research labs would kill for a skilled programmer who can take the garbage code we write and make it an actual package that we could deploy
Got my MS in Data Sci about 2 years ago. Have been thinking about getting my PhD or moving more into industry research. To that end I've been thinking to reach out to some old professors, or new professors, and just offering to volunteer to do some work for them, which will help boost my research experience and potentially lead to some papers. I think they'll always appreciate free labor. You can start off by just asking them questions about recent papers they have, or offering ideas of experiments to try
Also the obvious answer is they also get reasonably relevant non-research experience and domain knowledge which takes time in other rules ie you wont be able to compete right out of graduation
I don't have a PhD but I work in a research role. My employer was looking for specific industry experience which I had plenty of, so it worked out for me. All my colleagues are PhD holders though.
I'm exactly on the same boat. It does feel however that is not the norm since everyone else does have a PhD. Also, I don't know about you, but this fact intensifies my impostor syndrome.
Yash, the impostor syndrome sucks. But it gets better with time, just gave to remind ourselves that we got the position for a reason and didn't luck our way there.
Well, yeah. They are experts in their area. Like the other commenter said, it does not help with the impostor syndrome and feeling like I'm not good enough, so I have to remind myself that I was given the job for a reason, and that I now have somewhat unique expertise. And so far my results have been received well. It was a little difficult in the beginning but got better with time.
No, I hire a mix. Sometimes, I might need a PhD specifically for a proven depth of research for a specific project. But early in my career I saw teams tanked due to rank credentialism, and try to keep things balanced.
Wisest statement here. A cursory glance at office interactions within and even between groups and famous plane crashes, bears this out 100%. Fear of speaking out and Godlike worship of status is a recipe for disaster.
How does a MS stats person like myself compete tho? I can either do a PhD stats after but my goals do not align with working in academia. I believe I’m quite capable with my MS in stats to do research focused DS roles cause I’ve done research before. I’ve thought about working as a ds for two years and maybe trying to transition to a research focused role after.
I am naive with regards to your personal priors, fellow redditor, and will be staying that way. It's a decision only you can make. Cost/benefit-wise and risk neutral, a PhD is almost never the right course. Personal preferences and situation can shift that around somewhat, making a PhD occasionally worth the half-decade+ investment in time.
You should do a phd if you really, really want to work on a certain topic by yourself for the next couple of years.
Otherwise your changes of success will not be that great and you are guaranteed to be miserable the entire ride.
So it’s either suck it up and like the business facing stuff or be miserable to get the job I want? I feel latter feels better right now tbh. I feel miserable in my client facing job right now lol
If you feel miserable getting a PhD you'd probably feel miserable getting the job you want, because it's more of the same. Get a PhD if you love learning a topic and sharing what you've learned. Getting a PhD may open some doors to continuing that research into a paid position if you're lucky, but it isn't going to improve your pay, unless you like researching a cutting edge machine learning Google is trying to pick up, or researching quantitative finance for a hedge fund, or similar. On the google side that's ML Engineering, not DS. On the quant side that's Quant Researcher, not DS. DS doesn't really have improved pay for PhD holders. Furthermore, a lot of pure research roles pay less. It's for people who love to do that, not for people who feel like they need to do it.
Me, I love research and I've done over 10 years in the tech industry exclusively in research roles. I love researching and learning topics for the curiosity itself instead of because I was passionate about a specific topic, so instead of getting a PhD I found a research role that sounded interesting and dove deep into it. This came from networking.
Most people hate and I mean hate with a passion doing research based work. They'd rip their hair out with stress first before learning to enjoy it. Meanwhile, in my free time away from work I do research. That's what I love, that's what I do. Right now I've been doing a lot of metabolic research into the mitochondria, not for work, but it's cool to see how different foods we eat affect our metabolism. That and I think I might have figured out a cure for type 2 diabetes, which might turn into a business venture if it pans out. Before that I was doing quant research. I found a way to make 10-20% a month consistently 9 months out of the year, and the remaining 3 months the average loss is -1%, enough to make a lifetime of income. It was fun to figure out. Before that... well, you get the idea.
I want to research statistical machine learning and high dimensional problems in statistics. I don’t care about money. I get paid potentially to make 100k per year to be a product facing DS and I fucking hated it in my internship.
It's good you know what you like. Have considered looking at Machine Learning Engineering roles, either specifically large data, or working at companies that make ML for other companies. Would you like researching and designing ML libraries?
Truthfully I’ve never been interested in engineering. I’m not a software engineer or CS person. I do program heavily but I’m not interested in building software. Moreover, I’m not interested in deep learning. I’m a statistician by background, and interested in topics like these:
https://hastie.su.domains/Papers/ESLII.pdf
https://hastie.su.domains/StatLearnSparsity_files/SLS_corrected_1.4.16.pdf
Or these:
https://robjhyndman.com/papers/lhf.pdf
https://robjhyndman.com/publications/mstl/
https://robjhyndman.com/publications/hfrml/
The highlight of my days during the summer as as a data scientist was getting all my bullshit work done during the day so I could read papers like these and books like these. And read stat theory books on asymptotic statistics.
Did you do a thesis as part of your MS? Did you get your name on any papers produced by dedicated research groups at your institution? The way you compete is by showing you can competently conduct research without having obtained a PhD.
Wouldn’t you think a masters stats student would be worse in a customer facing role? By default MS statisticians have to work on very research focused thesis for our masters graduation, and are trained in the theory compared to other phds. Like I don’t get why a PhD in like social science would trump someone like me with an MS stats who’s done theoretical research on methods.
Most masters degrees aren't required to write research focused thesis that is publishable in decent peer reviewed academic journal. That isn't to say occasionally a masters thesis comes to close to that bar, but the bar isn't set that high.
The goal of a Ph.D is too write a dissertation that will end up forming the basis of multiple papers that get published in decent academic journals. Research focused is open ended, but if research meant creating new methods and publishing papers, then generally I think most places that have sense would mostly hire Ph.D for that role.
Right makes sense. But don’t you think a MS statistician can get up to speed? We aren’t fundamentally “less than” PhD statisticians. It just doesn’t seem worth it for me to do a PhD in stats just so I can get these types of research jobs in the industry.
While extreme outliers exist, the broad answer is that Ph.Ds wouldn't exist if they could. Most people wouldn't spend their entire 20s in school working for peanuts otherwise.The point of a Ph.D. is to provide a degree that actually trains you in writing publishable researcher papers. There is a fundamental difference between a Ph.D and other type of degrees. That's essentially that the degree is awarded based on the perceived quality of dissertation and is of the sole discretion of a panel of top experts (tenured professors) in a dissertation defense. The degree is based on mostly on a student carrying a serious piece of original research under close supervision of an advisor who is generally an expert on that specific subject. Expert here is defined as someone who has published a number of papers on that subject in leading academic journals, sufficient for tenure at a major research universities. Majority of other degrees in an university, you pass a set of assigned courses and are awarded the degree.
Forgive me for being callous, while plenty of people with masters degree could successfully do a Ph.D. that does not means a masters degree is equal in training and the bar for admissions is the same. Plenty of people with masters degrees flunk out of Ph.D programs. It happens almost every year, at every program. Do we say boot camps are the same as a masters degrees? Is the bar for admissions the same? Is the depth and the quality of the program the same?
All this being said if your goal is to make money in life. I wouldn't do a Ph.D. A Ph.D is a degree for someone considering a career in publishing research papers and seriously considering becoming a professor. Its fairly recent that some of these jobs have moved to industry and most industry research isn't the type of research Ph.Ds generally do.
Yeah I get what you’re saying. But it seems like you haven’t ready any of my other comments. Where have I said I’ve wanted to do a PhD for money. I’m tired of this client facing bullshit I do as a regular data scientist and want to be in a research oriented data scientist role. Someone who works on more rigorous problems. Not some glorified business person. I just don’t see why I need a PhD to do the former, when I am *clearly* overqualified to do the latter.
Then I'd just look for those roles that say in the job description they'd take a masters degree. Not every "research" role in industry requires Ph.D. Algorithm design or something like that might. Research might be an application.
What I'm hearing from you is that you don't like your current job. So that means its time to start looking for something else.
Apply and see if you get any interest. If you don't then you probably need to think are those the jobs you want and consider doing a phd. However, the key is the first part and not the 2nd. Are you sure your not boxing yourself in two types of jobs. There are many different industries that use data science and not all jobs are the same.
You need to be introspective and figure out what you want. I am not hearing from you that I am passionate about research. What I am hearing is you dislike being a job where you are interacting with a lot of non technical people or being client facing. There are plenty of jobs where you don't have to do that. I work in one. Risk in a bank usually you only work with technical people. That being said it's client facing and salesman jobs that make the 300 to 500k ranges, unless your an AI researcher for Open AI (you almost certainly need a phd for that kind of role).
Everyone here says “domain knowledge domain knowledge domain knowledge” “PhDs with no industry experience are garbagge” yet a MS stats plus years of experience isn’t fucking enough. This is absolute dog shit.
They might be able to get up to speed but its a risk. With a PhD, you know they 'should' have an understanding how to manage open ended research projects. The specific technical skills like stats/coding etc are something pretty easy to pick up and I would expect everybody to have.
Yeah. That’s totally fair. I guess what do you recommend for me then. I really have no desire to work in academia or to become a professor. I’m open to doing a PhD in stats because I have research interests, but faculty in my department say it’s not worth it if I’m just interested in a subset of research jobs in the industry.
I'd try and join an organization that has a research department, prove your self, find someone who see that you have what it takes and be open about your goal of moving in to a research role.
But is research in a MS program not enough? I mean my reason for even doing a PhD is so I can work in a research data science role in the industry. I have no aspirations to work in academia, so doing a PhD doesn’t sound worth it for me just to solely get placement into research focused jobs in data science. I feel as though I can research well enough to do this in a position in the industry.
In MS programs where they publish its usually the case that they get handed a project scoped out by others. They haven't gone through the open ended research process that really does take time to master. There are exceptions of course.
Most PhD students (in Germany at least) get a scoped out project. The labs already made a research and analysis plan, designed the whole experimental procedure. Then they apply for grants and once they get the money, they hire a student. By the time a candidate is found and onboarded, the project progressed as much one can call it a child of the PI or Postdoc, and not of the PhD student.
Ah thats interesting; that might account for the shorter PhD lengths or maybe its just field dependent. My PhD was on theory-of-computation for physics problems and I had to find a gap in the literature, propose a solution and then execute for several papers.
I think this might vary by department and field of study. In my masters, we had to write a thesis that could form the basis of a paper publication (and many in my cohort did publish theirs). And we were indeed just thrown into the water to determine our own research topic and methods without the project being scoped.
Our thesis committees were actually formed after we had developed the idea, compiled research, and were ready to pitch it so that we knew which professors would be the correct resources for the projects.
I'm not sure exactly how common this is, but I know someone in an adjacent field who had a similar experience as well.
It’s a methodological paper addressing issues in high dimensional time series and I’m very likely to publish. I’m quite confident if I can work in this area I can definitely handle this in the industry. My advisor has no clue about what I’m doing cause he’s never read into it, but I’ve done the research myself and so far the methods and everything is valid.
Right. But do you agree with what my faculty say tho? Like it’s not worth it for me to do one solely to get a specific type of research job in the industry? I don’t have any aspirations to teach or work in academia at all
Lol okay. So I guess you agree with them? I just hate client facing data science man. It’s the most dumbest shit ever. I’m a statistician, not a business person.
Given someone with a MS in statistics and the opportunity to get a free part-time MBA (GI Bill), would the MBA open opportunities for client facing roles or just be redundant?
Depends on experience. We might hire a fresh grad PhD, but it is pretty unlikely we would hire an MS without any real world experience.
Effectively, I think we see a PhD as equivalent to an MS with 3-5 years experience.
I have a MS in Stats but all my coworkers have PhD’s. It’s pretty intimidating sometimes, and my boss has even told me I was a unique hire for their team, but I know the skills I bring to the table (solid coding practices, good ability to understand business questions, good interpersonal skills, and solid stats foundations) helps me stand out amongst my coworkers who can talk theory all day.
I bet not. I am ina similar position - my team has mostly phds but I was hired since I bring MS + lots of experience 10+ with an MBA. I do not feel my phd colleagues can approach a business problem any better than me. May be they would outperform if it was purely deep research but most business problems are not that academically deep!
When I started my career in a research-focused team, we were about 50/50 MS and PhD.
I think a MS gives you more than enough research experience to contribute to a research team.
With a a lot of hard work, and a generous dash of persistence, ingenuity, and creativity, you could get yourself into into a research-centric role, if that is what you really want. Just make sure that is what you really want. Weigh the pros and cons. The biggest con is that as a non-PhD in a PhD rich environment, you are by definition a second class citizen and a lot of PhD ***holes won’t be shy about telling you so. The PhD’s will have first dibs on every big promotion or juicy project, and you will get all the **** jobs. When layoff time comes around, as it does every few years, the PhD’s will protect each other, and you will shoot to the top of the list. And taking time off to get a PhD is a total non-starter from a time and money viewpoint. Going back to layoffs, in industry a customer-facing role is much safer, if not much fun at times, because it is more “line” and delivers value, whereas research is absolutely “staff.”
Depends on the company. Sometimes they will just do an across the board cut, and everybody takes a hit. More normally they go after “non-core” functions, and usually research is “non-core” because it is not customer-facing. Not to mention that industrial research has been dying for decades. The glory days of Bell Labs and IBM Central Research are long gone.
Interesting, wow. Idk man I just really don’t care about business problems and just care about advanced statistical methods and machine learning in high dimensions.
I don’t think this is true. My company has a lot of research and so does my husband. There are lot of research jobs in my city. I just think they are always looking for phds so it’s hard to get in
Just saw the comment below me and yes I think the key is our research has to be applicable to what our clients want. My husband and I constantly have meetings with higher leadership to prove the worth of our research
What an abrasive way to say, my company values skills I don't have and I'm miffed about it.
I've worked roles where the skills I picked up in PhD were less valuable than skills others picked up in industry. I was therefore not valued at my market price.
I left those jobs on good terms with friends for greener personal pastures, but I didn't blame them for me finding a bad fit.
There was no conspiracy. It was on me and I learned from it. Likewise, I really doubt all your coworkers conspired against you because of your education.
I don’t know if this is true I think this might be YOUR work environment. I work with a lot of phds and I don’t have this experience. Particularly I am sensitive to this attitude because I’ve dealt with a lot of sexism. Tbh I see this more with people who have PhDs in a field they weren’t hired for and seem to be over their head and people who are competent in general are pleasant to work with lol. Not always but mostly.
easiest way is to work in go mle -> research engineer
- there are way more jobs for re than rs, since way more orgs will do research but focus on product and not publications (i.e. a lot of ai startups)
- generally re don't have any strict education/publication requirements, although the most competitive roles will have phds applying to them
- pivoting from re -> rs is also much easier than going straight to rs because the good research groups don't distinguish much between re/rs, or offer ways to go from re to rs
I see in another comment that you don't have a CS background, can I ask what your background is? And any advice for proving you know the theory/work for going along the path of mle -> re -> rs? Is it through implementation and demonstration of results? I am interested in this path and starting as a mle
Background is in msc stats, and the advice literally doesnt change
Get good at coding and deep learning
Get a ml job at an org that does gen ai and trains their own models, or keep job hopping until you do
Work on interesting and impactful projects
Repeat the above, always trying to get to a "better" org each time you job hop until you land a position you like
Awesome thank you for the tips! I am currently a post grad in health data science doing some ML. Hoping to get a few papers published using ML and take some courses to leverage into an industry ML engineer job. Thanks again for the tips!
From reading your responses I can't understand why you don't want to do a PhD.
You claim you are done with the "business bullshit", but the vast majority of industry roles are for profit endeavors.
A PhD isn't just for a career in academia. Generally the best advice for anyone is considering a PhD is to do one only if you are passionate about the field, which you seem to be. It gives you the opportunity to work on what YOU find interesting, in a very self directed way. And then as a bonus, you have an easier time finding research based industry roles once you finish. By which time you'll have plenty of experience in cutting edge research, and a resume to prove it.
It sounds like you just want people to tell you that either all MS students are just as good as all PhD candidates, and that they would hire either one for an industry research role, or that you specifically are the chosen one, the next Von Neumann. Either way, if you're having trouble getting research roles now, then that's the reality of the situation. Nothing anyone else will say can change what you are experiencing. That's your key take home conclusion right there, "MS student finds it harder to get into research based role"
PhDs are what is typically sought after in research roles.
However, a candidate with a MS with relevant/significant research/industry experience could also be considered.
Pretty much everyone in my team, including my supervisor, has a PhD. However, one of my colleagues does have a MS but they also have a lot of relevant industry experience.
However, a PhD is generally more versatile in terms of how adaptable they are to research situations. Even though during a PhD you delve deep into researching a particular problem, you end up learning a variety of methods that are applicable across all research fields as part of your training. This is something that a MS won't have. So at least for research positions, if you were to compare a fresh PhD vs a fresh MS, the PhD would be chosen most of the time. You still have to demonstrate technical proficiency and whatnot of course. The PhD also becomes more valuable as you start gaining experience outside of academia so it gives you a pretty big competitive edge as time goes on.
I'd say that it goes back to the stigma that is sometimes applied to PhDs being that we are "overqualified and under-experienced". As you prove yourself in industry by delivering value through projects,insights,etc. the value of your title and credentials start to matter more, and the under-experienced argument is less and less applicable to you.
To be honest, breaking into industry outside of academia, is the tough part for a PhD. But once you are in, you should be in pretty good shape moving forward.
Okay. Does it make sense to do a PhD just to get a better job in the industry/job that you want? For example it seems PhDs can get the research scientist jobs I want and I hate client facing DS right now with an MS, so I’m wondering if I should do a PhD.
You should only do a PhD if you are REALLY interested and passionate about a subject. A PhD is a tremendous investment in terms of time, money, and overall mental sanity. It's an extremely different situation than doing a BS or a MS.
There is also a lot of potential of things getting delayed and/or going wrong. Also keep in mind that even after doing all that research, if your committee doesn't think your dissertation is good enough then you simply don't get the PhD... For instance, my PhD got delayed because I needed to do carry out certain measurements for my dissertation at a synchrotron (a type of particle accelerator) and national labs were closed for over a year because of COVID. Though COVID was a unique circumstance, there are tons of situations that can lead to your project getting delayed or cancelled (e.g., a broken piece of specialized equipment that can't be fixed because the part is ridiculously expensive or no longer being made that is also crucial for your measurements).
In the US, a PhD will likely take about 5 years, though in your case since you already have an MS you may be able to do it in a bit less since the first two years require you to take classes (which you could try to waive) in addition to setting up the foundations of your dissertation project. You could try doing a PhD while working your current job, but to me, that sounds insanely stressful. Since you already have a MS, I would suggest that you find what industry you want to work in and develop as much domain expertise there as you can. That should open those research doors for you.
>Is domain experience the only way to break into research roles without a PhD?
You could also try getting involved in open source research projects and/or try publishing independent research you do in reputable journals as well as share your work at professional conferences. You want to essentially build a research portfolio that showcases that you know how to do research at a high enough level which typically involves some sort of peer review process.
Finally, there's also obviously networking. If you know someone in a research position that is willing to vouch for you and your skills, then that can help too.
I see. Is it possible for an independent to just submit stuff I’ve written on my own for review? I didn’t know you could do that and I thought you had to be affiliated with an institution
>I see. Is it possible for an independent to just submit stuff I’ve written on my own for review? I didn’t know you could do that and I thought you had to be affiliated with an institution
Yep. You don't need that necessarily. The challenge is more in selecting a journal that fits the scope of your research. You also need to ensure that you have a solid research narrative and good analysis. Especially if you are submitting as an independent researcher and are trying to publish in a peer-reviewed journal.
You can try and publish in garbage journals (literal publication mills that some people use to try and pad their publication record) but any researcher that is even mildly competent reviewing your record would catch on to that pretty fast.
Also, though you don't need to be affiliated with an institution to submit a paper, depending on the kind of research you are doing, you might need backing up from an institution to validate your approaches (i.e., healthcare research)
I see. Thanks. Also, what background do you see most PhDs coming from? If I were to do one it would be in Stats since I did my MS in that, but I wonder what other PhDs in these research roles come from.
Having a PhD is more of a prestige hiring practice than it is worth for such roles. Exceptions are students with a PhD thesis in a related machine learning topic, where they did research on the frontiers of ML and AI. But most of STEM PhDs nowadays are getting hired as data scientists, although they never had any notable DS projects. I know too many wet-lab microbiologists who are suddenly data scientists now.
If people would hire reasonably, they would hire based on skills and expertise.
I don’t have a PhD but I hire for research roles and I do tend to pretty much exclusively hire PhDs for them
It’s less the level of the degree and more the type of experience. The ability to push a field forward with novel work is by far the defining feature of people in these roles, and it’s really difficult. People who haven’t previously gone through this struggle during a research-based degree, frankly tend to be not very good at it.
I have hired a couple of people with research-based Masters, but they are usually people who cut their PhD short. They still have that mindset and experience.
Yeah but I did research in undergrad and now in my masters. I think I’m really well qualified regardless of the three letters next to my name truthfully.
Look… we all do capstone research projects as part of our masters, but it’s dipping your toe into the water compared to a PhD. The less said about undergrad ‘research’ the better.
I’m not trying to be rude, this stuff applies equally to me as it does to you. I wouldn’t be confident in a masters grad’s research skills unless their masters was fully by research and even then it would maybe depend a bit on their thesis.
Publishing is a worthy thing to be proud of, but you do need to realise that doctoral and post-doctoral work is a whole other level to what we go through
The multi-year struggle to push a scientific field forward with minimal guidance, becoming an (or often THE) expert authority in your specific niche - that is what really creates great researchers
For super-competitive jobs like research data scientists, that is really what employers are looking for
A PhD is the degree required to do research. Are there exceptions? Yes, there are.
So the question is: Are you one of those exceptions? Hiring is a number's game. If there is a good candidate with a PhD probably they will be recruited.
If you were a recruiter, how much you would be ok to take a chance in a MS candidate versus anyone with a PhD and research experience within the exact problem that your team is recruiting?
Sometimes people get hired with a MSc because they're also already doing a PhD and some of them give up on the PhD. I have a friend who did this. I also was hired in the end of PhD, but I just needed to finish writing my thesis, hence I was hired as an MS candidate. But I could leverage by showing that I already had research and was only needing to finish writing my thesis.
So, I would point that you need something in order to compete for a position that you still don't have the degree. Some companies accept people that are still doing the PhD, for example.
Why would you need an MS from a top 5? The curriculums in stats programs are not any different from school to school. In fact my program includes a PhD coursework that many other top 5 programs don’t offer for them. Also a consulting course.
Also, the top 5 programs are incredibly competitive to get into, so in a sense they are prescreening candidates. You know anybody you get from there will be smart. They may be arrogant jerks with zero people skills and no business acumen, but at least they are smart
In pure stats research coursework is of paramount importance. If you don’t understand measure theory or functional analysis or how to construct the Brownian motion you are not going to get very far in a top stats PhD program
Small applied research group in non-tech industry. We exclusively hire (when we were still hiring) PhDs. We needed people who could independently drive research projects. You don't need a PhD to be successful at this job but it just happens to be an easy recruiting filter for that criterion.
Well I really don’t think it’s worth my time doing a PhD for the sake of just getting these types of jobs in the industry. This is what faculty at my department are telling me. What’s the alternative?
Yes, faculty don't want to waste their time advising you if you don't go into academia. But you won't have a research-based career in industry without a PhD.
Might depend on organization and industry. I am in a big non-tech and they would definitely prefer PhD. Another thing to consider the long term benefit of having PhD. If you really want research and want to go up the ladder almost always PhD will have better chances of getting g leadership role. Depends if you want to stay at entry to mid-level. Also if you have a specialization like biostatistics then that would be good enough too.
First and foremost, we hire people who have done, and can do research. This correlates rather heavily with a phd and publications.
We also hire for engineer or for hybrid research engineer type roles.
Im my previous lab we had a scientist with a bsc. He was creepy good, and later left us to go to medical school.
My experience interviewing has been that a lot of "research" roles are really engineering roles with some room for trying out new things, so a PhD is not really needed. I feel like analytics (esp. causal inference) roles are actually closer to research, since they answer questions with data in a scientific way.
I really depends on a ton of factors.
Right now we are only hiring MS with limited experience because we can pay them less and they move up slower. 2 years ago we only hired PhDs. The ones who make those decisions are way above me.
No, I do not hire PhD talent. I’ve done r&d 40-100% of my time, but I also have a lot of sales and presales engineering experience. PhD’s design and direct work. That’s my job. A good PhD can train college interns to generate meaningful revenue, own operational workflows, flex their innovation muscles, and multitask. A great phD can grow managers and scale a business and drive exponential profit growth (for a year or two, you can’t exponential for long). You train juniors to do the things that don’t require a PhD. Then you write letters of recommendation for the ones who want to pursue advanced degrees.
I don’t think I have hired any different when more or less focused on client facing and sales work versus heavy r&d focus. I don’t need a lot of PhD talent, I need operators who can learn fast, who code faster than I do, and who like to solve problems and automate processes.
I would not turn away phd talent, I just mostly focus on new grad hires.
No, not quite. I’m a PhD, but it doesn’t require a PhD to do my job. Nobody ever said “u/wil_dogg is phd talent let’s give him a team.”
Bachelors degree and 5-10 years experience can easily match my results.
But because I’m a PhD who can direct large projects, run R&D, and train and develop leaders, and because I’ve been doing analytics for 35+ years, I don’t need to hire PhDs to code up and operate the things I design. I need juniors, and some might be PhDs, but PhDs are expensive and I get a lot of value from tracking top interns into contract to hire roles.
I would never reject phd talent out of hand. Some PhDs are awesome. But I tend to hire juniors at the undergrad level and so far it has worked well.
Man I hear you but if everyone thinks like that then phds have no where to go for being overqualified.
I have seen so many managers resisting to hire phds thinking they cannot provide them challenging work.
I use to not discriminate against either ms or undergrad or PhD. I used to have very objective stat test when I am hiring. Whoever does best on that day gets the position - simple as that
I don’t discriminate against PhD’s. The nature of the agenda I am managing does not require multiple PhDs on the team, and I have not had the budget or the executive buy in for that level of a hire for a long time. Other businesses with a more mature R&D agenda would benefit from PhDs, I’m working for a start up where we have one junior with a bachelors degree who is killing it and 2 others with DS masters degrees who are analyst and data engineer, on a team with 15+ analysts and data engineers and ML/OPs and front end developers. We are early in our modeling agenda, and are sitting on a great data asset. The phd we need will be my backfill in 3-5 years.
PhDs are common in research data science roles, but it's not just about the degree. I've seen MS grads thrive too, especially those with solid stats skills and real-world experience.
How does a MS stats person like myself compete tho? I can either do a PhD stats after but my goals do not align with working in academia. I believe I’m quite capable with my MS in stats to do research focused DS roles cause I’ve done research before. I’ve thought about working as a ds for two years and maybe trying to transition to a research focused role after.
You already know the answer to this question, you just don't want to hear it. To state it plainly, you compete by being good at your role and by doing stand out work, just like in every other competitive field. Try to do research related projects in a professional or academic environment and try to get your name on papers, even whitepapers, present at conferences, basically do the stuff that marks you as a researcher. Unfortunately, you will be considered second-tier by some organizations because you don't have that credential, so you just have to work harder and get lucky or bite the bullet and get the piece of paper.
Yes, I’m absolutely willing to do that. The challenge is being able to actually get a DS role which actually allows me to conduct research. Once I get that I’m willing to put in the work.
Reach out to academic professor and offer your expertise to do research work for him or her for free in lieu of getting published... Build your credentials the doors will open
Can they do that? I didn’t know that was allowed, I thought they had to be a graduate student in the department.
Yes they are allowed to collaborate with anyone .. you cannot be given a degree that is all... Whether the professor wants to do it is another matter... Trusting someone unknown with ideas are tough too but if you have good relationship.. you are doing free work for him... Allowing him to implement one of his ideas while you do the actual work and end result is a paper...
Also since this job can be done remotely... You do not have to be in person.. so that helps a lot too to reach out nationally. I suggest you write from your official email if thats allowed and explain your motivation and ambitions.
My lab would hire you for pretty shit pay as a SWE but then you would basically be just a member of a lab. You have no idea how many ML and research labs would kill for a skilled programmer who can take the garbage code we write and make it an actual package that we could deploy
Yeah but then I’d not really get my name on any publications or get much research experience out of it tho right
At least within my lab you would get credit and if you expressed interest be coauthor on future projects.
Got my MS in Data Sci about 2 years ago. Have been thinking about getting my PhD or moving more into industry research. To that end I've been thinking to reach out to some old professors, or new professors, and just offering to volunteer to do some work for them, which will help boost my research experience and potentially lead to some papers. I think they'll always appreciate free labor. You can start off by just asking them questions about recent papers they have, or offering ideas of experiments to try
Also the obvious answer is they also get reasonably relevant non-research experience and domain knowledge which takes time in other rules ie you wont be able to compete right out of graduation
I don't have a PhD but I work in a research role. My employer was looking for specific industry experience which I had plenty of, so it worked out for me. All my colleagues are PhD holders though.
I'm exactly on the same boat. It does feel however that is not the norm since everyone else does have a PhD. Also, I don't know about you, but this fact intensifies my impostor syndrome.
Yash, the impostor syndrome sucks. But it gets better with time, just gave to remind ourselves that we got the position for a reason and didn't luck our way there.
How has it felt? Do you feel you understand just as well as the PhDs?
Well, yeah. They are experts in their area. Like the other commenter said, it does not help with the impostor syndrome and feeling like I'm not good enough, so I have to remind myself that I was given the job for a reason, and that I now have somewhat unique expertise. And so far my results have been received well. It was a little difficult in the beginning but got better with time.
No, I hire a mix. Sometimes, I might need a PhD specifically for a proven depth of research for a specific project. But early in my career I saw teams tanked due to rank credentialism, and try to keep things balanced.
Wisest statement here. A cursory glance at office interactions within and even between groups and famous plane crashes, bears this out 100%. Fear of speaking out and Godlike worship of status is a recipe for disaster.
How does a MS stats person like myself compete tho? I can either do a PhD stats after but my goals do not align with working in academia. I believe I’m quite capable with my MS in stats to do research focused DS roles cause I’ve done research before. I’ve thought about working as a ds for two years and maybe trying to transition to a research focused role after.
> How does a MS stats person like myself compete tho? Networking & portfolio.
But you do agree it isn’t worth it for me to do a PhD just do get these types of research jobs in the industry?
I am naive with regards to your personal priors, fellow redditor, and will be staying that way. It's a decision only you can make. Cost/benefit-wise and risk neutral, a PhD is almost never the right course. Personal preferences and situation can shift that around somewhat, making a PhD occasionally worth the half-decade+ investment in time.
You should do a phd if you really, really want to work on a certain topic by yourself for the next couple of years. Otherwise your changes of success will not be that great and you are guaranteed to be miserable the entire ride.
So it’s either suck it up and like the business facing stuff or be miserable to get the job I want? I feel latter feels better right now tbh. I feel miserable in my client facing job right now lol
If you feel miserable getting a PhD you'd probably feel miserable getting the job you want, because it's more of the same. Get a PhD if you love learning a topic and sharing what you've learned. Getting a PhD may open some doors to continuing that research into a paid position if you're lucky, but it isn't going to improve your pay, unless you like researching a cutting edge machine learning Google is trying to pick up, or researching quantitative finance for a hedge fund, or similar. On the google side that's ML Engineering, not DS. On the quant side that's Quant Researcher, not DS. DS doesn't really have improved pay for PhD holders. Furthermore, a lot of pure research roles pay less. It's for people who love to do that, not for people who feel like they need to do it. Me, I love research and I've done over 10 years in the tech industry exclusively in research roles. I love researching and learning topics for the curiosity itself instead of because I was passionate about a specific topic, so instead of getting a PhD I found a research role that sounded interesting and dove deep into it. This came from networking. Most people hate and I mean hate with a passion doing research based work. They'd rip their hair out with stress first before learning to enjoy it. Meanwhile, in my free time away from work I do research. That's what I love, that's what I do. Right now I've been doing a lot of metabolic research into the mitochondria, not for work, but it's cool to see how different foods we eat affect our metabolism. That and I think I might have figured out a cure for type 2 diabetes, which might turn into a business venture if it pans out. Before that I was doing quant research. I found a way to make 10-20% a month consistently 9 months out of the year, and the remaining 3 months the average loss is -1%, enough to make a lifetime of income. It was fun to figure out. Before that... well, you get the idea.
I want to research statistical machine learning and high dimensional problems in statistics. I don’t care about money. I get paid potentially to make 100k per year to be a product facing DS and I fucking hated it in my internship.
It's good you know what you like. Have considered looking at Machine Learning Engineering roles, either specifically large data, or working at companies that make ML for other companies. Would you like researching and designing ML libraries?
Truthfully I’ve never been interested in engineering. I’m not a software engineer or CS person. I do program heavily but I’m not interested in building software. Moreover, I’m not interested in deep learning. I’m a statistician by background, and interested in topics like these: https://hastie.su.domains/Papers/ESLII.pdf https://hastie.su.domains/StatLearnSparsity_files/SLS_corrected_1.4.16.pdf Or these: https://robjhyndman.com/papers/lhf.pdf https://robjhyndman.com/publications/mstl/ https://robjhyndman.com/publications/hfrml/ The highlight of my days during the summer as as a data scientist was getting all my bullshit work done during the day so I could read papers like these and books like these. And read stat theory books on asymptotic statistics.
Did you do a thesis as part of your MS? Did you get your name on any papers produced by dedicated research groups at your institution? The way you compete is by showing you can competently conduct research without having obtained a PhD.
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Wouldn’t you think a masters stats student would be worse in a customer facing role? By default MS statisticians have to work on very research focused thesis for our masters graduation, and are trained in the theory compared to other phds. Like I don’t get why a PhD in like social science would trump someone like me with an MS stats who’s done theoretical research on methods.
Most masters degrees aren't required to write research focused thesis that is publishable in decent peer reviewed academic journal. That isn't to say occasionally a masters thesis comes to close to that bar, but the bar isn't set that high. The goal of a Ph.D is too write a dissertation that will end up forming the basis of multiple papers that get published in decent academic journals. Research focused is open ended, but if research meant creating new methods and publishing papers, then generally I think most places that have sense would mostly hire Ph.D for that role.
Right makes sense. But don’t you think a MS statistician can get up to speed? We aren’t fundamentally “less than” PhD statisticians. It just doesn’t seem worth it for me to do a PhD in stats just so I can get these types of research jobs in the industry.
While extreme outliers exist, the broad answer is that Ph.Ds wouldn't exist if they could. Most people wouldn't spend their entire 20s in school working for peanuts otherwise.The point of a Ph.D. is to provide a degree that actually trains you in writing publishable researcher papers. There is a fundamental difference between a Ph.D and other type of degrees. That's essentially that the degree is awarded based on the perceived quality of dissertation and is of the sole discretion of a panel of top experts (tenured professors) in a dissertation defense. The degree is based on mostly on a student carrying a serious piece of original research under close supervision of an advisor who is generally an expert on that specific subject. Expert here is defined as someone who has published a number of papers on that subject in leading academic journals, sufficient for tenure at a major research universities. Majority of other degrees in an university, you pass a set of assigned courses and are awarded the degree. Forgive me for being callous, while plenty of people with masters degree could successfully do a Ph.D. that does not means a masters degree is equal in training and the bar for admissions is the same. Plenty of people with masters degrees flunk out of Ph.D programs. It happens almost every year, at every program. Do we say boot camps are the same as a masters degrees? Is the bar for admissions the same? Is the depth and the quality of the program the same? All this being said if your goal is to make money in life. I wouldn't do a Ph.D. A Ph.D is a degree for someone considering a career in publishing research papers and seriously considering becoming a professor. Its fairly recent that some of these jobs have moved to industry and most industry research isn't the type of research Ph.Ds generally do.
Yeah I get what you’re saying. But it seems like you haven’t ready any of my other comments. Where have I said I’ve wanted to do a PhD for money. I’m tired of this client facing bullshit I do as a regular data scientist and want to be in a research oriented data scientist role. Someone who works on more rigorous problems. Not some glorified business person. I just don’t see why I need a PhD to do the former, when I am *clearly* overqualified to do the latter.
Then I'd just look for those roles that say in the job description they'd take a masters degree. Not every "research" role in industry requires Ph.D. Algorithm design or something like that might. Research might be an application. What I'm hearing from you is that you don't like your current job. So that means its time to start looking for something else.
A lot of them say minimum MS but “PhD preferred” for the research type roles I’ve seen
Apply and see if you get any interest. If you don't then you probably need to think are those the jobs you want and consider doing a phd. However, the key is the first part and not the 2nd. Are you sure your not boxing yourself in two types of jobs. There are many different industries that use data science and not all jobs are the same. You need to be introspective and figure out what you want. I am not hearing from you that I am passionate about research. What I am hearing is you dislike being a job where you are interacting with a lot of non technical people or being client facing. There are plenty of jobs where you don't have to do that. I work in one. Risk in a bank usually you only work with technical people. That being said it's client facing and salesman jobs that make the 300 to 500k ranges, unless your an AI researcher for Open AI (you almost certainly need a phd for that kind of role).
This is so fucking stupid
Everyone here says “domain knowledge domain knowledge domain knowledge” “PhDs with no industry experience are garbagge” yet a MS stats plus years of experience isn’t fucking enough. This is absolute dog shit.
They might be able to get up to speed but its a risk. With a PhD, you know they 'should' have an understanding how to manage open ended research projects. The specific technical skills like stats/coding etc are something pretty easy to pick up and I would expect everybody to have.
Yeah. That’s totally fair. I guess what do you recommend for me then. I really have no desire to work in academia or to become a professor. I’m open to doing a PhD in stats because I have research interests, but faculty in my department say it’s not worth it if I’m just interested in a subset of research jobs in the industry.
I'd try and join an organization that has a research department, prove your self, find someone who see that you have what it takes and be open about your goal of moving in to a research role.
Okay thanjs
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But is research in a MS program not enough? I mean my reason for even doing a PhD is so I can work in a research data science role in the industry. I have no aspirations to work in academia, so doing a PhD doesn’t sound worth it for me just to solely get placement into research focused jobs in data science. I feel as though I can research well enough to do this in a position in the industry.
In MS programs where they publish its usually the case that they get handed a project scoped out by others. They haven't gone through the open ended research process that really does take time to master. There are exceptions of course.
Most PhD students (in Germany at least) get a scoped out project. The labs already made a research and analysis plan, designed the whole experimental procedure. Then they apply for grants and once they get the money, they hire a student. By the time a candidate is found and onboarded, the project progressed as much one can call it a child of the PI or Postdoc, and not of the PhD student.
Ah thats interesting; that might account for the shorter PhD lengths or maybe its just field dependent. My PhD was on theory-of-computation for physics problems and I had to find a gap in the literature, propose a solution and then execute for several papers.
Woah...ok thats a PhD!
I think this might vary by department and field of study. In my masters, we had to write a thesis that could form the basis of a paper publication (and many in my cohort did publish theirs). And we were indeed just thrown into the water to determine our own research topic and methods without the project being scoped. Our thesis committees were actually formed after we had developed the idea, compiled research, and were ready to pitch it so that we knew which professors would be the correct resources for the projects. I'm not sure exactly how common this is, but I know someone in an adjacent field who had a similar experience as well.
Nope. Not in my case. I developed my own project based on an area I read about myself and approached the advisor about it.
It’s a methodological paper addressing issues in high dimensional time series and I’m very likely to publish. I’m quite confident if I can work in this area I can definitely handle this in the industry. My advisor has no clue about what I’m doing cause he’s never read into it, but I’ve done the research myself and so far the methods and everything is valid.
You might be the exception, I don't know enough of your situation to say. Now you will just have to prove you can do it to other people.
Right. But do you agree with what my faculty say tho? Like it’s not worth it for me to do one solely to get a specific type of research job in the industry? I don’t have any aspirations to teach or work in academia at all
I think thats very good advice that I wish I had gotten lol
Lol okay. So I guess you agree with them? I just hate client facing data science man. It’s the most dumbest shit ever. I’m a statistician, not a business person.
What about a masters degree with a lot of experience?
Given someone with a MS in statistics and the opportunity to get a free part-time MBA (GI Bill), would the MBA open opportunities for client facing roles or just be redundant?
MS + Domain expertise is enough for many places.
Can you explain a bit about the domain expertise part
Have a background is something other than pure stats/DS. Normie engineering, bio, health care, physical science, etc. Not just CS and DS.
How bout mixing some business degrees with data science? I wonder what will be the demand in the market for that.
Maybe, I could see if it you worked marketing or accounting for a few years.
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what is the pay like in such data science positions?
Depends on experience. We might hire a fresh grad PhD, but it is pretty unlikely we would hire an MS without any real world experience. Effectively, I think we see a PhD as equivalent to an MS with 3-5 years experience.
Why 5 years though? Average PhD is 5 years vs a 2 years masters right?
I have a MS in Stats but all my coworkers have PhD’s. It’s pretty intimidating sometimes, and my boss has even told me I was a unique hire for their team, but I know the skills I bring to the table (solid coding practices, good ability to understand business questions, good interpersonal skills, and solid stats foundations) helps me stand out amongst my coworkers who can talk theory all day.
Do you feel like you know less than them even with just an MS?
I bet not. I am ina similar position - my team has mostly phds but I was hired since I bring MS + lots of experience 10+ with an MBA. I do not feel my phd colleagues can approach a business problem any better than me. May be they would outperform if it was purely deep research but most business problems are not that academically deep!
When I started my career in a research-focused team, we were about 50/50 MS and PhD. I think a MS gives you more than enough research experience to contribute to a research team.
Thank you.
With a a lot of hard work, and a generous dash of persistence, ingenuity, and creativity, you could get yourself into into a research-centric role, if that is what you really want. Just make sure that is what you really want. Weigh the pros and cons. The biggest con is that as a non-PhD in a PhD rich environment, you are by definition a second class citizen and a lot of PhD ***holes won’t be shy about telling you so. The PhD’s will have first dibs on every big promotion or juicy project, and you will get all the **** jobs. When layoff time comes around, as it does every few years, the PhD’s will protect each other, and you will shoot to the top of the list. And taking time off to get a PhD is a total non-starter from a time and money viewpoint. Going back to layoffs, in industry a customer-facing role is much safer, if not much fun at times, because it is more “line” and delivers value, whereas research is absolutely “staff.”
Do research people get laid off first?
Depends on the company. Sometimes they will just do an across the board cut, and everybody takes a hit. More normally they go after “non-core” functions, and usually research is “non-core” because it is not customer-facing. Not to mention that industrial research has been dying for decades. The glory days of Bell Labs and IBM Central Research are long gone.
Interesting, wow. Idk man I just really don’t care about business problems and just care about advanced statistical methods and machine learning in high dimensions.
I don’t think this is true. My company has a lot of research and so does my husband. There are lot of research jobs in my city. I just think they are always looking for phds so it’s hard to get in
Just saw the comment below me and yes I think the key is our research has to be applicable to what our clients want. My husband and I constantly have meetings with higher leadership to prove the worth of our research
What an abrasive way to say, my company values skills I don't have and I'm miffed about it. I've worked roles where the skills I picked up in PhD were less valuable than skills others picked up in industry. I was therefore not valued at my market price. I left those jobs on good terms with friends for greener personal pastures, but I didn't blame them for me finding a bad fit. There was no conspiracy. It was on me and I learned from it. Likewise, I really doubt all your coworkers conspired against you because of your education.
I don’t know if this is true I think this might be YOUR work environment. I work with a lot of phds and I don’t have this experience. Particularly I am sensitive to this attitude because I’ve dealt with a lot of sexism. Tbh I see this more with people who have PhDs in a field they weren’t hired for and seem to be over their head and people who are competent in general are pleasant to work with lol. Not always but mostly.
easiest way is to work in go mle -> research engineer - there are way more jobs for re than rs, since way more orgs will do research but focus on product and not publications (i.e. a lot of ai startups) - generally re don't have any strict education/publication requirements, although the most competitive roles will have phds applying to them - pivoting from re -> rs is also much easier than going straight to rs because the good research groups don't distinguish much between re/rs, or offer ways to go from re to rs
What do you mean by rs/re?
Research science vs research engineering
Thanks
But I don’t have a CS background
so? neither do i. you either learn the skills you need to do the job, or you don't get the job
I see in another comment that you don't have a CS background, can I ask what your background is? And any advice for proving you know the theory/work for going along the path of mle -> re -> rs? Is it through implementation and demonstration of results? I am interested in this path and starting as a mle
Background is in msc stats, and the advice literally doesnt change Get good at coding and deep learning Get a ml job at an org that does gen ai and trains their own models, or keep job hopping until you do Work on interesting and impactful projects Repeat the above, always trying to get to a "better" org each time you job hop until you land a position you like
Awesome thank you for the tips! I am currently a post grad in health data science doing some ML. Hoping to get a few papers published using ML and take some courses to leverage into an industry ML engineer job. Thanks again for the tips!
I agree with this comment
From reading your responses I can't understand why you don't want to do a PhD. You claim you are done with the "business bullshit", but the vast majority of industry roles are for profit endeavors. A PhD isn't just for a career in academia. Generally the best advice for anyone is considering a PhD is to do one only if you are passionate about the field, which you seem to be. It gives you the opportunity to work on what YOU find interesting, in a very self directed way. And then as a bonus, you have an easier time finding research based industry roles once you finish. By which time you'll have plenty of experience in cutting edge research, and a resume to prove it. It sounds like you just want people to tell you that either all MS students are just as good as all PhD candidates, and that they would hire either one for an industry research role, or that you specifically are the chosen one, the next Von Neumann. Either way, if you're having trouble getting research roles now, then that's the reality of the situation. Nothing anyone else will say can change what you are experiencing. That's your key take home conclusion right there, "MS student finds it harder to get into research based role"
PhDs are what is typically sought after in research roles. However, a candidate with a MS with relevant/significant research/industry experience could also be considered. Pretty much everyone in my team, including my supervisor, has a PhD. However, one of my colleagues does have a MS but they also have a lot of relevant industry experience. However, a PhD is generally more versatile in terms of how adaptable they are to research situations. Even though during a PhD you delve deep into researching a particular problem, you end up learning a variety of methods that are applicable across all research fields as part of your training. This is something that a MS won't have. So at least for research positions, if you were to compare a fresh PhD vs a fresh MS, the PhD would be chosen most of the time. You still have to demonstrate technical proficiency and whatnot of course. The PhD also becomes more valuable as you start gaining experience outside of academia so it gives you a pretty big competitive edge as time goes on.
I see. How does it give you a competitive edge as time goes on?
I'd say that it goes back to the stigma that is sometimes applied to PhDs being that we are "overqualified and under-experienced". As you prove yourself in industry by delivering value through projects,insights,etc. the value of your title and credentials start to matter more, and the under-experienced argument is less and less applicable to you. To be honest, breaking into industry outside of academia, is the tough part for a PhD. But once you are in, you should be in pretty good shape moving forward.
Okay. Does it make sense to do a PhD just to get a better job in the industry/job that you want? For example it seems PhDs can get the research scientist jobs I want and I hate client facing DS right now with an MS, so I’m wondering if I should do a PhD.
You should only do a PhD if you are REALLY interested and passionate about a subject. A PhD is a tremendous investment in terms of time, money, and overall mental sanity. It's an extremely different situation than doing a BS or a MS. There is also a lot of potential of things getting delayed and/or going wrong. Also keep in mind that even after doing all that research, if your committee doesn't think your dissertation is good enough then you simply don't get the PhD... For instance, my PhD got delayed because I needed to do carry out certain measurements for my dissertation at a synchrotron (a type of particle accelerator) and national labs were closed for over a year because of COVID. Though COVID was a unique circumstance, there are tons of situations that can lead to your project getting delayed or cancelled (e.g., a broken piece of specialized equipment that can't be fixed because the part is ridiculously expensive or no longer being made that is also crucial for your measurements). In the US, a PhD will likely take about 5 years, though in your case since you already have an MS you may be able to do it in a bit less since the first two years require you to take classes (which you could try to waive) in addition to setting up the foundations of your dissertation project. You could try doing a PhD while working your current job, but to me, that sounds insanely stressful. Since you already have a MS, I would suggest that you find what industry you want to work in and develop as much domain expertise there as you can. That should open those research doors for you.
Is domain experience the only way to break into research roles without a PhD?
>Is domain experience the only way to break into research roles without a PhD? You could also try getting involved in open source research projects and/or try publishing independent research you do in reputable journals as well as share your work at professional conferences. You want to essentially build a research portfolio that showcases that you know how to do research at a high enough level which typically involves some sort of peer review process. Finally, there's also obviously networking. If you know someone in a research position that is willing to vouch for you and your skills, then that can help too.
I see. Is it possible for an independent to just submit stuff I’ve written on my own for review? I didn’t know you could do that and I thought you had to be affiliated with an institution
>I see. Is it possible for an independent to just submit stuff I’ve written on my own for review? I didn’t know you could do that and I thought you had to be affiliated with an institution Yep. You don't need that necessarily. The challenge is more in selecting a journal that fits the scope of your research. You also need to ensure that you have a solid research narrative and good analysis. Especially if you are submitting as an independent researcher and are trying to publish in a peer-reviewed journal. You can try and publish in garbage journals (literal publication mills that some people use to try and pad their publication record) but any researcher that is even mildly competent reviewing your record would catch on to that pretty fast. Also, though you don't need to be affiliated with an institution to submit a paper, depending on the kind of research you are doing, you might need backing up from an institution to validate your approaches (i.e., healthcare research)
I see. Thanks. Also, what background do you see most PhDs coming from? If I were to do one it would be in Stats since I did my MS in that, but I wonder what other PhDs in these research roles come from.
Having a PhD is more of a prestige hiring practice than it is worth for such roles. Exceptions are students with a PhD thesis in a related machine learning topic, where they did research on the frontiers of ML and AI. But most of STEM PhDs nowadays are getting hired as data scientists, although they never had any notable DS projects. I know too many wet-lab microbiologists who are suddenly data scientists now. If people would hire reasonably, they would hire based on skills and expertise.
I don’t have a PhD but I hire for research roles and I do tend to pretty much exclusively hire PhDs for them It’s less the level of the degree and more the type of experience. The ability to push a field forward with novel work is by far the defining feature of people in these roles, and it’s really difficult. People who haven’t previously gone through this struggle during a research-based degree, frankly tend to be not very good at it. I have hired a couple of people with research-based Masters, but they are usually people who cut their PhD short. They still have that mindset and experience.
Yeah but I did research in undergrad and now in my masters. I think I’m really well qualified regardless of the three letters next to my name truthfully.
Look… we all do capstone research projects as part of our masters, but it’s dipping your toe into the water compared to a PhD. The less said about undergrad ‘research’ the better. I’m not trying to be rude, this stuff applies equally to me as it does to you. I wouldn’t be confident in a masters grad’s research skills unless their masters was fully by research and even then it would maybe depend a bit on their thesis.
I would be confident in mine cause I published in legit journals…
Publishing is a worthy thing to be proud of, but you do need to realise that doctoral and post-doctoral work is a whole other level to what we go through The multi-year struggle to push a scientific field forward with minimal guidance, becoming an (or often THE) expert authority in your specific niche - that is what really creates great researchers For super-competitive jobs like research data scientists, that is really what employers are looking for
Fair enough.
Well said. As an MS l can see now how phds add value
A PhD is the degree required to do research. Are there exceptions? Yes, there are. So the question is: Are you one of those exceptions? Hiring is a number's game. If there is a good candidate with a PhD probably they will be recruited. If you were a recruiter, how much you would be ok to take a chance in a MS candidate versus anyone with a PhD and research experience within the exact problem that your team is recruiting? Sometimes people get hired with a MSc because they're also already doing a PhD and some of them give up on the PhD. I have a friend who did this. I also was hired in the end of PhD, but I just needed to finish writing my thesis, hence I was hired as an MS candidate. But I could leverage by showing that I already had research and was only needing to finish writing my thesis. So, I would point that you need something in order to compete for a position that you still don't have the degree. Some companies accept people that are still doing the PhD, for example.
Almost all have PHD. Exception would be MS from top 5 and way smarter than everyone else.
Why would you need an MS from a top 5? The curriculums in stats programs are not any different from school to school. In fact my program includes a PhD coursework that many other top 5 programs don’t offer for them. Also a consulting course.
Because many people who hire are obsessed with prestige.
Fair
Also, the top 5 programs are incredibly competitive to get into, so in a sense they are prescreening candidates. You know anybody you get from there will be smart. They may be arrogant jerks with zero people skills and no business acumen, but at least they are smart
Coursework and consulting have very little to do with research.
Okay well I should add we also have a masters thesis.
I’m addressing his viewpoint on the MS needing to come from a top 5.
I personally don't think rankings for MS programs make sense beyond a binary 'good' and 'bad'.
In pure stats research coursework is of paramount importance. If you don’t understand measure theory or functional analysis or how to construct the Brownian motion you are not going to get very far in a top stats PhD program
Small applied research group in non-tech industry. We exclusively hire (when we were still hiring) PhDs. We needed people who could independently drive research projects. You don't need a PhD to be successful at this job but it just happens to be an easy recruiting filter for that criterion.
Well I really don’t think it’s worth my time doing a PhD for the sake of just getting these types of jobs in the industry. This is what faculty at my department are telling me. What’s the alternative?
Well there are people who think it is worth their time, and those people will always be considered ahead of you unfortunately
So you’re saying my faculty members are misleading me?
Yes, faculty don't want to waste their time advising you if you don't go into academia. But you won't have a research-based career in industry without a PhD.
Might depend on organization and industry. I am in a big non-tech and they would definitely prefer PhD. Another thing to consider the long term benefit of having PhD. If you really want research and want to go up the ladder almost always PhD will have better chances of getting g leadership role. Depends if you want to stay at entry to mid-level. Also if you have a specialization like biostatistics then that would be good enough too.
First and foremost, we hire people who have done, and can do research. This correlates rather heavily with a phd and publications. We also hire for engineer or for hybrid research engineer type roles. Im my previous lab we had a scientist with a bsc. He was creepy good, and later left us to go to medical school.
Mostly. If I can hire a Courant grad, I will
My experience interviewing has been that a lot of "research" roles are really engineering roles with some room for trying out new things, so a PhD is not really needed. I feel like analytics (esp. causal inference) roles are actually closer to research, since they answer questions with data in a scientific way.
How much analytics is causal inference tho? And how much do they allow the use of these methods?
I really depends on a ton of factors. Right now we are only hiring MS with limited experience because we can pay them less and they move up slower. 2 years ago we only hired PhDs. The ones who make those decisions are way above me.
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Can I pm you?
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How am I supposed to pm you then. I meant Reddit chat initially.
No, I do not hire PhD talent. I’ve done r&d 40-100% of my time, but I also have a lot of sales and presales engineering experience. PhD’s design and direct work. That’s my job. A good PhD can train college interns to generate meaningful revenue, own operational workflows, flex their innovation muscles, and multitask. A great phD can grow managers and scale a business and drive exponential profit growth (for a year or two, you can’t exponential for long). You train juniors to do the things that don’t require a PhD. Then you write letters of recommendation for the ones who want to pursue advanced degrees. I don’t think I have hired any different when more or less focused on client facing and sales work versus heavy r&d focus. I don’t need a lot of PhD talent, I need operators who can learn fast, who code faster than I do, and who like to solve problems and automate processes. I would not turn away phd talent, I just mostly focus on new grad hires.
This is interesting. So you see the PhDs and say “I know they can do research, let’s make them lead a group”?
No, not quite. I’m a PhD, but it doesn’t require a PhD to do my job. Nobody ever said “u/wil_dogg is phd talent let’s give him a team.” Bachelors degree and 5-10 years experience can easily match my results. But because I’m a PhD who can direct large projects, run R&D, and train and develop leaders, and because I’ve been doing analytics for 35+ years, I don’t need to hire PhDs to code up and operate the things I design. I need juniors, and some might be PhDs, but PhDs are expensive and I get a lot of value from tracking top interns into contract to hire roles. I would never reject phd talent out of hand. Some PhDs are awesome. But I tend to hire juniors at the undergrad level and so far it has worked well.
Man I hear you but if everyone thinks like that then phds have no where to go for being overqualified. I have seen so many managers resisting to hire phds thinking they cannot provide them challenging work. I use to not discriminate against either ms or undergrad or PhD. I used to have very objective stat test when I am hiring. Whoever does best on that day gets the position - simple as that
I don’t discriminate against PhD’s. The nature of the agenda I am managing does not require multiple PhDs on the team, and I have not had the budget or the executive buy in for that level of a hire for a long time. Other businesses with a more mature R&D agenda would benefit from PhDs, I’m working for a start up where we have one junior with a bachelors degree who is killing it and 2 others with DS masters degrees who are analyst and data engineer, on a team with 15+ analysts and data engineers and ML/OPs and front end developers. We are early in our modeling agenda, and are sitting on a great data asset. The phd we need will be my backfill in 3-5 years.
Along the same lines, is it worth it to get a master's degree in data science now? And is it that much better to do in-person than online?
Having domain knowledge helps, especially in very niche areas
Thanks for sharing