I have a BS in Chemistry and a MS in Bioengineering with a thesis.
I am currently on a gap year where I decide my next career move. I have been getting really handy with building and launching AI agents and coding webapps (for fun) and staying on top of the latest and greatest with aI.
Long term – I want to be a founder.
Short term – I want to make the best moves to get me to this position.
My interests lay in the industrial biomanufacturing transition and climate tech.
I have been frustrated with the lack of available equipment for me to experiement myself without partnered with an academic lab. I have also been frustrated with this current market. I want to do science. I am currently making money through freelance coding.
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Every time I ask someone about a PhD they say the most valuable thing they got out of the program is “The ability to learn how to learn”.
To me, this means processing information from papers, synthesizing experiments, and interpreting results to reveal and prove new information in your field of study.
They have also said most of their time out of lab was spent gathering papers and writing protocols.
Recently, rudimentary versions of LLMs and AI agents have been released that accelerate the information gathering stage (reading), protocol writing, and data anaylsis from experiments. Therefore, students are able to save days, weeks, months, and even years(?) of tedious work of searching, writing, and analyzing info.
A lot of PhD programs have requirements such as :
– X course credits (usually satisfied in 1-3 years)
– teaching courses (1-3 years)
– publishing X papers
Obviously LLMs and AI Agents can’t replace the course credits and TA requirements, but they can heavily assist with the manual labor of paper publishing process.
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Bottom line: I want to do a PhD to get access to cirtical resources for building a hard-tech biotech startup in the industrial biomanufacturing field. However, I am concerned about the 5-6+ year requriement.
Do you see this time decreasing in the future?
Comments
No, not from this anyway. There has always been a technological bent toward making research more efficient. What it has mainly done is raise the bar for the number of publications to achieve by graduation.
Get a PhD outside of the united states? Those sound like US timelines to me.
>but they can heavily assist with the manual labor of paper publishing process.
lol no
Short cuts make for long delays. If you plan on using AI to do the reading for you, expect to do poor experiments. If you plan on using AI to do the analysis for you, expect meaningless results. It is the thinking and the doing that matter, and AI is giving only incremental help to either. It doesn’t sound like a PhD or research is your cup of tea.
UK PhDs are 3 to 4 years, with a hard submission deadline of 4 years after you start the course. So if course length is an issue for you, you could consider that.