Working While Pursuing a PhD

My lab has extended me an opportunity to be a research scientist and helping out our current senior data scientist with the daily analytics and IT support the lab needs. It’s a very enticing opportunity, but I need to stop and think about my options

I’d get paid more! What kind of graduate student would not want that? But I would really need to consider and clarify with my advisor and rest of my lab how this can fit in with my PhD. I don’t want to be doing my PhD longer than I have to, and ideally I would be put on a series of projects that can be used for my final dissertation topic. However, if I am a staff member of the lab, I will have less freedom of what my topic would be. Of course, if I spent the after hours working on my dissertation, I could do whatever I wanted, but that might not be a feasible solution.

The job will give me financial stability, but currently as a PhD student, I have a lot of academic freedom that I might loose. Since most of my work is computational, it can easily be done remotely.

Luckily my advisor will becoming to down in a few weeks. We’ll discuss this further then.