@Neel Thanks for your thoughts. It’s good to see the clarity that you knew that you would want to do a Ph.D someday anyway. That’s the kind of thing that I hope students start off with, even if what happens once they reach college is opposite to what they imagined. And thanks for mentioning what students should expect.

@Parag The divide that you mentioning is the same software engineering vs. computer science divide that I referred to originally. The kind of learnings you would get in the two realms will tend to be the learnings that you would expect in a good job vs. a good university.

@Sashank I can really relate to what you are saying, although I didn’t have a taste of research and after all my brushes with that realm, I think I’m better off in this side of the world, heh.

@Everyone, Thank you all for the quality conversations. It has certainly been enlightening, and I think the discussion here added more value for the reader than my actual post. Thanks!

1. All through my college , i was dreaming of doing MTech at IITs , despite my best efforts i got disqualified at GATE , got depressed for few weeks , then went out to search for a job , afterall BTech or MTech is just get a job ! ( was my thought that time )

2. After joining a Govt RnD , i was blown away with the taste of actual research and my thought process only got better after my first date with FOSS software , during this time few of my friends went for part time MTech in BMS and few others MS in BITs Pilani , I did not care for , because iam already having the adrenalin rush due to making things work , exploring how things work and developing new cool stuff , Why boring Studies again ? Why boring exams, preparations etc ? when iam having the fun i want ( was my thought process this time )

3. And now after 6 yrs of Software engg life , after few unsuccessful stints with few product ideas and entrepreneurship , after getting bored of watching few products which donot add any value to life , i feel there is no proper research went in making this products , now i feel like doing PhD , for exploring , researching to create products of value , which has impact on our lives , which can make this world better place to live . ( this is my current thought process ! )

To start with I am very glad that I did the masters. I do not think doing a job for those 2 years would have taught me more than what I learned in school. Having said this, I believe I had a good experience doing my masters because I had the opportunity to do research with a very nice advisor and had excellent peers to interact with. A job would never have given me (agreeing with @Sreekanth here) the kind of exposure to ideas and people that I got while at the university. I don’t think I learned much in the classroom, but I did learn a lot writing actual code and interacting with other members of the research team.

Beyond the usual learning, writing my theses helped me improve my writing as well as communication skills significantly. In fact it also got me interested in writing to the extent that I started my own newsletter and later on my blog. Now I am not suggesting that a masters be done to inculcate an interest in writing. I am simply stating this as one more benefit I got from my masters.

Beyond just the money making capabilities, a (good) university environment offers exposure to people, ideas, and a certain environment which a job may not offer. The friendships I made back then remain so till date, and many of the things I learned in those early years still influence my thought process in a positive way.

Having said this I would also like to add that not everyone may have the resources and opportunity to pursue a masters education. I do not think all is lost. The online world in this day and age allows us (through some creativity) to simulate a large part of the a creative environment with ideas, and interactions that exist in a university.

To summarize, I think a masters is useful, but only if the university offers the kind of environment which is truly invigorating. Doing an MS just for the degree may not be very useful. In that case it might be better to seek a job instead.

I am pursuing a PhD at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (matscience for short) in Chennai, and I joined this program after my BSc at Mount Carmel College in Bangalore. As for the choice between harsh winters and harsh summers, I chose the latter because I felt under-prepared for a long stint abroad. I discarded the option of doing a Masters’ because I was reasonably sure that I would eventually do a PhD – I do not intend to go too far from the business of academics and/or research, and a PhD would be considered a pre-requisite. (I save time by doing it after my BSc rather than after a MSc.)

A PhD is a good thing to do even if you don’t intend to stay in the usual academic circles for life – usually people shy away because of the teaching duties that come for free with such a career. However, but Google/Yahoo/IBM/et al have excellent research labs which are great places to go to after a PhD (and I gather that one would feel more confident in the research lab environment post-PhD/MSc rather than post-BTech). This sort of a job is attractive for various reasons, and if you have the slightest inclination towards learning and discovering new things all the time, then it’s good to know that you can get paid for it too.

Consider music – you can learn to play by ear, with minimal “formal training”, by watching others and learning how to read sheet music with some basic intuition about rhythm an scales. There are some, however, who yearn to know what really makes the whole thing tick, and they feel restless (in spite of a certain degree of mastery in practice) about the way they do things. An investment of a couple of years in learning music theory makes some people feel a lot better about how they play music. And there are some who actually don’t care – that’s perfectly fine as long as you are confident that you indeed don’t care.

Do a Masters’ if you can actually sense some dissatisfaction with your present status of learning. You may know the best algorithms for a large set of problems, and perhaps the implementation is at your fingertips. But if it interests you to know (for example) that there is a formal classification of problems based on their complexity, and that there are good (formal) reasons for saying that you don’t expect to get an answer to the TSP in polynomial time, then you should consider spending some time on discovering more magic than what you’ve seen so far. Also, the new magic helps you build a strong sense of intuition, using which you can stare at a problem statement and remark that “Oh, don’t think you can crack that in linear time, because…”.

Having said that – if the world that you are hitherto familiar with comes across as magical enough and you aren’t hungry for more, you may find the masters’ experience merely frustrating, and you’ll spend your time itching to get out of it into the real world where you can write/improvise/hack away at code that you knew to write months ago.

Also, much can be achieved by self-learning, and open courseware programs (such as the one offered by MIT) make it completely feasible for you to gain the experience that you would with a Masters’ program at your own pace. If there are no reasons for having the degree itself, then picking up things on your own is a serious alternative. Being at an institute has the advantage of greater levels of discipline and interaction, but the former may be precisely what you want to avoid, and the latter can be made up for in many ways.

A final note on the financial aspect of things – a PhD program (at least the ones I know of in India) comes with a stipend that is getting more and more competitive with time. Funds are being poured into the research industry by the governement and industry alike – and the competition/glamour hasn’t really caught on proportionately. Thus if you have somewhat decent abilities, you stand a good chance, and you can be further sponsored in many attractive ways if you are better than decent. Fact that someone like me managed to (at least so far) survive the program should give anybody a lot of confidence

Also, tell us about how you evaluated Masters option? What were your conclusions?

Srichand clearly knew why he was getting into Masters, irrespective of whether he changed direction or not (which is often the reality)

Would you approve if a person spends 20 lakh rupees or so to do a Masters just because everybody else is doing it?

I hope you see now why I’m suggesting that people clarify their inclinations before taking this decision.

I agree with your observation. I am focusing on the value of the education itself whereas you are focusing on the value of college life. I think they are two different things. But choosing to go for a Masters degree for the value of college life is a perfectly good reason. But the problem is that most people who ask the question, in my opinion, have not-so-admirable motivations such as “I am not getting a job, so maybe I should do masters.”

Also, I have to clarify that nowhere I said that Theory is a bad thing. Hell no. My point was that you have to realize your inclination to one or the other. Very few people can straddle both worlds.

@Srichand : Thank you for the fantastic thoughts.

Regarding Point 4, I think it deserves more explanation. I think motivations to do something should be clear, even if you don’t have the big picture in clarity. Course correction is always required for any plan. Start off in a direction, if it is not working out, then change direction. But if you never start having a direction, then you’ll be just swaying whichever way the wind takes you, which I don’t think is a great method in the long run.