Is It Worth Pursuing a PhD in String Theory Without Financial Support?

[Kyleric]

I applied to three universities to enter a PhD program in string theory (I know, it's not much).

All three rejected me. One of them rejected me purely for financial reasons. Since I am motivated, I bargained with it to start my PhD without financial support and got accepted. It's possible I won't get paid during my whole period of study. The start date is January 2011.

I realize now that the success rate to enter a PhD program in ST is very low and that I should have applied to many more places.

Should I go for it? Should I take courses during the winter session and apply to, say, 10-20 places? How do you judge the qualifications of a potential PhD supervisor?

 

[fss]

How are you going to eat and/or live with a roof over your head?

 

[Null_]

Could you "afford" to wait until the fall to start? That way you'd be able to apply to more places.

 

[jbunniii]

The last thing you want in graduate school is to worry constantly about how to pay the bills.

I would absolutely wait and re-apply in the winter, unless you have more than enough money saved to live comfortably throughout the entire Ph.D. program.

Just the tuition waiver alone is extremely valuable, especially with the rate of tuition increases in recent years. The University of California, just to name one example, raised its tuition by something like 30% last year alone.

On top of tuition, you will need cash for living expenses. Absolute minimum $15k per year if it's in a cheap city, probably more like $30k if it's somewhere expensive like NYC. This too will go up every year - the only place where there is actually zero inflation is in Ben Bernanke's head. A Ph.D. could take anywhere from 3 to 8 years, even more in some cases.

Unless you have massive savings (several hundred thousand) you are going to end up in a lot of debt when you are done. And even if you do have massive savings, do you want to blow it all on this?

Also consider what you will do about health insurance.

 

[Pengwuino]

Have you applied for grants and fellowships? If you're a good enough student, you can get external fellowships that will help you out big time.

 

[twofish-quant]

Should I go for it? Should I take courses during the winter session and apply to, say, 10-20 places? How do you judge the qualifications of a potential PhD supervisor?

I don't think that you should go for it. Fix whatever holes in your resume you can, and reapply later.

 

[LAHLH]

Definitely don't do this unless your parents are super rich or something. If I absolutely couldn't obtain a position and had to self fund I would consider a masters programme perhaps first to strengthen me up to the point I had a good chance of getting a funded PhD. (For example I almost considered going to do cambridge part III for a year unfunded, and the Imperial MSc in particles in fields, I guess there must be some US equivalents).

 

[fasterthanjoao]

I don't think that you should go for it. Fix whatever holes in your resume you can, and reapply later.

Seconded.


Apply to more programmes too, you could maybe even look at expanding your subject area a little bit more. Spend some time doing research into career paths as well as day-to-day work, to make sure you're sure about your topic.

 

[eri]

Don't do it. You'll be putting yourself into massive amounts of debt, and for what? A PhD in string theory? There really aren't any/many jobs for that. If you must pay for your own education, pick something more practical where you're likely to actually find a job when you graduate, and there's not a good chance your field will be completely dead/gone by the time you graduate.