Is a Ph.D. is an expensive meal ticket to get an access to premium quality food? If so, why do we have to spend almost 20 years in formal schooling for getting a job?

First of all, this is a heavy writing, and it maybe critically goes against your fundamental belief of the value of education. Thus, let’s keep your mind open and stay optimistic but realistic.

It has already been almost 3 years that I have been around in IST even though I have less interactions with other students and faculty due to my personality. In IST, publishing papers seems to me the uttermost of the topmost priority of the faculties and the students. Acquiring funding resources seems to be the critical interest of the all the colleges since it is basically contributing to existence of those. The school needs to be funded, the faculties need to make their living and creating their professional identity, and the students desperately want to graduate and, thus, have a decent career after graduation. This phenomenon is so true not only in IST, Penn State, but also in all the schools over the US and, somewhat, in EU.

Funded graduate students sitting in air-conditioned office, looking for research gaps in the literature

Most of us, academic people, spend several hours a days, almost everyday in months reviewing literature just hopefully to find research gaps. Once those gaps are located, we are already on something which is economically, financially sexy. Of course, closing a research gap means a lot to us and to the community.

However, I doubt the value of the research that we all have been done so far. What are we actually doing good things to social world at large? At the time we spend our time to “re-discover” such gaps, the serious gaps have already been out there in the real world. Millions of people’s lives in the Africa are being devoured by hunger and by HIV/AID. Hundreds of millions of children in the less developed countries are unschooled, forced to be working more than 10 hours a day, have less access learning environment.

This is a hand of a young girl in Uganda.

The bird is standing by to eat this starving child. This picture was voted as the best the best journalistic photography many years ago. And the photographer later committed suicide because of his emotional breakdown attaching to his own work.

Child labors are ubiquitous seen in China, glorifying capitalism and supplying uncountably incredibly cheap goods to the Walton family, making them the richest family in world.

One of the reasons that I pursue Ph.D. program is to help changes the world to be “livable” place to continue humankind. I don’t just want to get a prestigious meal ticket to get an access to premium meal since I think it would not be necessary to further push myself for approximately 5 years to earn a little bit higher salary. Unfortunately, I at the moment am feeling my strong will has politically been rotten because of game of the education system over time. If we look at the topics of IST M.S. theses and IST Ph.D. dissertations, we would say that we have no doubt toward their academic values. But how about their contribution to the world’s most pressing needs and problem?

I would say that we are not a God (and I actually don’t believe in God); we have no power to change how the world works. But I feel like we, claiming that we are making scientific, technological advancement implanted into the world, should responsibly return something socially good to the world. And the end of the day, the very topic for all of us who are pursuing academic or professional careers would be: How we can do for making a livable world, not what it takes to get ourselves graduated.