Should You Get A PhD Or A Real Job In Industry? (A PhD Quiz)

Should you get a PhD or a real job in industry? This quiz was crowdsourced by asking the R3ciprocity YouTube community that primarily consists of potential PhDs, PhD students, and professors. The R3ciprocity Project started out as a side-project, where David Maslach created an App to help others get feedback on their work (r3ciprocity.com – it is seriously inexpensive and easy to use. You have to try it!), but it is beginning to grow into a real movement.

The questions where generated by 98 responses on the community.

I initially asked the community, what online quiz is most appealing to them to help them make a PhD decision. Here were the responses:
1. Should I get a PhD or get a real job in industry (36%).
2. Should you become a professor (22%).
3. Should you get a PhD (17%).
4. Which PhD program is right for me? (14%).
5. Are you prepared for a PhD? (11%).

So, here is the most popular online PhD quiz: “Should you get a PhD or get a real job in industry.” There are 12 items to the quiz, and these 12 items where based on the most popular responses to 4 polls on the community that relate to university resources, PhD opportunity costs, preferences for PhDs, and the skills required for a PhD. These items are based on inputs, and not the outputs of doing a PhD (e.g., your publication record or position at a university).

Did you benefit from this quiz? Do you know of anyone at all that could use feedback on their writing or editing of their documents? I would be so grateful if you read this post on how to get feedback on your writing using R3ciprocity.com or let others know about the R3ciprocity Project. THANK YOU in advance! You are the bees knees.

1.Do you consider yourself to have a lot of perseverance?
2.Do you consider yourself to have a lot of tenacity?
3.Do you consider yourself to be optimistic?
4.Are you able to deal with uncertainty (e.g., not knowing the right answer or making decisions with full information)
5.Does financial security matter to you?
6.Do you believe that career prospects in industry seem better than in academia?
7.Do you have friends or family that believe that industry jobs are better than academic jobs?
8.Do you like autonomy (e.g., working on your own)?
9.Do you like search for new ideas or discovering new things?
10.Do you like having access to information or knowledge?
11.Do you like having flexible time to work on your own projects?
12.Do you like having access to university facilities?

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