All the reasons NOT to go to grad school

DrugMonkey is trying to fix the NIHand especially the way the money is allocated with lots of ideas, one of them being to stop training so many PhDs.

Source

If you see this graph, it makes sense a lot of sense, because indeed biomedical PhDs are going through the roof it seems. But who are all those people that go to grad school and why do they do it? As my summer student said after hearing us complain all summer about how little we got paid and how hard it was to find jobs after a PhD/post-doc:”I’m not so sure I want to go to grad school anymore”. Because you can blame it on the NIH if you can’t find a job or get a grant, but you can also perhaps blame it on yourself. So here are a couple reasons why you should NOT go to grad school:

1. Not knowing what else to do. There are people who are done with undergrad, may have a year of technician experience and then don’t really know what to do with their lives. Grad school seems like an answer, because it will occupy you for at least another 5-infinite years. Don’t do it though. Because when you’re done with grad school, you will be older, more jealous of your friends who do earn actual money and still clueless about what to do next. Also, you will be overqualified for a lot of things.

2. There are no other jobs available because of the economy. This is kind of related to reason 1, and of course it is nice to know that you will be paid (albeit little) for the next 5-infinite years, but if your only reason to go to grad school is to keep you from being unemployed, don’t do it. Search longer for something you actually want, because being stuck in a lab when you don’t really want to be there is not going to make you happy, and again, you might be overqualified for other things when you’re done.

3. You want to do something sciency. This might be a good reason to go to grad school, but think about it first. Because if you want to be a science writer for example, you don’t need a PhD. And there are many other jobs, for example in industry where you don’t need a PhD to do sciency things.

What other bad reasons can you think of for going to grad school?