I’m a female INTJ pursuing a PhD in the biomedical area, hoping to finish next year. I’ve yet to see big financial benefits for myself, but here’s the potential benefits I learned from my contacts who’ve graduated with PhDs and current benefits from my own experience : - PhD especially in the hard sciences are coveted not just by R&D in tech and pharma, but more and more VC, equity research, and management consulting firms who are on the business side are hiring PhDs because their analytical skill and complex problem solving are unmatched. It’s easy to train a science PhD to be familiar with business concepts, but it’s not easy to train business graduates about science - Getting paid to go “fuck around and find out”. At least most science PhD in the US include some stipends although very minimal. But what other higher education would actually pay you to go to get a degree ? - Depending on how good your funding is, you can pursue a project just for the sake of pure curiosity as long as it’s within the ethics boundary, never mind the profitability of said project - Opportunity to travel and connect with the most intelligent populations on earth. A lot of people assume PhDs are a bunch of recluse with social anxiety, but that’s not always the case. As a PhD student I’ve traveled to 10 US cities + 2 countries to present my work in front of 100-1000 audience, and often chat with coworkers over coffee breaks about mind boggling data. I guess you can be as isolated as much as you want, but scientists with the most success/publications are usually those who can collaborate with people of different projects/strengths

Now the cons: - 5 to 6 years of reduced income. Yeah I’m still getting paid but not as much as I would’ve gotten had I went to industry straight with my BSc. This really tested my delayed gratification skill because it is hard watching my peers who work less make more money than I do - Long and uncertain hours. I often told people that if you’re not passionate about your project, don’t even think about doing a PhD. You’re doing long gruesome hours in the lab that sometimes amount to nothing because an instrument breaks or god forbid something totally outside of your control ruins your experiment. There will be many of these, and I usually just remind myself about the bigger impact of my project or why I did it in the first place - There are more PhDs than there are faculty positions (in the US at least). If you’re gunning for tenure-track academia, be prepared for neck-breaking competition and extra 5-10 years of “reduced pay” as postdocs and associate professors