Am I qualified to answer this question? I don’t know. I’m just a second-year PhD student at the moment. You be the judge.

What is a PhD? My understanding so far is it is a period of time (a few years) you spend under another academic (your supervisor)

• learning how to be an academic in that particular field
• by doing research work
• that is in large parts independent as well as (ideally) collaborative
• that other academics too deem worth the time (a few years)

Does PhD requires research? Yes.

Does research require PhD? No. Plenty of people throughout human history have made scientific and philosophical discoveries without doing a PhD. See List of Autodidacts and also Industry Research in your particular field.

Does PhD put you on a guaranteed path to be an academic? No. Consider that, annually, an academic institute might churn out 5 PhD-holders, but might create a new assistant-professor position once every 5 years. That’s 25 PhD-qualified candidates for 1 position. Even if you consider that new academic institutes pop up, the number of new academic positions still remain several times below new PhD-qualified candidates. (Also see this Nature article.) In other words, unless you are damn good and damn lucky even during your PhD, only then can you expect to get a good academic position. And let’s not forget that you have already been damn good and damn lucky just to qualify for your PhD program.

If other academics deem some research worth the time, that research must be good, right? No. What that merely implies is that that research is deemed worth the time (and money and resources) by other academics. Surely, it must at least correlate with good research?

What is good research? Surely, research on how to extract fossil fuels is good. For the purposes of extracting fossil fueis. Research on how to exploit greater productivity from employees is good. For the purpose of productivity-maximization. Research how to convert trees to better quality paper is good. For the purpose of paper-manufacturing. But neither of these seem good for the purpose of moving towards a sustainable equitable future. The point is goodness of research is extra-scientific. There is no scientific method to determine what qualifies as good research. To decide whether some research is good or not, you need to have a purpose in mind. Once you have some purpose, then research can be good or bad towards that purpose.

So far, that’s a pretty bleak picture of PhD. And it seems, one should not do a PhD at all! Not to mention PhD students are often underpaid, stressed, and prone to depression and anxiety more than a matched sample not doing their PhD. Okay, that makes the motivation for PhD even bleaker.

Why do a PhD at all then? Why do we do anything at all? Apparantly, because not doing that something incurs a greater perceived cost than doing it.

A PhD gets you

• several years worth of time to read and think on your own
• access to your supervisor, who you think is/was awesome
• opportunity to attend conferences with like minded people
• personal experience and behind the scenes happenings of academic publishing
• an affiliation that often times lets you be taken seriously or opens up access to journals

Further, a good academic or PhD environment also gets you

• access to the history of your field
• access to not just your supervisor and conference attendees, but an entire department (= 24x7) with like minded people
• opportunity to be an academic relative of an awesome family of researchers
• a stipend that is less than awesome, but still enough to sustain a comfortable life

And if you think doing good science requires knowing the

1. history [of the field]
2. current happenings [of the field]
3. ways of the minds and limitations of the awesome people [in the field],

the PhD package - especially the one which is good - seem like a pretty good deal.

Indeed, the earlier point that goodness of science needs to be evaluated extra-scientifically still stands. You must have a larger purpose in mind. The like-mindedness and awesome-ness is towards that larger purpose. Assuming you have that larger purpose in mind, you are the best judge whether a particular PhD program is good for your purpose.

And now you are also aware of the limitations of academic research described above.

Beware, a bad or not-so-good PhD (or academic) environment often skips teaching you how to be an academic in a particular field. This is often implicit knowledge, and you ought to be a fair bit perceptive about how people and institutions work to figure it out. There are some books on this topic, but it is by and large knowledge that you will need to figure out in person through real-life interactions. Of course, you can consult your supervisor or other colleagues in the department or people you meet at the conferences. Such knowledge also gets described during late-night parties or social lunches at the labs or departments.

Random note: Scientific research is not a game (RPG) in which you unlock certain powers of the world by doing certain specific actions. There is no fixed set of actions that doing research involves. At best, it is like playing a very rich RPG without a manual, and where quests are unlocked or solved on the span of years, decades and generations of humans. (Such a rich-enough RPG at a smaller scale would be fun! Though real-world is often more fun (= more complex).)