Background: The benefits of a PhD education include opportunities for professional, personal growth and large-scale contribution to research and knowledge creation. A PhD could be pursued after a master’s degree or a bachelor’s degree in different parts of the world. We hypothesize that the master’s thesis plays a very important role in preparing students for their PhD studies. This study, therefore, aimed to assess how PhD students experience that their master’s thesis affected their readiness for PhD studies. We specifically aimed to assess whether it’s better to do a thesis in industry or academia, whether it’s better to do a thesis individually or in a group, and what motivated the PhD students to continue in academia after their master’s thesis.
Methods: A Google survey with 27 questions was sent out to people who are pursuing a PhD or have pursued a PhD in the past. A quantitative statistical analysis was carried out on the entire dataset, divided as per whether a subject did their master’s thesis alone or in a group and whether they did it in academia or industry to see the effects of different paths chosen as a part of the master’s thesis.
Results: We received 22 replies to the Google survey. 19 subjects did their master’s thesis in academia, and 3 did in the industry. 52% of the subjects that did their master’s thesis in academia started their PhD at the same research institution. A larger proportion of individuals who completed their master’s thesis in academia reported feeling prepared to start a PhD, enjoyed writing their thesis, and found discussions with their supervisor and colleagues motivating, more so than those who did their thesis in industry. Across all three groups, publishing a paper during the master’s thesis had minimal impact on motivation to pursue a PhD. The results were also classified based on the thesis type, such as group and individual theses. There were 18 students who did their thesis individually, and 4 students worked in groups. A little difference in agreement was found between the two classes when asked if they enjoyed discussing their results with their supervisors and peers. However, we found no difference between the two classes when we asked them about gaining important academic skills necessary for a PhD.
Conclusion: Doing a master’s thesis in academia prepares students better for doing a PhD than doing a master’s thesis in industry, possibly because supervisors invest more time in their students in academia. There is no difference between doing a master’s thesis individually versus doing it in a group since no difference in the perceived development between students of these two groups was observed. However, the data available for both of these comparisons were highly imbalanced, with one of the groups being significantly smaller than the other in both cases. Therefore, more research is needed to obtain reliable conclusions to our research questions.
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