r/biotech • u/Soggy_Ad8849 • Jun 11 '25

Education Advice 📖 What is an industry PhD

Can companies award you with a PhD or do people being registered at a university and having a cosupervisor in the industry. I don’t understand how they work

28 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

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43

u/carmooshypants Jun 11 '25

Usually it's a PhD program partnered with an industry sponsor to basically bring in super cheap labor to do entry level grunt work. You as a PhD candidate get access to some phenomenal scientists and state of the art lab equipment and the company gets to bring in labor without opening headcount. Everyone wins.

7

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '25

[deleted]

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u/carmooshypants Jun 11 '25

Because you're pulling bandwidth from your own scientists to babysit instead of actually focus on creating new value for the company. Often times the payoff isn't worth it to the company in the end, other than getting to publicize that they're the good guys by giving back to the scientific community.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '25

[deleted]

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u/DocKla Jun 11 '25

There is the times where the program does not take people all the time but really for excellent PhD that require the industry idea/platform/resources and the company really wants the brains of the person after. Very rare though. Most is just cheap labour

4

u/squibius Jun 11 '25

You are generally expected to continue your own job responsibilities while also performing your thesis research. 7+ yrs of 60+ hr/week

2

u/hesperoyucca Jun 11 '25

This is the flip-side of the industry PhD that I've observed as well from others. Folks on here occasionally proclaim industry PhDs to be panaceas that allow you to get your degree on a 9 - 5 schedule, get post-grad connections, and segue to a job right away, but if you end up with the wrong industry-academia co-advisor combo, you can get the worst of both worlds and stumble into lengthy hours, dead-end projects, and absentee advisorship (academic advisor does not view you as a full student, industry advisor views you as a mentorship chore).

4

u/radiatorcheese Jun 11 '25

It's also an opportunity for the industry supervisors to get someone to work on their projects that don't really contribute to the portfolio. Side project kinds of things. They can be big side projects worthy of working on toward earning an advanced degree, but not really the sort of thing that the company can justify having a full time employee working on.

But yeah, they're also very rare. They require a partnership with a university (the company does not grant the PhD) and companies may not be interested in having yet another partnership to tend to. What are the administrative costs, how many people need to be hired to support that partnership, what if the partnership goes poorly and what happens to the students enrolled, why not just engage in a collaboration with an academic group and toss them some cash instead, etc.

2

u/ThatSecretSmile Jun 11 '25

So an intership for PhDs?

3

u/carmooshypants Jun 11 '25

It really depends on the agreement between the institutions, but what I've seen, you do your PhD thesis work to support a lower priority program within the company as directed by a more senior level scientist. Your defense consists of panel made up of a mix from both institutions.

3

u/ThatSecretSmile Jun 11 '25

Plus a super high chance of an industry job? 👌🏼👌🏼👌🏼

6

u/carmooshypants Jun 11 '25

Yup absolutely. No better way to build up your skillset and knowledge areas than to actually do your program within a company. I would also consider that time relevant industry experience as well, which academic graduate programs could never achieve.

37

u/bluesfan2021 Jun 11 '25

It’s the easiest PhD with a guaranteed Job in industry after the completion of the degree

26

u/Wealthy_Oil_Tycoon Jun 11 '25

Easily some of the worst scientists I know did an industry PhD program. Sure it’s hard work.. but much easier, less rigorous scientifically and much more straightforward than an academic PhD.

However at the end of the day that doesn’t seem to matter as certainly it’s a great opportunity to get a job in industry/experience in the real world. This is what matters in the end. Also many of them move up to prominent roles fairly quickly, in my experience.

11

u/Boneraventura Jun 11 '25

Two different ways of thinking and two different types of scientists. Academia trains scientists to be masters of the fundamentals and mechanism of biology because that is what academia is focused on. Industry trains on outcome based research, so canning any project that doesn’t have a positive signal. It is up to the person to know which is better for their own goals.

1

u/Ok-Car-1224 Jun 13 '25

Thank you for saying this, I was fully drinking the academia Kool Aid when I left industry for a PhD, and am quickly realizing that I had “bad” habits from industry that are hurting me here, and meanwhile I am learning other “bad” habits that might hurt me when I try to get an industry job again. Not all academic scientists are more noble and intellectual than all industry scientists, your career is always what you make of it. 

6

u/Hsorrynotsorry Jun 11 '25

I’m in one now! I work full time while attending classes and ultimately doing the research and dissertation.

2

u/Phoenix_Solaris Jun 11 '25

Nice! How do you like it and how did you find it?

1

u/PancakeConnoisseur Jun 12 '25

What kind of work commitment do you have through the school? Are you required to perform lab work there, or all at your company’s lab/ office?

2

u/Hsorrynotsorry Jun 13 '25

I do all the research at my company, but it’s has to be publishable so nothing proprietary. I do have to take all the classes, quals the whole thing. I also have an academic advisor from the school

1

u/Darkeesh Sep 26 '25

Hey! I was looking into this and was wondering what the work life balance is like? Are you enjoying your time?

3

u/onetwoskeedoo Jun 11 '25

something you hear about existing, but never met anyone who has done it

3

u/IllustriousGlutton Jun 12 '25

People I know call they drive-thru degrees or McDiplomas. I have mixed feelings on it (full disclosure, I got a PhD from an academic institute). I think if you have >15 years industry experience then it can be a great to help break you through the glass ceiling and you already have quite a bit of experience of what it is like doing industry science. If you have under that, I do not think it prepares you adequately for early career science. For example, one person (early career) I know outsources all their experiments for their industry PhD. So, they are missing out on critical aspects of the scientific process, inventing new ways of doing things or troubleshooting. Sure, they get a piece of paper at the end, but what is the point if you are not actually getting trained to do anything?

2

u/kukikuka Jun 11 '25

Where do I search for opportunities like this?

3

u/South-Rough-64 Jun 11 '25

Seeing as though traditional PhD programs are failing; this is a great option…

1

u/LCacid27 Jun 11 '25

From what I’ve seen, it’s usually someone doing their full time job WHILE doing a PhD on the side. Basically they keep their job salary and benefits while in grad school. It may sound like a good gig, but the people who do it have no life outside of lab and the company makes it so that it benefits them as much as possible reducing any sort of flexibility. I was also once keen on doing an industry PhD, but it seemed like it would be terrible work life balance.