Andrey,
Ah, I see. Well, I guess I like both teaching and research. I don't have
enough experience with either to do which I prefer more, or whether I would
be happy doing just one of them for the rest of my life. But I would
definitely be fascinated by the work on my PhD thesis. By the way, I did
very well in national science fairs in high school (with a discrete
mathematics topic). I mention this just to say that I love research and
that I'm self-motivated to learn. It was poor health that derailed my plans
earlier in life to get a PhD.
Regarding my love for teaching, I have tutored high school students in
algebra and I'm currently tutoring a doctor in Python programming. I love
this. So note--I don't need to be teaching an advanced topic to be happy.
I'm fascinated by how to make a topic understandable, whether it would be
teaching a graduate-level class, or figuring out how to help high school
students who struggle with algebra.
So I guess one way to approach this question is to ask
- what path offers me good *options* (i.e., I can spin from there into any
number of possibilities depending on what I learn that I love most)
- what downside is there to a PhD (i.e., possible student loan debt,
deferring earned income and saving for retirement years which are merely 25
years away for me, and merely 18 years after I would probably start earning
again, hard time finding work? [overqualified for everything?], etc.)
Regarding financial considerations and retirement, one question to ask is--
would I be happy doing my job until age 80? I.e. would I love my job so
much that I don't feel a need to retire? I think that I could potentially
love both interesting research and fascinating teaching enough. But a
boring garden-variety programming job, like the one I had before? Yuck.
Couldn't wait to retire.
Dennis
On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 3:40 PM, Andrey Chudnov
On 12/03/2013 05:26 PM, Dennis Raddle wrote:
All replies have been helpful. I realize my question is vague, and that's partly because I don't know what area within CS interests me. I may have to do at least an MS to find out.
What I meant was whether you would like to do research or teach (or both) -- not a specific area. While you will probably be required to teach some classes anyway (as a TA, which means grading, supervising labs and consultations), most of your time in grad school pursuing a PhD would be spent on research. That's because producing novel and relevant research results is an absolute requirement for getting a PhD (while teaching a lot of classes, on the other hand, is not). In pursuing a PhD it would help if you enjoy (or at least can tolerate) the very process of research and feel passionate about your research topic. Otherwise, you might be in for quite a few miserable years.