Asklemmy

Hi I have one. Grad school was the most fun part of my life, but let me give you some advice:

1. Your relationship with your advisor makes or breaks grad school for you. Don’t take a gamble.

2. Research is not what most people think it’s going to be. Almost regardless of field these days, get ready to learn how to write code, and get ready to teach yourself everything.

3. If they don’t have a plan to pay your salary for at least 4 years, don’t bother. No, you can’t count on external money in this funding climate.

4. Read the book “getting what you came for”

5. Talk to potential advisors. The ones you want to be with won’t have time to talk to you. It’s a paradox.

6. You want to be a person who wants a “hands-off” advisor, and then you want to get one. If you want a hands-on advisor, my advice is to go do some work on your confidence, and come back when you think you’re ready to teach yourself everything.

7. Don’t go into grad school thinking you know what you will work on. Projects evolve and change based on funding and whims and chance.

The experience will be exactly what you make of it. Yes you might have trouble of finding your initial advisor taking you on a part-time role. But if you can demonstrate domain knowledge, the ability to be more functional, less handholding than a normal student, you can build a relationship with an advisor and be able to woo them into your increased contributions even at a part-time level.

If you love learning, and doing research, and being challenged, and forced to self-evaluate, do it. It's a great experience. It is a long experience. But it's great

Hey! I'm in a similar boat. I also do electronics design and can't deal with the 100% pay cut that a PhD would incur. At least not yet.

My current solution is just to research things on my own, without a university. I design things I think might be interesting, then get the boards made at a factory (cheap these days), then populate them and test it out. Cost tends to be quite low per project (under 100$ even for fairly advanced things like particle physics). Then I write it up online or do a conference talk if people think it's interesting enough -- and if they don't, I really don't care: I'm already all about the next project!

If I strip away all the "publish or perish" nonsense as well as grant applications and teaching requirements, it turns out I can do a satisfying amount of research in my spare time. Equipment costs are not a disaster either -- maybe a 1000$ oscilloscope (which I need for work anyway), but very ordinary other stuff otherwise.

A good side effect is the stuff I work on keeps me sharp at work, and on rare occasions produces something commercially useful. It also forms a body of work that I use to advance my career, as examples of neat stuff I know how to do. I'd have a hard time putting a number do it, but I'd estimate my research has a negative cost.

Right now, I'm trying to do audio processing in 16 bytes of RAM and under 500 bytes of program. So far, it looks like it will work, but I don't know yet!

I hire people like you (ASIC verification) and generally the more academia someone has been through, the bigger problem I'm going to have getting them functional in a project.

I am interested in learning and lately I got particularly interested in formal verification and started reading books, watching tutorials, on top of applying it at work. I really would like to learn more, participate to its advancement and contribute even slightest.

Formal verification is a great topic, but the experts at actually applying it to problems are in industry, not in universities. What I'd suggest is trying to find companies that:

1. Are heavy users of formal verification techniques. This means they are either big, because the software costs so much, or a company developing the software)
2. Have somebody at them that speaks at industry events on the topic. Ideally they should be presenting new ways to do things.
3. Have good mentoring systems

Then get a job there, ideally for the person that you identified and learn as much as you can from them.

Can you switch to a job with more of a research focus? Maybe that is hard to find in the area that you want (I have no idea what formal verification actually is).

As someone who has been through it the mental and financial toll is indeed significant, so you are smart to be asking about it.

One thing you can do to see if you really have the ability to handle PhD could be, try to replicate a recent paper's work, provided you don't need huge amount to resources for it. If you are able to do it, then you might be able to handle a PhR.

It is a pretty dumb method, but it could give you a lot more insight into whether you want to be in academia for PhD or not.

I'm not sure of your country, but are you tied to it? (For example, do you have family, or are trying to attain citizenship?)

Opening up your search might be helpful. Look at a variety of universities in many countries to see what options there are.