Speaker 1: Start with the end in mind. When you start a PhD you have to think to yourself What do I want to do with this investment? This investment in time? This investment in energy? What do I want at the other end? And too many people do a PhD without actually thinking about What's on the other end of their PhD for them. It is a lot of stress. It's a lot of time It's a lot of missed opportunities and building a career that you could otherwise be having outside of academia So here are the worst PhDs that I think you can do at the moment Now the thing is is that you can actually do these PhDs and work them to your advantage as long as you have a plan for what to do on the other end. Also, there are people that do PhDs just because they want to do a certain PhD in a certain area because they find it really interesting. Don't let me stop you. But if I was doing my PhD right now, here are the topics and the fields that I would avoid. The first one is history. Now history, I found data and stuff to back it up. So let's go over here. So I found the 2021 AHA, which is the American Historical Association Jobs Report. And so essentially if we scroll down to this graph here, you can see that there's the number of job ads. It goes up and then it drops significantly and then it continues to decline. And the number of history PhDs increases and then drops off significantly because I assume there is just no job market for them to go into. And so it's really, really tough when you get a PhD at the end to not get a job immediately. And the thing is, is that in this, if we go up to this graph, you can see that in fact, the number of assistant professors hires, it's really within the first one and two years of graduating that these PhDs are highly valued. So if you are going to go into academia, you need to do it right away. You need to work really hard throughout your PhD to make sure that you are attractive enough to employers within universities straight out of your PhD. Otherwise, you can be in this long tail down here, five years PhD post-graduation, where you're just not attractive to research institutions. And also, if we head over to this, which is the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and we search for historians on this line here, we can see that essentially you just need a master's degree which is the typical entry level of education. So it can be a huge wasted amount of energy and time. The second one that I want to bring to your attention are humanities PhDs. Now if we head over to the data and what people are saying, it kind of is a little bit scary. So here, humanities, this is something from 2018 and I can assure you if it's in 2018 and it's been published, it's only getting worse. So here, desperately seeking careers. That is probably not a good omen for the start of your PhD, is it? So over here they looked at different Canadian PhD humanity graduates, and essentially if we just go all the way down to the conclusions, we can essentially see that for a humanities PhD, it shows that lack of funding and career preparation really sort of inhibits the range of non-academic careers that these humanists can find, as well as the perceived relevance of the PhD by people employing them. So I would double guess or really make sure that you have skills built up in your PhD as you're doing it to make you an attractive candidate for outside of academia. And another thing I want to draw your attention to is this graph. This is data from the US Census Bureau. It's from 2009 to 2011. And if we look at the humanities, which is this blue line here. So this series of data points here, here, here, and here. This is essentially the amount of money that you can earn with these degrees. You can see it increases from bachelor's to master's. You can see that it increases significantly if you go from the humanities and go straight into a professional degree, i.e. a degree that is incredibly sort of targeted towards your career goals. and a PhD decreases your earning potential relative to a professional degree. So this puts it on my list to say, be very careful if you do decide to do a humanities PhD without really thinking about what's coming at the end. It looks tough. Now I've got a PhD in chemistry and I'm not here to rag on any non-scientific PhD, so I've looked in the sciences and I've kind of looked at the PhDs that are the hardest to kind of translate into industry or actual earnings. So if we look at the life sciences, so US post-doctoral careers in life sciences and physical sciences, and essentially it's this bit down here, that there is a considerable movement between employment sectors within the first six months post-PhD. Now this tells me that, you know, it's quite a turbulent time for people with a PhD and they're moving around a lot. And then also down here, postdocs in the physical sciences are shorter, better paid, and more often in non-academic sectors than postdocs in the life sciences, which means that the life sciences is really tough if you haven't got a very specific skill that you can apply to an industry right away. Now, getting a job isn't everyone's idea of like a successful PhD, but I think it's important to look at that. Then if we head on over to our employment stuff from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and we type in life sciences. Okay, here it is, life scientists. We can see that you only really need a bachelor's degree for this typical entry-level job. And another thing I noticed, if we go back to my data that I pulled from the Census Bureau, here are the dots for life sciences. We can see that there is a significant increase. So bachelor's is here, and then we've got master's, which is here, which is a nice increase. Professional degree is massive, and then a PhD is a drop from a professional degree, and it's not much better than a master's degree. So importantly, you do have to enter a PhD in the life sciences with your eyes wide open, and make sure that you are actually attractive to employers at the end of your PhD, and that there is an increase in your earning potential. You're better off, in fact, doing a professional degree because the data shows that that is a significant amount of money that you can get and you don't have to go through the stress of a PhD. So there is an example of the sorts of data I would look at if I was choosing to do a PhD right now. Earning potential after your PhD, whether or not the job area is growing, whether or not you can enter a certain job that you want to do with a bachelor's or a master's or a professional degree. And importantly, professional degrees actually kind of increase your earning potential far more than PhDs. If we go back to my data that I collected, you can see this average line go through here. A professional degree means that you get more money and a PhD often means a drop in earnings over a professional degree. So think about that. Think about also the job perspectives and also whether or not you want to do a particular job. Now, what sort of areas are actually employing PhDs? Now, I found this knowledge economy white paper from Australia, and here are the top 50 PhD employers in business, which is outside of academia, where I think a number of PhD students actually end up, and you can see that they are in banking and financial services, which is I know a lot of physics and data sort of people end up there. From my sort of past, they've ended up in banking. And then we've got mining and energy. That's where I ended up for a little bit as a chemist. And we've also got computer software, management consulting, engineering, other industries, legal and law services. And I actually was looking at a career in a patent attorney kind of for chemistry. And I'm not sure I would have enjoyed it, but I did actually sort of scope out that career and I started to make connections and networks in that area. Telecommunications, utilities, and medical and pharmaceuticals. So throughout your PhD, if you're actually aligning your current PhD with industries that are actively employing PhDs, you'll be in a much better position to secure funding after your PhD. Another thing I recommend you do is look at where graduates from your current research lab have ended up. Have they ended up in industry? Have they ended up on the post-doc treadmill? Have they ended up in a psychiatric ward? Wherever they've ended up, that probably gives you a good indication of where your opportunities lie. And I know, throughout my PhD, that a lot of the PhD graduates from my supervisor ended up in the mining industry. And that appealed to me at the time, and I did it for a bit, actually, and I'd find it wasn't really for me. But I think those are the sort of things that you need to look at before deciding on doing a PhD because a lot of people do a PhD because it's the path of least resistance. They don't know what else to do in the world and they're essentially just delaying all of the issues and the decisions for three years later when you're older, you've got more regrets and it's harder to make that mental change to switch careers. So think about it deep and hard and avoid PhDs that have the qualities that we saw today in those three PhDs. That's the sort of stuff I'd be looking for. So there we have it. There's everything I think you need to know about the worst PhDs. Now, the worst PhD for someone can be the best PhD for another person. It's about having the data and the knowledge and the information before going in. Every PhD has value in it. You just have to extract it and make sure that a PhD works for you. That said, if you want more information about PhDs and academia, there are more ways you can get involved with me. The first way to sign up to my newsletter. My newsletter is over at andrewstapleton.com.au forward slash newsletter. The link is in the description. And when you sign up, you'll get five emails over about two weeks. Everything from the tools I've used, the podcast I've been on, how to write the perfect abstract and more. It's exclusive content available for free. And the second thing you should go do is go check out academiainsider.com. That's where I've got my two eBooks, the Ultimate Academic Writing Toolkit, as well as the PhD Survival Guide, and the Insider Forum. There's a blog growing out over there as well. It's going off, and it's all there to help you make your PhD in academia work for you. So I'll see you over there, and I'll see you in the next video.