Should You Get a PhD?

Ah…the blog post we’ve gotten dozens of requests for…and I’ve put off writing for as long as humanly possible.

In 2018, I earned my doctorate in neuroscience, and one of the questions that frequently comes my way in professional circles is, "Is a PhD necessary for a successful career in medical writing?" A common, related-but-in-ways-completely-different question I get both professionally and personally is: was my PhD “worth it”?

While much has been said on this matter from a professional standpoint, the decision to embark on a PhD journey is inherently personal. So, let’s first talk profession, and then, let’s get ready to get a little bit…well, personal.

In Medical Writing: A “Nice to Have” Or a “Need to Have”?

Most clients I’ve worked with do not require a medical writer to hold a PhD (or similar, such as an MD or PharmD). While they do exist, most companies will hire medical writers with a masters degree or a bachelor's degree, and the right level of additional clinical expertise depending on the role. And while I always recommend medical writing as an “alternative career path” to newly minted PhDs who love clinical research and love to write…I don’t always recommend getting a PhD to individuals who want to become medical writers.

I do believe that the rigorous training that comes with a PhD (more on that later) ultimately can make an individual the best type of medical writer. You spend thousands of hours in the lab thinking critically about how to interpret new, complex statistical results, or staying up to date on the latest literature. Most of all, obtaining a PhD often requires a lot of clear and concise highly technical writing, which is exactly what is required of a medical writer. Some teams may also prefer a medical writer with a PhD solely to fulfill various regulatory requirements or marketing needs.

The Duality of my Feelings About my PhD

I’ve shared this very personal statement with several close friends, but it has taken me several years to process it: my PhD is simultaneously one of the best and worst things to ever happen to me.

How is that possible? Well, my PhD offered some of the best training I ever could have received in my career, in a very short amount of time. Malcolm Gladwell’s now very famous suggestion that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something is often applied to individuals in the process of obtaining their PhD. What this argument often glosses over is that many PhD students spend much more than the typical 40 hours a week and 5-year research program that Gladwell’s calculation is based on. When I was in my program, the average time to complete a PhD nationwide was 6 years. I’m sure this number stretched much farther during COVID. Moreover, most people think PhD students are just “in school,” but in reality, I only spent about 9 hours per week in my first 2.5 years in class.

I spent the other 50-60 hours of my average week working in the lab, teaching, and preparing for the classes I had to teach, and sometimes also doing homework, which in graduate school involved writing research papers and writing code. Most days I got to the lab or scanner before 7 or 8 am, and most nights I either was at the scanner with a research participant until after 9 pm or was on campus late teaching a night class or analyzing data. I spent most weekends catching up on work, often with other graduate students or postdoctoral fellows in my department.

In my experience as a medical writer, no week can be likened to the typical week I experienced as a PhD student in terms of hours, workload, and pressure to meet a deadline. And while I definitely had more energy in my 20s than I do in my 30s, I also had way less disposable income while on a PhD stipend, which made amenities like takeout, Ubers, and cleaners, which can sometimes ease the time constraints of a hectic week, considerably beyond my financial means.

Stress vs. Anxiety

I expected to be stressed in my doctorate program. After all, I finished my undergraduate degree a year early, while working two research assistant jobs and tutoring athletes on nights and weekends. I was used to a heavy workload and often enjoyed the adrenaline of a busy week. I wrote my first first-author peer-reviewed publication as an undergraduate, so I was used to working independently and with competing deadlines. I was excited about rigorous training.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the feelings of anxiety that developed that took me years to realize were clinical levels.

I almost always felt supported by my advisor, and most of the other researchers I worked with directly and my labmates. I received my PhD in a program that is known for being “kinder” than most other doctoral programs. That being said, the typical “hazing” of making graduate students feel like they needed to “earn” their right to be confident about their research was still alive and well in my program. I think what most academics with this attitude don’t realize is that five years in that environment actually won’t build you a “tough skin” “used to getting grants and papers rejected” but more commonly, make you hypervigilant against social interactions.

Which is exactly what happened to me.

I started my PhD at 21, and received it 4.5 years into my 5-year program at 26. I left my PhD program with an abundance of career opportunities…but crippling social anxiety. After a short stint at an NYC tech start-up, I was able to land my dream role as a medical writer at only 27, which is nearly unheard of in the field. I will be forever grateful for the training I received in my program for the career opportunities it gave me, but I can confidently say, there was no place for the comments about my work ethic, presentation style, writing style, feminine speaking cadence, career aspirations, general intelligence, ability/lack of ability to pick up on social skills, fears about leaving an inter-city campus late and how that reflected on my ability to meet deadlines, and other professional/personal advice I’ve probably buried in the deep recesses of my brain.

(Note: Noticeably absent from this list are the comments about my then-Pennsylvanian accent. While these comments certainly contributed to the development of my social anxiety, I’m glad we made the conscious effort to get rid of that thing in my 20s in graduate school, rather than in my 30s in my “professional life”)

At perhaps the pinnacle of irony, one of the things I did after landing my first in-house medical writing role, was spend 3 years in therapy conquering the clinical social anxiety I gained from graduate school, via a company-funded anxiety coach that was included with the amazing benefits package. It has never been lost on me that I gained that opportunity because I was able to land a job that I only could have landed at that point in my career because of my PhD training.

How could I have developed social anxiety? After all, I worked at an incredibly prestigious anxiety clinic as an undergraduate. I knew how to identify the signs. I also wasn’t a “wrong pick” for my program that somehow made it through the rigorous process—my own program had a ~6% acceptance rate, which maps with most of the PhD programs in neuroscience—I wrote and eventually published five more first-author peer-reviewed publications in my time in my program, which is supposed to be the highest metric of academic “career success.”

The fact of the matter is that developing anxiety during a PhD program is often the rule, not the exception. When I was working on my dissertation, the average nationwide graduation rate was only 50%. Half of PhD students were dropping out nationwide, and again and again, graduate students were citing that the mental toll of graduate school was to blame. Many programs offer free therapy, but it is often incredibly short: I attended the maximum 6 weeks after “failing” my qualification exam, only to later learn that every single student in my program that year also failed the mock-grant qualification exam as well. It’s not lost on me that…is it really a qualification exam if passing ultimately hinges on the opinion of those on the committee? Or if it is possible or even commonplace that every single student in the cohort is initially failed…and then immediately given the opportunity to pass?

(It’s also not lost on me that more than one faculty member commented that I “wasn’t a strong writer” during this process).

My own program had an eventual graduation rate of 75%, which was often considered high given national averages. I think this was a reflection that our program is better for graduate students than many others, but also provides insight into the systemic problems with PhD programs that can’t be fixed with free pizza appreciation lunches and a slight bump in pay. I’m sure I am not completely faultless in my experience of developing clinical levels of social anxiety in graduate school: I could have absolutely asked for help more from my advisor and advisor-adjacent mentors, but part of developing social anxiety is feeling like you’re a burden to those around you, which is why I had no trouble turning to a campus therapist but all the trouble turning to anyone else on campus. I’ve talked several other students out of dropping out of their PhDs—at my programs and others, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. If we want graduate students to stop dropping out at alarming rates, we need to stop hazing them, pay them astronomically better, and start implementing actions that treat them like the hardworking employees they are, instead of treating them like employees vs. students when either case is more convenient. After all, universities need graduate students, for an abundance of reasons but perhaps most simply because graduate students bring in a ton of money for university in the form of teaching undergraduate classes and performing most of the research that brings in grants, which R1 universities receive a significant overhead cost portion of to “keep running.”

Other Professional and Personal Questions to Ask Yourself

Bearing in mind all these stressors, one needs to ask themselves several professional and personal questions before deciding the embark on the journey that is obtaining a PhD.

Career Path

Are you interested in a specific research avenue you absolutely need to get your PhD to pursue? Do you have an avenue of research that pursuing through a PhD program would be vital to your life and career? Or could this be accomplished with a master’s degree, or other fellowship or even career change?

Do you have a specific career path or desired trajectory that culminates in a position that you need a PhD to hold?

Or are you simply just drawn to the allure of being called Dr. in a professional setting? After all, my friends and family love to put the reservation under “Dr. DiMenichi” but I can tell you that that is nowhere on the list of why my PhD was worth it.

Less Money = More Problems

I’m going to be brutally honest: being poor sucks. And being poor in my mid-20s was certainly hard but seems unfathomable in my mid-30s given how much more complicated life can get. After all, the average PhD student starts their program at 28, which means they would finish their doctoral degree between the ages of 33-36. This is something certainly to consider if you have a family, plan to have a family, or have other monetary obligations. I felt like this was joked about so much in graduate school, as well as accepted as just “part of the process.” But it created unnecessary stress in my 20s. I created enormously unreasonable budgets, often took on more teaching or tutoring opportunities to make ends meet, and constantly worried about not having much savings. I was on a full-ride for tuition, and had a 5-year stipend (though it just barely covered living costs in the NY metro). I’m lucky to be one of the few graduate students who didn’t finish my program with debt, but I also didn’t open my first 401k until I was 28 years old. Most students nationwide even struggle with food insecurity, which is a stat I learned when I co-founded our university’s first food pantry for students and staff.

When calculating costs, one also needs to consider the opportunity cost of 5+ years in academia and out of the traditional workforce. I ended up in a career where the opportunity cost of getting a PhD was mute when considering what the PhD has gained for me—both financially and in terms of personal happiness. Ask yourself how much your financial future will be affected by your choice to pursue a PhD.

Personal Conclusions

Ultimately, only you can decide if a PhD is best for you, not your colleagues, spouse, family, friends, parents, or others. It takes an incredible amount of soul-searching to decide if this career choice is best for you, and only you can decide that. I’m someone who ultimately needs to finish what I start, so I knew once I committed to a program, I was in it to the finish. There was never a plan B.

So…Was It Worth It?

The question we’ve all been waiting for (if you made it this far).

Was it worth it?

I’ll leave you with this: I’d do it all over again… if I could do it again at 21 to 26. Yes, I essentially gave up half my 20s to earn a PhD.

But of course it was worth it. My PhD has allowed me to make career advances as a medical writer that would have been virtually impossible without a PhD. The training my PhD provided has also arguably sculpted me into an incredible medical writer in a tremendously short amount of time.

…but I don’t know if I’d do it again if I had to get it in my mid-30s 😊