The Benefits and Challenges of an Industry-Funded PhD

Industry-funded PhDs offer the opportunity to pursue your research in a more vocational setting, developing excellent transferrable skills and providing you with plenty of business experience.

1. You have to become extremely good at time management

While every PhD will require effective time management, an industry-oriented one will be much stricter about this. You will likely have stipulations about how much time you must spend each week or month working with your industry partner or working with your university.

2. You will have to be the bridge between several different groups of collaborators and foster good communication between them

This is useful for increasing communication and organisational skills and also gives you far more people with different experiences to call upon for help. The downside is the difficulty of getting people from different industries and professions that all have different time commitments to meet in the same place at the same time.

3.You will have to learn about a topic or field you know relatively little about

This point is shared with multi-disciplinary PhDs. The vast majority of these projects are not purely focused on one strict field of research. The positive to this is that you will develop yourself further as a researcher and be more capable of handling different kinds of projects in the future. The downside is the difficulty of getting up to speed to a high level on a topic you know relatively little about.

4. There will be some legal and patenting restrictions on your work

While you can work on some exciting concepts and explore different ideas during an industrial PhD, the end goal is still a product that will possibly be sold for commercial profit. This provides some excellent practical experience (and will eventually look great on your CV), but it does have its limitations when it comes to sharing your research. There are various legal protections and intellectual property concerns that will limit your publication potential compared to a ‘normal’ doctorate.

5. It is necessary to focus on the big picture and the ‘macro’ of the project

You will come to have a good understanding of some of the more pragmatic aspects of your project and its future applications. While more conventional PhDs focus strongly on knowledge for knowledge’s sake, important logistical questions should stay at the forefront of a student’s mind when they are completing an industrial project.

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