Ask a doctoral student anything!

High school AP or IB satisfy the requirement. At least it does for John Hopkins.

 

As I understand it, those pursuing a master's degree have faculty member advisors to help shepherd them through the process. Is that true for doctoral aspirants, as well?

Are the processes, expectations, and requirements more rigorous than for a master's degree?

 

a doctorate in politics would be over 100k in tuition debt?

only a politician or political science professor could afford to pay that back in a lifetime, right?

 

I've been in grad school; it is a lot of work. I've only done a masters program in Financial Engineering. I personally don't know why anyone would go to school for politics, but that is just me. Don't get me wrong, it isn't because negative connotations involved (being compared to "basket weaving" or the lack of earnings potential). It's that everything involving the field often changes and its very difficult to be proficient in a field with a lack of a empirical foundation.

Then again, my background is in mathematics people often say similar things about that...

 

Haven't you ever found something that you'd enjoyed so much that you'd want to immerse yourself in, or does your current profession not require higher education?

 

What are you hoping to do after your program is finished?

 

So, you are spending 8 years of your life on something just to show to others that you can do that?
What are you going to do when you have a family? Money might not matter while you live in a dorm, or when you are very young, but how will explain to your kids that they could never get what they wanted because you preferred to spend your years on something that would feed your pride instead of their needs? How about having a nice house and a decent car?

A bachelor degree in Business would probably fetch you more income than a PhD in political science, unless you are one in a million and manage to get yourself into high politics. The odds are not in your favor! Trust me, the older you get, the harder it is to study. You are literally wasting your resources on nothing.

 

Mathematics doesn’t change.

PS - what do you do for a living? You can fetch nice jobs if you know advanced math. Encryption, security, aerospace come to mind.

 

Not what I was referring to.

 

What do you do for a living with your math degree?

 

I currently do Securities Lending / Fixed Income Strategies for a bank. It wasn't necessarily the math degree that landed it. I wanted to do something in Finance, but in New York you cannot double major if the degree programs are not similar (at least, that is how my advisor explained it). At my college, mathematics was a BS/BA and Finance was a BBA.

I took mathematics just to give me a better shot at a quant role. However, just having a BA/BS only provides you 30% of all of the quant finance jobs out there. The vast majority require a masters/Ph D.

 

@Socratica


With a degree in math you should try other fields outside of Finance.
I started in accounting/finance, then switched to web development and software development.

Having advanced degree in math can fetch you a nice job. Two months ago I wanted to impress my leadership and in the software I wrote, there is a function that looks at customer’s latitude and longitude (based on zip code) and calculates the distance to our locations’ coordinates, from which it then picks the smallest value (distance). I used trigonometry and curvature of Earth to achieve that. There is still a drag in the fact that it calculates “crow fly” distance, so if there is an obstacle between point A and point B like a large lake (Michigan) or a mountain then you’d logically pick another location, but it works in 90% of the cases. The reason why I mention this is that in programming language I used a math library, which uses advanced functions. There are people who create those libraries and they get paid good money for doing that! There are also awesome applications in other fields, like encryption. If you can figure out very large prime numbers you can make some pretty handsome money in IT.

 

I don’t think people who like to learn and enjoy/enjoyed education are rare. But maybe it’s different in various tracts or majors. Most people I attended with knew where they were headed and extracted all they could from course material. Even ones (like me) who sat in the back.

 

There wasn't any money for me to go to college so after I got out of the military I got a job as a computer operator. Ten years later I put myself through college at night while I was still working full time as an analyst. But that was just my "formal" education. I have always been fascinated by science and I have a love of learning new things. I had a library of 3000 books besides the ones I borrowed from the public libraries and I had subscriptions to a variety of scientific magazines. Nowadays I use ebooks and the internet and I am still learning new things on a daily basis. I expect that I will continue to learn for the rest of life. I can't imagine doing anything else.

 

Microsoft T-Sql Distance between two geographical points is a standard function.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sq...nce-geography-data-type?view=sql-server-ver15

 

What does a dog do that a man steps into?

 

It’s more fun to invent it yourself!
I did it in C#.

by the way - are you familiar with SQL?
And, I did not know it was that simple in SQL...

 

There are 3 formulas for calculating geographical distance.

The most basic one (used by Google) assumes that the earth is a perfect sphere so the results are less accurate than the one that MS uses in the T-SQL formula where a spheroid is assumed. There is a scientific one that is the most accurate of all and that is used for military and space applications.

My experience predates SQL since I started with machine code back in the early 1970's. I have designed and developed databases in multiple languages including SQL.

 

I’ve had a career as a design engineer, basically electrical, but mostly computer hardware design, and usually for industrial and commercial devices. Typically, for instance, a scientific instrument Typically has a central reaction chamber where things are added in, even things like light and electrical currents, along with what ever is being tested and reactants, if any. There is then a computer part that controls the inputs and reads the sensors, or the outputs of the test.

To make the instrument operate properly, readings of varying known qualities are read, and these are stored in a table. Then when the instrument is used an algorithm is run that compares the sensor readings to the table of known qualities to give a readout of the test at hand. Yet it is not as easy as looking things up in a table, because there are too many variables, making table lookups impossibly complex.

The easier way, and following the scientific idea, that mathematics can describe anything, typically an algorithm is created, that at its core, is a mathematical equation, or set of equations that fit the data of the known qualities. Typically mathematicians are employed to figure out what these equations should be.

 

One of my reasons for not having a military "career" was that I was bored out of my mind by the mindless repetition. I was fortunate to be able to take advantage of career opportunities in the private sector and I had the mathematical and conceptual skills to make a success of my chosen profession. The possibilities of what could be done never stopped and I was always willing to take on a new challenge. Still am for that matter.

 

As a doctorate how hot are the chicks that attend the same program?

 

Then they are not as cold as ice...I'll inform Foreigner..