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Is it possible to start a PhD at 36 without taking a huge hit financially?
I'm currently working as a Senior Engineer (Mechanical) for a large company. However, I am increasingly finding the work to be dull and lacking in challenge. I don't think I can bear to spend the next 20-30 years like this - I feel that I am not making use of my true abilities and I yearn to be doing something more novel and breaking new ground.
I live in the US (Boston area) and I have been looking around at what other opportunities are available; however, it seems that many of the more interesting-looking positions (which are more research-based) require a PhD. I majored in fluid dynamics and have some experience in CFD, so I am looking at positions that lean towards that area.
So, I am considering whether I should do a PhD, which seems to be a logical choice if I want to be doing more intellectually-challenging work. However, right now I am earning a good salary; I have a big mortgage to pay and a 3 year old kid to support. Doing a PhD seems like it would be a very difficult path to take, from a financial standpoint: not only would I have to give up my healthy salary, but I would also most likely have to pay a lot in tuition fees, in which case I would go from earning ++$ to -$, which would be very difficult to manage.
So, my question is: is it possible to do a PhD at my stage in life, whilst also paying the mortgage and supporting my family? What is the best way to balance this?
I should probably also mention that I have a Masters Degree in Aerospace Engineering from a top UK university (I moved to the US from the UK a few years ago).

Would/does your company pay for employees (i.e. you) to get a PhD? Some do.

Your assumption about fees and tuition  are most likely wrong. US Universities pay most Engineering graduate students a stipend (less than you're currently making) , cover most/all tuition, waive some fees, and sometimes offer healthcare insurance. MIT Posts their generic PhD stipends on their webpage: https://gradadmissions.mit.edu/costs-funding/stipend-rates

Tuition costs are generally covered in the US for engineering PhD students + they get a stipend. In the Midwest, it seems they get a stipend around $20-30k, but you'd have to check with specific departments to see actual numbers.  Also, as a PhD student at Michigan, I get really good health insurance that covers my family. Be sure to look at benefits like that, too.

Your university may pay Ph.D. students.  But that salary is far less than what a 36-year-old Senior Engineer earns.  So yes, you take a big financial hit.  You probably cannot do it if you have a mortgage and a family to support.

It's more like going from +++++$ to +$.

Yeah, don't do it for the money. CS students who end up going for a 5 to 6 year PhD could be giving up close to a million dollars, for example.

Not that it seems that you're doing it for the money, but it's good to know up front what you'll be giving up financially, to see if it's tolerable for you and fair for your family (don't forget about them and how they'd be affected by a near-poverty level salary). On the other hand, even though grad students are very busy, the schedule can be very flexible, which was the main plus that I saw as a mid-30s PhD student with young children.

@JonCuster It's a good suggestion, but I think very unlikely. My company is notoriously tight with money. It's hard enough to convince them to fund a 1-day training course ..

@MikeA your second comment hits it on the head. It's not that I'd be doing it for the money, but the reality of my situation right now is that I need to be earning a certain amount to support my family. As you mention, it does seem like there could potentially be a huge financial opportunity cost.

@NajibIdrissi It's a good point and I have been applying to those positions anyway, but so far have not heard back from any of the ones that state they require a PhD (so I haven't gotten to the point where I can 'argue' anything). The impression I get is that people seem by default to not believe you can do cutting-edge research-based work, unless you have a PhD. Perhaps it's also partly the area I live in - Boston may be somewhat saturated with PhD grads looking for work, so maybe employers can afford to be picky?

@Time4Tea Before spending the years on a PhD, I suggest intense networking. If you send an application in response to an advertised job opening it may be automatically rejected for lack of PhD. You need to be known to the managers who have the openings. Join any professional societies that hold local meetings, and get to know people  who might have jobs.

I am a PhD student in physics, but I strongly believe that a 6-year academic research experience is not necessarily superior to a decade of experience of working in the industry. So I second what najib Idrissi said.

Maybe a change of employer can already give you the challenge you are looking for. For example in a small company there is more variation in the work you do.

You state that you do not get to the interview process, so 2 things: first, have you had someone (i.e. company or maybe your own HR if you have a friend there) look over your resume? You may not be self-promoting enough of your accomplishments for HRs to see it as equal to Ph.D. requirement. Also, you just may not get past HR like that with normal channels (its a hard requirement and software or HR person just rejects without looking at any other thing). In that case, have you tried going to meetups and other social events to start networking (can start this with academic meetups too)?

@JGreenwell I think you and Patricia Shanahan both make a very good point. I probably do need to work on improving my networking, to try to help get past the 'normal' HR channels, which I am most likely running up against.

@Time4Tea I am unfortunately having a similar problem with only a Masters so I know its an issue (even when there is "equivalent experience" on the posting) and I'm right there in the same boat

@JGreenwell it's a bit ludicrous, isn't it? "I 'only' have a Masters degree, so clearly I'm not capable of doing cutting-edge research in Industry ..." :-(

@Time4Tea you should address your professional experience nce in your cover letter, don’t wait till the interview

You almost never have time to learn anything remotely comparable to the depth of theory in a PhD while doing a typical industry job. Patch this bug, patch that bug, oh we actually have time for a new release what a luxury. No wait we actually don't have time for it but now we promised customer it, o SHIII...

Research positions at my company (WA, USA) do not require a Ph.D. My impression is that hard requirement for Ph.D. is not very common in the industry. I wonder if it could be more common in Boston area, where there is a large supply of Ph.D. holders.

Really need some more information here.  You mention 3 year old kid, but are you a single parent, or do you have a spouse in the picture?  If the latter, does (or could) s/he contribute significant income?

@Akavall I think it is quite possible that part of the issue is the Boston area, and the number of PhDs coming out of the Universities here. If it were anywhere else, the employers might not be able to be quite so picky.

@jamesqf I do have a wife and she is earning a decent salary. So, it might be possible for me to drop my own salary to some extent. Still, the level of PhD stipends that has been mentioned here would be a big change.

@Time4Tea: In that case, perhaps looking at some lifestyle changes would help.  Of course I don't know your circumstances beyond what's in your question, but I see a lot of people spending far more than they need (or enjoy), either to impress their acquaintances (usually doesn't work :-)), or because they think it's expected.  Try reading e.g. the Mr Money Moustache site.

I did my PhD in computer science in the Boston area. Through an RA and a bit of TA, I had my tuition, health insurance, and conference travel expenses covered, plus a stipend which has since risen to $36,800 before tax per year. (With a bit of googling you can look up what financial support various PhD programs offer, as well as health insurance costs for dependents -- for a large family, this might be $10,000.) That was enough for a modest but comfortable single person's lifestyle in expensive Boston, but I would struggle to support a child or mortgage with that. PhD stipends will vary by field (i.e., how much funding professors have) and by university (i.e., local cost of living).
You will know your financial situation and it's up to you to judge whether you can cut your expenses and/or dip into your savings to make that work. PhDs are getting longer, so keep in mind that you probably need to do this for about six years.
There are a few other options to make it better financially:
Ideally you can work something out with an employer where they will pay you while you do your PhD, probably in exchange for some part time work or a promise that you will continue working for them afterwards. Such an arrangement is more common for shorter programs like an MBA.
It's also possible to spend some time during the PhD working in a company that is somehow related to your studies. For example, a lot of computer science PhD students will do internships at companies like Google or Microsoft. A 10-week summer internship could give your annual income a >$10k boost.
If it all gets too much financially, you can take a year or two off your PhD to work and then come back to finish. That's not ideal, because it interrupts your work. However, it's better than needing to drop out entirely.
Overall, however, I think it's unavoidable that a PhD will entail a financial hit. A PhD is almost never a good financial decision, but if you are passionate about research it's definitely worth it.

This is a great answer, thank you! I will discuss with my current company and see if there is some way they might help fund a PhD, although I think it unlikely. If not, perhaps a short-term goal could be to move to another company that would be more willing to consider it. As you live in Boston, do you know many people who have been funded by companies to do PhDs? How common is that?

The impression I get is that there are quite a lot of highly-qualified Science/Engineering grads/PhDs coming out of the Boston universities. If that is the case, could it be possible that companies are spoiled for choice and might be less likely to help fund a PhD because of that?

I'd suggest adding that it's worth checking what insurance might cost, too. A good friend of mine had free individual insurance but family insurance was close to $1k/month for him while he did his PhD. That was far more problematic than the pay difference between industry and academia.

@ElysianFields Good point. Mine was free, but dependents weren't. I looked it up: 7k annually for spouse, 4k for first child, 2k for second child, and further children free. So, yeah, 1k/month for a family of 4 or more.

@Time4Tea Getting employers to pay for a PhD is pretty hard. I only met one person who had managed it. Employer-funded masters are more common.

@ElysianFields good point about insurance. That is definitely an important consideration, but I think we could probably get reasonably-priced medical insurance through my wife's employment.

@Thomas I think perhaps my best chance of getting my employer to help fund it would be if I find another opportunity and threaten to leave. That would then put me in a good negotiating position, if they want to hold onto me.

@Time4Tea A lot of employers do not provide funding for education because that makes you more valuable to other employers, but not necessarily the one you are working for. In some fields (such as government contracting) it benefits the company to support even PhD because they get more money on government contracts and look more appealing to potential customers because of the educated work force.   You could look to into one of these organizations. They often also have more interesting work (a long the lines of research you may be interested in) national labs may be up your alley.

@Time4Tea From what I saw of my time working in Boston many companies do offer to pay for continued education. They do so because much of the competition already have this benefit. This is why in the Boston area you see similar health care, transportation, retirement etc, being offered by companies. In that area it is the norm.

No. You will take a financial hit. That's the short answer.
It is a good practice though to find out how big of a hit you would take. With such a life-changing decisions you ought to put some work into analysis first. You need to estimate your opportunity cost of doing a PhD. Essentially that will be a measure of your financial hit. How much money you will lose compared to not doing a PhD.

...right now I am earning a good salary; I have a big mortgage to pay
  and a 3 year old kid to support.

Just from this sentence I can guess that your opportunity costs will be high. Here are some things to take into account:
Possible negatives:

reduction or loss of salary
tuition costs
time you will have to spend studying
possibly longer commute
resuming a career at the age of 40 possibly starting at a lower salary, despite having a PhD
risk of failure at PhD program
risk you will not enjoy a PhD as much as you expect to
the last but definitely NOT least is graduating from PhD into an economic recession possibly making you unemployed for years into your 40s

Possible positives:

More interesting work opportunities upon graduation
Higher pay if you successfully resume your career with PhD
Higher chance to remain employed doing the job you love into retirement age (a very good thing once you get older)
Learn to understand the world better, makes you happier

A very important step before you sum it up is to discount all your future gains and losses and compare their present value. For example, getting a better job in 4 years is less certain so it has less present value, maybe 60% compared to if you got this job today. Losing your job now to start a PhD, if certain, is valued as a loss of 100% of salary. Basically things that may or may not happen in the future are less important than the ones that are guaranteed to happen now. 10% discount rate per year is a good rate, but make it compounded.
Also account for compound interest that would accumulate on your immediate gains/losses. For example, the salary you receive now is way more valuable than the salary you will receive 10 years from now because you can immediately invest it, and not just in stocks or your retirement, but to pay off the mortgage sooner, to get quality early education for your kid, etc.
You don't have to be precise with any of this. Just doing a sketch and reading up on those financial concepts will make the picture much clearer.
Finally, if you decide it is not worth it, there are other options. You can start reading up on research topics that are interesting to you, see if any of that research can help your current employer save/make some money. If yes, perhaps you could even get your company to allocate some R&D budget for a small corporate lab. Perhaps even team up with some academic institution for a join applied science project with corporate funding. It will take you years of reading and studying, but so will a PhD program.

As others have said, you should remove "tuition costs" from your Negatives list.

@JeffE thanks, I renamed the lists as "possible" negatives and positives so it doesn't look like the list applies to every case. Each case is unique of course, not just because of monetary outcomes but because of personal preferences

Good answer overall (+1), but there is another possible positive that you are ignoring: the opportunity to do deep research into an area that fascinates you, without having an employer asking that everything that you do is immediately applicable to the company's environment. This is potentially the main reason to do a PhD -- it's the main reason I am! You also develop invaluable learning skills, and much more. Not everything is about making more money in the future. (The question asks about taking a financial hit, rather than doing a PhD to make more money in the future.)

Higher chance to remain employed doing the job you love into retirement age, is that true?

Yep @SamT there is a happiness you can find in finally being able to come up with your own versions of the awesome stuff which your professors once showed you when you were an undergraduate. If you work hard you are quite likely to reach those levels at the end of your PhD - or maybe during your PostDoc. That happiness is probably not so easy to find elsewhere in life.

@mathreadler I mean, I have found that from the start... (doing maths/discrete probability theory). Getting to research when I find interesting, not just an intersection between what I find somewhat interesting and a company considers important -- it's great! But very tough sometimes. In fact, interestingly the drop-out rate is about constant throughout the PhD: it's not the fact that quite a few drop out at the start and not later on, but rather the rate is about constant. Tough, but rewarding! (I think anyway)

@SamT : Yes, not only at the start, but some also quit when they realize how stuff works and that it is not the future they want. Yet some others quit because they get demotivated when they see the arbitrarity of what is accepted and what is not. Well, no system is perfect, that is fur shore.

Yeah, agreed. I find it interesting, though, that the drop out rate in the first two months is basically the same (in maths at least), as the drop out rate in months 36 to 38. Anyway, we (/I) digress, ad don't want to spam this comment thread

@SamT Yep, it must be rather stressful for them to lose the tractive power of those guys in month 38, they must have learned a lot on the way and suddenly we just lose any chance we might've had to get ahold of them when they are in their prime.

Here a few options you and/or your family could consider:

A research collaboration at your workplace: If you could marry what your workplace does with academically-interesting research (interesting to some university professor, to be more concrete) - you might be able to engage in such research on company time. This may or may not be within the purview of a PhD program, but it would meet your underlying goal.
A part-time/extenal Ph.D. program: If your workplace is willing to let you take down your salary somewhat, but all go down to part-time employment (whether it be 50%, 60% or 80%), and your industrial experience is interesting to a potential advisor, you could work on a PhD at a slower pace, and partially in your spare time (assuming you have any, with small child and probably a spouse). Of course, this would likely take quite a good number of years.
Relying on your spouse: Your spouse may be willing (and able) to find more gainful employment, with yourself and perhaps other family helping with child care, while your salary drops significantly as a Ph.D. candidate. Of course - if you're not an employed/funded Ph.D. candidate, it's quite unlikely your spouse could increase her salary by that much. You can potentially improve this option with some real-estate-dorm switcheroo: Assuming you get a funded Ph.D. position and couples/family dorm privileges, you could move there with your family - again, if your spouse is willing to put up with that - and rent out your existing apartment.

All this goes to show why it's important for junior researcher unions to thrive and struggle to bring the wages up, enough to make it a viable option for adults with families to be able to support their families and shoulder their expenses as Ph.D. candidates. Typical salaries must at least treble, if not quadruple, for the that to be the case. If you do end up as a Ph.D. full-timer, do invest some time in union organizing.

+1 for the suggestion that wife could support mortgage

@Dawn:  To be honest, I got the idea from PhD-Comics' Michael Slackenerny...

Funny enough I'm opposite of you: got my PhD, did some teaching and now in industry. Ahh the irony! I'm going to be as honest as possible here, I don't think you should start a PhD; here are my reasons:
Engineering is not research: I'm in computing, to this day, I'm impressed by engineers everyday. However here is the truth: doesn't matter how efficient you might be in the engineering department, research has its own struggles. For example, if I create a programming language, it is not research on its own, but if I come up with a theory on a type system of a language that might be a research and publishable. To an engineering mind, it might be a battle, that overtime might force you to say: ahh I don't need this in my life I'm going to leave research.
Loads of reading: you will be reading 80% of time, other people's work to get an idea, where your contribution maybe; but there is no guarantee. For example, in my case, due to lack of good supervision, I was not certain what will be my contribution after a year of reading other people's work. However, and engineer might say: well, I'm calculating my input to this work, and this should be my output; but this is not true in research. You will be wondering "where the idea comes from"; and let me tell you it is a rabbit hole; you might get lucky and get an idea but reading a journal, or you might go through the last 20 years research and journals and get nothing.
Finance and Research You might say, well, I'm senior in my job and I'm bored. I want to do something different, but without getting hit financially. Doesn't matter how you cut it, you will get hit financially: you are changing the trajectory of your career; what do you expect.
What is the end game here?: Imagine this: hello sir, here is your PhD diploma; what will you be doing sir?. You might publish several papers during PhD, then what about after that? Becoming a lecturer? Let me tell you that is also very hard to get and they will pay you probably less than what you are making; research is not for financial gains and stability; you see what I'm trying to say here?
When everything is boring: I think you are bored because there are not so much diversity in your work place, and it is time to move on; but maybe because of family issues you can't. Have you considered outside work projects? Something that you need to push through? That might be the answer your problem.

Thanks for your suggestions. Regarding your last point: I think a big question I need to answer is: am I bored with my current job, or am I bored with Engineering? Unfortunately, I feel that it may be more the latter - it seems that when you get down to it, Engineering is essentially solving the same problems over and over again in different contexts. It's learning new things and breaking new ground that really motivates me. Btw, I love reading - I often read through Engineering/scientific text books for fun in my spare time.

...and in an instant, tens of thousands of R&D engineers go up in  a cloud of smoke

@Time4Tea If you like to do it, and love reading, do it; however I got an impression that you do think like a engineer and want to calculate your financial hit; and research is a horrible in that sense. You will get hit.

Where I am from, "industrial" PhD students are not unheard of. A private company (which you probably work for) pay part of your time for you to do a PhD on. For example 50% of your working time.
You may get less institutional duties like teaching MSc and undergraduates than ordinary PhD students paid by employment at university or stipend would.
I would guess you would make more money that way but have less "academic freedom" as your "boss" in this case will be the company paying for your degree.

I would think the chances to be allowed to do one of these increase the better network and the more of a name you have made for yourself being skilled at tackling technically difficult things at work (assuming you would do a PhD in some technical field).

I gave up a job as a senior engineer to start my PhD (at 30).  I was very  lucky in that (1) my wife at the time was well-paid (better than me in engineering), and (2) PhD stipends in the UK are quite decent -- it sounds  like this may be a possibility for you  Similarly to you my interesting job had become much less so as our customised systems became much more routine.
You'll have to budget carefully, but being based in Boston should give you a good chance of finding a PhD position without having to move or work away from home for long periods.  It's not a purely financial decision by any means, or you probably wouldn't do it, but you need to be financially confident.
If you plan to continue in academia, TA work during your PhD is important experience, and can pay a reasonable hourly rate - but you don't want to do too much and risk your research.  This depends heavily on country, institution, funding source etc. but should be taken into account.
Ultimately only you and your partner know how much you can trim from your current spending, and how that balances against what you want to do.
You don't sound like you're in a desperate situation, so you could try living a simpler lifestyle for a year or two, perhaps putting the savings against your mortgage to reduce costs when you do start, before looking in earnest for a suitable PhD.  Do you expect childcare costs to go up or down? Here UK, pre-school is normally costly, while state primary schools are the norm, so childcare gets cheaper when they start school.
Finally an important non-financial point: only take up a PhD for a supervisor that values your industrial experience.  You've got something uncommon to offer, and a good supervisor will understand that; they'll also respect your family life.  A poor supervisor will expect you to remember an entire BSc and not to know anything else, while expecting you to work hours to suit them (e.g. expecting you to be available to meet up late in the day, when you're in by 0800 every day and have to pick your child up).

You're right. One can't pick a PhD supervisor carefully enough. This ought to be tattooed on every prospective applicant's forehead. There's no one size fits all as this is so much more about human alchemy than sheer credentials alone.

I can barely believe I'm suggesting this, but....
Have you considered an online PhD? There are a variety of programs, some of which are affiliated with prestigious physical colleges (e.g., Columbia). These would work around your schedule, and wouldn't require you to quit your job. I'm not sure how much work this would entail...I would imagine significantly less than a 'real' grad school (i.e., not full time), though more than enough to keep you busy.
If the goal is to get a (legitimate) piece of paper to 'check the box' and allow your employer to promote you, this seems like a good option. If the goal is actually to learn how to do research, then I would of course suggest going to the best possible grad school and getting the best possible education...but in that case, as others have said, no real way to do so without uprooting your whole life.

I'm super-suspicious of anything like that. I'd make the the default assumption that such a program offered to me is some kind of a scam.

(-1) A PhD is not so much a diploma as a research apprenticeship. Doing it “online” has no benefit, there are very few courses to attend, you still need time to do the research or it will be a complete scam. By contrast, it's perfectly possible to enroll in a regular PhD programme without a lot of presence on the university's grounds, because you are working in another lab or in a company interested in your research for example. The challenge is finding time for the research and it's almost impossible with a demanding full-time job.

@cag51 thanks for the suggestion, although I'm not sure why an 'online' PhD would be better, in my situation. I live in Boston, so it's not physical proximity to academic institutions that is the problem, it's more about the time/money. Perhaps I'm ignorant, but I would think that for an online PhD to be 'worth' as much as a regular PhD, a similar amount of work would need to go into it?

@Relaxed, Time4Tea -- If the goal is to learn how to do research, then I agree, online is a waste of time. If the goal is to get a degree from an accredited school (so that OP's big company can promote him), then the top-few online programs seem reasonable. I suggested it might be better because it will work around your schedule, so you wouldn't have to quit your job while pursuing it -- though I am assuming that an online PhD is WAY less work than a 'real' PhD, which I admit may not be the case.

I mention this because I've collaborated with a few big companies. In such companies, a degree from an accredited school will satisfy HR, and the technical staff will care about your years of experience more than your degree. No one generally cares where you went to grad school after 5 years in the field.

@cag51 ok, thanks. It is an interesting suggestion and I will look into it, as I am open to all options. Yes, it might be the case for Industry that just having a certificate that says 'PhD' with my name on it on it may be more important than the 'quality' of the degree.

This is a great idea if all you care about the whole thing is a piece of paper saying PhD on it. If you want to become able to do research it's a horribly bad idea.

@mathreadler - I think my last paragraph says this, almost word-for-word.

@cag51 if you are hired for your PhD the company hiring you may care about that you can do actual research. Which is what the diploma is about. An institute puts it name on the line, guaranteeing that you can do research.

@mathreadler - again, my answer very clearly states that if the goal is to learn how to do research, you should go to the best possible grad school. OP's question very clearly states that spending 6 years getting $30K a year to get a degree validating the skills he already has is not a good cost-benefit tradeoff for him. I agree that online "doctorates" are a joke, but I also think that requiring a PhD for a promotion is stupid. I don't get to make the rules. The fact is, if OP just needs a piece of paper saying PhD, an online diploma might be an option depending on his circumstances.

@cag51 Validating skills he already has? Where do you get that from? OP says he finds that his current work lacks in challenge. The challenge he seeks would be in acquiring new research related skills to learn (to construct) more theoretically advanced tools - and that doing so would make better use of his abilities. That he believes he has the ability to acquire said skills, not that he already has them.

How simply can you live for a few years? Doctoral students normally live a very simple life outside of their academic work. You know what your mortgage is, of course, and it could be a burden. You may also be facing school fees for your child pretty soon if not now. Can you make your car last for a few more years? Can you give up entertainment, hobbies, etc?
As the comments indicate in many fields the institution will grant you your tuition fees and probably pay you a small salary, not much above a poverty wage if that. It would be a small fraction of what you currently earn.
Have you got retirement savings? Are you willing to spend them now and maybe not make them up later?
People do this, of course. But you have to be very sure that your life goals require it. The academic life has many advantages, but money is seldom one of them. But "challenge" is one of the big positives.
But the short answer to the question is, no, it likely can't be done without a big financial hit.

Thanks for your answer - it more or less confirms my suspicions, that there would most likely be a big financial impact. I think for now, I will have to do some more research into whether I could possibly make it work financially, and try to look at other ways to find higher levels of intellectual challenge without having a PhD.

@Time4Tea, You might explore (a) funding from your employer combined with (b) part time commitment. It requires a 3 way buy in but others have done it. It depends on how valuable you are to your employer and how flexible one of the many  local universities can be. The "funding" could just be paid time off for studies.

Others have mentioned a part-time PhD or ‘industrial’ PhD.  A possible scenario there is:

You identify a topic which is academically interesting and of at least some interest to your current employer (but which they're not doing because it's not vital to them, or too expensive, or ...)
You drop to 50% at your current employer (and add a modest PhD stipend).
You line up a supervisor at a local institute, who'll supervise the project.

Advantages to the supervisor/institution:

You have a clear (ish) project and are starting with lots of professional background.
You have experience of working independently (so you'll need less handholding).
You have a commercial network and current commercial knowledge/nous, which the supervisor/institution may be interested in plugging in to (ie, an entirely selfish motivation).

Advantages to your current employer:

They still have you around, possibly significantly more motivated.
The research outcomes may be useful to them without them having to pay for it.
They get to brag about their staff working intimately with Institution X, blah, blah.
(Note: you're not asking your employer to significantly fund the PhD here – these are merely payoffs that might sweeten things for them).

Such arrangements are often seen as useful to the larger economy, so there may be support which either you or (more probably, I think) the prospective institution can apply for, to grease the wheels.  If you said to a supervisor ‘you can apply for this money, and I can write the bid for you’, then you're talking their language.
In the UK, for example, a company can apply for a CASE studentship, in which the company defines a project jointly with an institution, and EPSRC provides support for the student, thus minimising the cost for the company and the institution.  Now, these particular things are principally aimed at full-time recent graduates, you're interested in setting this up ‘backwards’, and of course that refers to the UK rather than the US; but this shows that such a setup does exist, and I'd be surprised if there wasn't something similar in the US (once you know to look for it), which might be bent to your specific case here.
There are a couple of circles to square there, but this might be a start.

If you're going ahead into this venture with a view to tick a box, that's probably too thin a motivation and won't survive the test of both time and cost of opportunity. The latter will hit you hard when you find yourself stuck in a rut.
My advice to you, should you wish to embark on this risky journey, is to be absolutely clear about your goals and carefully ponder whether you want your thesis to be in engineering or in science. Fluid dynamics is broad spectrum with its ends reaching wide into both fields. I mention this because there's a chance you'd find yourself with the wrong audience if you came up with something absolutely brilliant from an engineering viewpoint but that would only carry marginal weight to more basic scientists. And vice-versa.
Of course I don't know you at all but the description of your current situation seems to suggest that you are currently in a comfortable albeit no longer challenging position. Perhaps this is actually an opportunity for you to flip this around and start exploring potential research projects while retaining your day job.
If the financials of it is your main concern, this may or may not be an option for you but consider doing a PhD in Switzerland or Norway. They have indecently competitive salaries and their research ecosystem is excellent plus you can easily get by speaking English alone. In Switzerland semester fees are so (ridiculously) low that student debts are virtually unheard of. I suspect the same can be said of Scandinavian countries.
Norway has many fluid-related research projects linked to their oil and gas platforms activities.
With respect to your seniority, the only flag I'd raise is not to underestimate finding yourself surrounded with younger fellows. If you've gotten accustomed (and perhaps rightly so) to certain life standards and have achieved the status and maturity levels that I suspect, do ask yourself if being back to school with ``kids'' is not going to take an unsuspected toll on your morale. That might sound arrogant and haughty but you'll know what I mean if you get there.
I think most views expressed here will be helpful. At the end of the day, everyone's different and a happy research experience rests on so many factors that no single opinion can possibly accurately summarize.
All the best, I wish you well.

Thanks! I think you make a good point, that my current situation is a good time to do some background reading and explore potential research projects, to see if I can find an area that really interests me. Switzerland and Norway sound like fantastic places to do a PhD; however, I don't think moving internationally is going to be an option for me.

I started my PhD at Cornell when I was 39. I had a master in Coastal Engineering plus a BS in physics and the equivalent to a master in solid state electronics + computer Science (all from a public Spanish university). Before that, I was also developing CFD codes.
I got a scholarship so I didn't have to pay for tuition and got a small salary. I knew people in a similar situation that was able to support their families, but, as others have pointed out, you'll probably have to go back to a simpler, student's life.
As far as I know, tuition is rarely paid for PhD programs. People usually have some kind of scholarship.

I am currently doing a masters in CS (not in US) currently at the age of 35 I started it and want to do a phd. I don't live in US but 5 years back I had applied in universities but I was rejected. Upto 2 years back I was rejected in admission process at many places I tried many other places for admissions in phd but some or the other thing did not worked.So I decided to first to a masters and then move to phd. I am lucky I don't have a family as you have. Financially I am hit in masters program itself. So if family liability are there on you money wise things won't be easy to manage but you may need to talk to your professor or guide or department people may help by involving you in some projects which can be paid projects. Though usually working in such projects side by side along with your degree is tough.

Basics:

You find your current position unchallenging
You think R&D is where all the fortune and glory is and the path to R&D is a PhD, but...
You don't think you want to take the financial hit because of payments
for a house you can't afford and having to support your child

To me, it sounds like you want someone else to handle all of your risk - you've even gone so far as to ask other people to do the thinking for you.
Try this: START YOUR OWN BUSINESS.
You've got untapped abilities?  Prove it.  That takes research.  Think you've found an underserved market?  Develop a solution for it, end-to-end.
You're going to take a financial hit either way.  But, at least this way, your happiness is yours.  Your mistakes are yours.  If you find yourself bored, you won't have your employer to blame.  You'll also relieve yourself of that terrible fat check you currently get.  So, be an engineer: downsize, simplify your life.
If you fail, great!  You've learned something: maybe you're not what you thought you were.  And - added bonus - when you DO decide to go back to work for someone, you'll have a deeper appreciation of what it takes to get you that fat check you find so unattractive today.
If you succeed, you'll have accomplished more than most PhDs.  Oh... and you won't have the PhD debt load, after.  So, there's that.

I have considered starting a business, but I've come to the conclusion that 'business' and money are not what motivates me. I don't think I'm asking anyone to 'handle my risk', I'm trying to get a feel for what the risks are, before I make a leap. To me, that seems like a sensible approach ...

How in the heckin' heck will he be able to spend time on doing research if he has to work 12 hours a day on starting a company?


text:
Telling where I am originally from at the first lecture?
I am going to start teaching next year in a university in the UK. One common question I get with students in one-to-one conversations is about my origin. I certainly have an accent, and they are naturally curious about it. I was wondering if it is fine that, when I introduce myself during the first lecture, I tell them where I am originally from?  This is not an issue for me.
I understand that some lecturers get offended with the question "where are you originally from?", but I think sometimes students are genuinely interested on knowing this inconsequential information. I was, when I was a student, so I understand.

@Monika I was wondering if it is fine that when I introduce myself during the first lecture, I tell them where I am originally from. Sorry, I didn't use a question mark.

Is the difficulty / social awkwardness of this sort of disclosure a UK thing?  In the US, these disclosures / conversations are almost the norm.  I think I knew the origin of all my professors.  Certainly I did with all of my Grad school instructors.  But then again, all three of the universities I went to had sizable populations of foreign students and foreign-born professors.

Why not simply put a short bio on your university web page?  That way interested students can easily find the info. but you don't have to spend class time on it.

One of my US professors mentioned he was from Turkey on the first day and then asked us as a final exam bonus question.

Do it ! :-) || Where are you originally from? :-). | I ask that question of many people. The question is often criticised in social media as rude for various reasons BUT I am genuinely interested and have seldom had people react adversely. I have visited 35 countries )some only VERY briefly) including 15 visits to China (1 of 35 countries). I like finding out where people come from, partially to see if I know their homeland personally, partially because people generally enjoy finding someone knows something about their homeland, partially because .... hey, life is interesting :-) - Russell

@Van No, the difficulty here is not a normal UK thing. I can't quite understand what's led to this question being posted.

I've seen this question in trending section on the right, and now I'm curious of your ethnic origin too.

These questions are just to initiate or maintain a conversation. In general, people don't care.

You can certainly do so. Something like "I was born here. I did my undergraduate degree here, my masters degree here, and my PhD here. After my PhD ..." etc. It doesn't have to be very long and could also be part of your lecture slides.
One of my lecturers from my bachelor's degree did this, and I still remember she and my brother shared an alma mater.

It also adds "weight" when you embellish theory with real examples : "when I was at XXX this happened and we solved it with YYY"...

I like it when professors do this, not just to answer the where are you from question but also to give an idea of what they do outside of lecturing... for example, if you sponsor or work with any student club, or if you have some interesting research going on.

I agree there's no harm in humanizing yourself a bit by sharing this small bit of personal information. Professors are people too, and people sometimes forget that.

When I first visited the university that I ultimately would attend for undergraduate studies, I sat in with a group for a type of orientation led by a gentleman who was 'not from here'. He began with some brief information about the university, what we were going to do, and then said to the crowd in his relatively thick accent, "I know what you are thinking . . . I am not from Michigan." Everyone laughed. The timing was perfect because it was obvious English was not his native tongue and we'd all quite gotten accustomed to his accent by this time.

@NuclearWang Professors sometimes forget that, too!

I think it is a good thing to do, actually. In fact, anything you can do or say to make connections with them is good. In this case it places you in a context. You can also ask, assuming that the scale is reasonable, if anyone else comes from an "interesting" place. Don't press it if no one volunteers, but many people are proud of their origins. Others may not want to seem different from their peers.
The basic idea is to make yourself seem more human to them rather than just someone who will need to judge them eventually. Students sometimes fear their professors, especially in early courses when they have little experience. When they see you as a person they will probably be more willing to accept what you say when you, inevitably, correct them.

Good point. However, I would skip asking them about it, as people get easily offended about their origins nowadays.

@Name, not to ask individuals, but to ask if anyone wants to volunteer the information. BTW, where are you that people get offended?

In the UK, the question "where are you originally from?" tends to be tricky. They often think it is because they look different. I like your other points, it is just that asking this question to the students may only lead to a cringe silence.

I usually ask who else is from abroad. My courses are on EU politics, so it's a natural ice-breaker.

Yes, I teach in the US but have an Australian accent. So I usually introduce myself to a new class, and see if there are any others from outside the US (originally or their parents).  Many students mistake my accent for British, so I like to set them straight. :-)

@PeterK. - in 1989 I stayed in a hotel in Jamaica that had ~90% US guests; everyone from the north-east of the US assumed from my accent (I'm from Essex in the UK) I was from Chicago; people from Chicago thought I was from Kansas; people from Kansas thought I was Texan; Texans thought I was Californian; Californians thought I was Australian. Hearing that Americans think you're British kind-of closes that circle for me :-)

@Spratty Great story! :-)

@Name "...tends to be tricky in the UK" - Don't be coy. Asked by a complete stranger, "where are you originally from?" often means "are you an illegal immigrant?"

@alephzero, and it also tags the asker as a jerk when asked that way.

@PeterK. I attended a conference talk that opened with "I should point out that I'm Swedish. I like to say this at the start of every talk that I give because otherwise I find that the audience spends about half of their time trying to figure out where my accent is from and I'd prefer you listen to what I have to say instead." I found it was a great way to break the ice.

@WesToleman Of course, as a Swede, having the skills to break ice is important.

@PeterK. Funny, I'm almost always confused for an Aussie when in the States. Why is it that they get us switched around all the time?!

IMO, teachers should not ask students they've just met where they've from (unless it's a more personal-interaction workshop or such.)

@einpoklum, asking a class whether anyone wants to volunteer isn't the same thing, of course.

@Buffy: True, but I'm still uncomfortable with that.

@Buffy In the ideal world with no ethnic or national prejudice, absolutely, but I fear if a student is already uncertain how their ethnicity or nationality would be perceived, having other students who already know their background is considered "cool" among their peers to "volunteer" will not help break the ice but will only increase their uneasiness.

I usually introduce myself in my first lecture by giving a short overview about my background. Since I'm not very different from most students, there is nothing surprising in this, but if I would have a different background, I would mention it since it helps building a relationship to your students. If you are having an accent, they will recognize that you are not a native speaker anyway ;-).

I teach in what is not my first language. I speak more or less correctly, but my accent is strong to the ear of a native speaker. On the first day of class I generally make some jokes about my accent, so that students know I am not oblivious to potential problems understanding me, and I ask them to stop me whenever they don't understand something because of my accent or grammatical errors (this occurs occasionally), but I don't usually explain where I am from unless (better said, until) asked. The class is not about me, it's about whatever I am teaching, and I prefer to spend lecture time talking about mathematics than about myself, since in any case there is no reason to enter into personal details. Moreover, many students can guess from where I come, and inevitably by the middle of the semester someone asks anyway.
In general, opinions differ about how much to personalize interactions with students, and different degrees of personalization can work well for different teachers. I try to maintain a certain distance and focus on subject matter, and my uninteresting life story is not relevant to the subject matter, but it would be entirely reasonable to spend two minutes the first day explaining from where one comes. This seems to me mainly a matter of personal taste and teaching style.

I took linear algebra from a professor who was from Australia. The first couple weeks of the course were all about manipulating matrices with the variables X, Y, and Z, terms which were mentioned constantly. Two weeks in, he asks if anybody has any questions, and a student raises their hand: "what's zed?" (Z is pronounced "zee" in US English). There's absolutely no problem with having an accent, but even if you don't have a strong accent, it's good to make it clear up front that you want to make sure everyone is understanding each other and welcome the opportunity to clarify.

@ZachLipton: The instructor has to become aware of where his/her speech may cause problems for students, and take steps to ameliorate the problem. For example, in my case, when I teach in Spanish, because I do not pronounce the Spanish 'r' well, I have to take care to distinguish words such as "ortogonal" and "ortonormal" that appear in similar contexts with closely related, but different meanings (the way I pronounce the second 'r' in "ortonormal" is hard for a native to hear, making it hard to distinguish from "ortogonal").

To be honest, your birthplace, ethnicity, and nationality are irrelevant, and it is not appropriate for people to ask questions of that sort in a professional context. You may not mind the question, but others may. By introducing the information as a preliminary, you are setting a precedent that will pressurise your colleagues who may prefer not to discuss the matter.
Personally, I do not generally tell people about my birthplace, ethnicity, and nationality in the course of teaching, unless it had some connection to the subject-matter at hand (e.g.: if I were citing my own experience/background to illustrate an argument I am presenting in the lecture -- I am in a humanities subject, so that does occur in some instances).
However, when I used to work in Scotland, I was open in declaring that I am not local (but without specifying much more), since my accent (British-English Received Pronunciation) makes it fairly obvious (although, as an ostensibly "neutral" accent, it does not tell you much more). When I mispronounced the Scottish name of one of the students, I apologised and added

"as you can tell, I am not Scottish -- in fact, I live south of the border"

(in the UK, it is quite common for academics to not live in the same city as their university).

My Physics 1 teaching assistant had an uncommon accent, but instead of telling us, when someone brought it up she said we can try and guess, and she would tell us if we got it right. We didn't... but it contributed to a more jovial, humorous atmosphere. This will not work for just anyone though, only if you're generally an outgoing person, smile occasionally etc; also, it works in the group setting rather than in 1-on-1 conversations.
Maybe you can also think of "gamefying" this aspect of your interaction with students.

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text:
Reviewer of PhD thesis doesn't allow me to write in the first person singular
In my PhD thesis, I often used the first person singular during the description of the problem and the discussion of the results. One comment from the reviewer states that because I did not use the third person, the entire thesis must be revised accordingly.
I understand that in a journal article one should use the third person to describe the problem and discuss the findings. However, I always supposed that one can use the first person in a PhD thesis because I saw many researchers doing so. Could anybody give me a suggestion about how to deal with the reviewer who doesn't accept my choice to write in the first person?

I'm voting to reopen the question because it has a different focus than the earlier question: The earlier question was about the standards for writing in the first person. This new question is about how to deal with a reviewer who doesn't accept the choice to write in the first person.

@lighthousekeeper I am convinced by your comment that this question is about how to deal with the situation that the committee member disagrees with the OP's choice. I apologize and thanks for pointing it out.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

Can you please [edit] your question to clarify whether the reviewer really insisted on you using the third person (he, she, it, they) or just the first person plural (we)?

As one of our esteemed moderators posted a clarifying question here and not in the chat chain, I'll dare to do the same....  Can you give us a bit more context such as field, age of reviewer, whether reviewer has some recent publications, country you're in?

This post is (now) non-controversial.

With due respect - everyone's answers here are mostly irrelevant.  The suggestions, ideas and perceptions we here on Academia.SX have on this issue are not the authoritative answer you need to get you past the review.
You need to talk to:

Your advisor
The administrator in charge of the "thesis phase" of PhDs in your department or your graduate school

They have some or lots of experience, respectively, with this situation, and will tell you what you should/must do when faced with such a demand from a reviewer. They may also contact the reviewer on your behalf if they believe s/he is wrong, or to explain the regulations to him/her etc.
Note that it might even be the case that you're expected to use the first person, and other reviewers will get annoyed if you switch. So you can't just cater to one person - you need to check what the default is.

I like this.  We can discuss the problem here till the cows come home, but the advisor and administrators on the ground are the people who can give relevant, meaningful advice to OP.

Your institution will have a set of style guidelines. Follow them and speak to your administrator if you get any pushback

@Stevetech: I was assuming that if OP was able to submit and have his thesis sent to reviewers, it meets the institutional guidelines already.

I was agreeing with you. Most institutions will also have language guides

At least my experiance was that there were a bunch of beuracractic rules about tables of contents, margins front material, font sizes etc but said bureaucratic rules were silent on how the body of the document should actually be written. That seemed to be down to conventions and unwritten rules.

@PeterGreen: In that case, your advisor will say "officially you can write your thesis either way, just humor the guy" or "I want it to be 1st-person, let me talk to him".

This answer could apply to any question.  Should we just shut down academia?

@AaronLS: No, it couldn't. But there are certainly some questions here on the site with the answer being essentially "Just read the manual".

@einpoklum That's not what I mean.  I mean this question basically says "Go ask someone else", and any question could be approached that way.  Someone might ask a question about financial aid, and we could be very capable of answering the question based on knowledge of the particular process, but someone could also provide a non-answer that basically is "Go ask your the financial aid advisory" which is essentially directing people away from the site when they've asked a legitimate question that is answerable.  It's even less useful than a link only answer.

@AaronLS: The answer isn't "go ask someone else", it's "the only answer is what someone else will tell you", and those are not the same thing.

@einpoklum This entire page proves that it's not the only answer.  Literally the counter-example is right in front of you.

@AaronLS: I wrote this answer to disagree with (most of) the other ones. And I managed to convince the OP, so that has to account for something...

@einpoklum It does count for something, but doesn't invalidate my point.

There is an annoying truth here: What's OK in a PhD thesis and what not largely depends on the reviewers. Some people in academia have a huge inflated ego and prefer things to be done as they suggest, and the reviewer in your case is possibly among those people. You don't want to fight with them on this kind of issue.
If the reviewer has other comments that tend to create additional work without clearly improving the thesis, you may consider exchanging the reviewer.

Agreeing with DSVA; different fields have different widely accepted conventions. For example in astronomy use of “I” is quite prevelant, but in say, a particle physics paper is not, showing even within the same field, different subfields may have varying conventions. That being said, the department’s PhD style guide (if it exists) always takes precedent.

@DSVA and JNS: Mostly agreed. I'm referring to the OP's description, according to which he already saw his preferred form in a couple of PhD theses (presumably in the same area).

There is no steadfast rule that applies across disciplines, countries, fashions, and personalities.
Do what makes your reviewers happy. Their demand is annoying, but not utterly unreasonable. More importantly, they decide over your defense and thereby your future.
This is not something worth fighting over, and certainly no reason to change supervisors.

I agree that it's not worth fighting the reviewer; nevertheless, I think the reviewer is being utterly unreasonable.

A famous example of the “make reviewers/editor happy” rule is the story of this cat http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/cat-co-authored-influential-physics-paper who got co-author credit for a paper.  I actually think that, in a thesis, attribution is important and “I” should be used to clarify what the candidate has done.

We think that they can either suck it up, or keep using they as it clarifies very much the thesis.
And by they I mean you, by we I mean they, or something like that.
I wrote my PhD thesis by putting "I" everywhere when the norm was a vaporous "we, the people". I wrote it, together with MY brain and, most importantly, MY ego. The dog did not type it either, though we could be all-encompassing.
I find it ridiculous to use a metaphorical "we" or "they", or "the neighbour" when talking about one's own work. We should share their salary, while we are at it.
Now your question is whether you can do something or not, which is completely up to the jury or referrer. Sure you can. And sure they can make your life miserable.

We is first person, not third.

We love the humor in this post. +1

So you didn’t want the reader to follow along?

@JeffE: I am not sure what you mean. That by using "we do this and that", the reader is somehow embarked in the journey? No. This is not a John le Carre book but a document which shows what I did to get the title (and, hopefully, moved our civilization's knowledge a tiny bit ahead). Me and possibly others, in that case we (Mary Brown and myself) did something together. She did something else on her own ([MaryBrown2003]) which is not "we" anymore. I find it hard to understand why this is a problem only in  Academia. Normally people will say "I" when they mean "I" and "we" when they mean "we"

@WoJ Mathematicians and their ilk justify the standard use of "we" for solo work by claiming it means "the author and the reader".  For example: "As a key step toward our main theorem, we prove Lemma 4 using a variant of our proof technique for Lemma 2."  Math papers don't describe what someone did before the paper was written, but an argument to be followed by the reader after the paper is written, with the author's help.

@JeffE I agree that this is appropriate for a mathematical proof or similarly structured argument, but in many other contexts (e.g. reporting practical procedures) it doesn't work. For instance: "I wet-sieved the disaggregated material using a 62 μm mesh and dried the coarse fraction at room temperature". Substituting "we" here would simply be incorrect: none of my colleagues participated in the sieving, and I think we can be fairly sure that the reader of the thesis wasn't involved either :).

@DSVA Switching to the passive decreases readability (in my opinion), increases length, and worst of all removes information. It actually makes a practical difference whether a sample was prepared by me, by a department technician with 25 years' experience, by a novice undergrad assistant, by a professional external lab, or by a trained chimpanzee. Distinguishing between work that I did and work that someone else did is particularly important in a PhD dissertation, because it's primarily my work that's of relevance for assessment.

@DSVA Of course if your field or target journal strictly mandates the passive you have no choice, but for many fields this isn't the case. For instance, Nature's style guide says ‘Nature journals prefer authors to write in the active voice’, the American Chemical Society Style Guide (3rd ed.) says ‘Use first person when it helps to keep your meaning clear and to express a purpose or a decision. [e.g.] Jones reported xyz, but I (or we) found…’, and as JeffE mentions above, the active ‘we’ is standard in mathematics. For the rest, I think we'll have to agree to disagree.

Actyually... I've always though that the academic "we" meant "I the author and you the reader".

@JeffE I always thought of it as the royal plural. In any case I've never seen first person singular in a math paper so it would just be weird.

Despite this academic's personal embrace of first person writing, many respected colleagues despise even a hint of first person narrative. In their honor, here are a few ways writing improves without the first person.

Phrases like "I think that" and "I believe that" often sneak into writing and water it down. Excising the first person can make the arguments bolder, as well as more readable.
Even in presenting results or discussion or a conclusion, "I find that..." might already be implicit. For instance, replacing, "I find that the sky appears blue," with "The sky appears blue," yields a stronger topic sentence for the paragraph. Again, sentences can gain authority while becoming briefer.
More broadly, the best writing tells a story. However, the narrative that is often closest to an author's mind is their own journey through the topic. Only exceptional circumstances make that autobiography a compelling narrative to frame a research paper. Instead, "storytelling" should almost always give the reader insight into the research, perhaps by highlighting an incident captured in and illuminated by the data, or a metaphor to characterize molecules' motion, or as the puzzle of why X commonly happens after Y.

As other answers here emphasize, if that committee member cares enough about this point and must approve the final draft, then editing it is the wisest course of action. If there are hints (from that person or others) why they care, that may allow for compromises that meet those objectives without a full edit, or it may at least make the time spent editing out "I"s feel less bitter. And upon reviewing sentences in the thesis that use the first person, if patterns emerge, editing only the frequent, most problematic contexts (such as "I think...") may appease that reader.
(This answer uses neither the first nor second person, without relying on the passive voice. It is possible by (occasionally) relying on the impersonal pronoun, using gerunds to discuss action without having to identify an actor, and making inanimate things into grammatical subjects. It makes for an annoying writing experience, and hopefully such edits will not be mandatory after all for the thesis in question.)

As a side point, It is very convenient to use the term "we" in a draft of a paper, in the off-chance that an additional author joins for one reason or another (someone you consult makes a significant contribution, two articles with similar content are independently published on a pre-print server, and a joint paper is in order).
Also, some boiler-plate introduction of terms/notions can be almost copy-pasted between projects, some with one author, some with several. Changing all 'I' to 'we' must be annoying.

Writing style is not a big deal. If you have a strong and reasonable opinion about style, you have a good chance to defend it, because people won't care too much.
Depends on the country, but I think in general, not all reviewers get to approve the final version of your thesis. Some suggestions of those who do not, especially suggestions about style, can be silently ignored.
If "third person", as in "he" or "she", is actually what you meant to say then it does not seem common in the West, which makes it more likely that you can just ignore this suggestion.

A lot has been covered by other answers, but I just wanted to add something that came up while I was working on my thesis.
The faculty at my university always suggested that in the "Contributions" section (of the Introduction), you list your contributions in first person. For example, "I was responsible for implementing X on Y and testing Z", "I authored a paper in IEEE Transactions on ABC" and so on.
For the rest of the thesis it was passive, but that one section was handled differently. Of course, discuss this with your supervisor and reviewers first.

One quick solution could be to find another example of a thesis that has already been approved by your institution which also uses first person singular. If there is a precedent it might justify your use.
I remember that one of my reviewer comments about "aesthetic" language issues like this which I ignored: the reviewer suggested that I had not used a real word, I provided a link to a dictionary definition of the word, stated that it was a matter of preference, and that I would keep my original choice of word. (I do not claim that all comments can be rejected in this way, but my point is that it is possible.)

thanks, I have already found several precedents approved by my department.

I am in favor of clear writing and against the academic attitude.  All that said, I would still go ahead and write it like a normal journal article.  Use the third person and the "we/our" for most of the results.  After all, you will probably add at least your advisor to the co-author list of papers coming out (or have already done so if you already wrote the journal articles).
Just scanned my thesis, which was mostly stitched together chemistry papers.  Not like a European one where all it is, is the papers themselves.  But pretty clearly taking different papers and with some minor edits changing them into chapters (e.g. combining redundant methods).  I was pretty much either talking about the chemicals or using the passive voice or saying "our" for discussion of interpretation and such.  But these were sections where I had co-authors, professor at least.
I did have one minor area (other than acknowledgements) where I used first person and got no static for it.  Within the Intro, after giving a review of previous work, I discussed the research objectives (in a one para section called that) and used "my" in context of "my goals changed during the student.  Initial my goal was X; subsequently it was Y.  Didn't get any static for this--it was a helpful para to explain why the chapters to follow in the thesis were connected.
There are a lot of other areas where you can cut the crap and be honest (for example, I shared some important lab safety learnings and equipment construction that was helpful to subsequent students but really fit in a thesis more than a results journal article.  I did that on purpose because the main audience was/is future group members.
But I wouldn't make a big deal of the impersonal style.  Some of it is good (keeping attention on the chemical, not the researcher).  Some of it is bad (pompousness, or not taking responsibility).  But overall, it's not worth worrying about.
Get the union card done.  Thesis is pass-fail and very little read.  Don't mess with it too much, just wrap something up, get a job and boogie.  Defense committees can be very accommodating as long as you have published well (already showing ability to make solid contributions) and have gotten someone to hire you!

In my opinion, avoiding first person and sticking to passive voice is beneficial for two reasons, one philosophical and one practical.
Starting with the practical - parts of the thesis are likely to be used as a base for subsequent journal articles. As the OP says, journal articles have a fairly set format. By sticking to the same format in the thesis, a lot of redundant writing effort could be saved. It would also be a sort of dry run- one can identify problematic/ambiguous phrases/paragraphs, which are to be avoided in later manuscripts.
On the philosophical front, any piece of scientific writing should, IMO, primarily convey scientific results and secondarily the methodology used by the researcher. Certainly, researchers deserve credit for novel methods followed, but this shouldn't overshadow the results/inferences. I believe passive voice acts as a safeguard against this.

Could I know why this answer was down-voted? I'm new to the site and would like to avoid mistakes/oversights made in the future. Thanks.

Your practical point is a really good one. (Arguably, that reviewer should've spoken up about it before the thesis was mostly written.) You're answering the question: "Could anybody give me some suggestion?" by supporting a change to third person: therefore no need to tangle with the reviewer. You may have gotten down-voted because people think the novel part of this question is how to deal with that committee member, rather than the writing itself (covered in previous questions). ::shrug::

Active voice is best. Using the passive voice is not good.

@MartinF because....

@FábioDias -- The active voice is usually more concise and easier to understand. See https://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/CCS_activevoice.html, https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/539/02/ or https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/active-voice-versus-passive-voice

@user153812 because you have everything backwards.

Am I missing something, or are you just trolling?

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text:
What should I do when my PhD adviser sends me a paper to read?
I'm currently in a PhD program in Electrical Engineering. Sometimes, my adviser will send me papers with a small note such as "I thought this may be relevant to your work. Please have a look and see if it is helpful." Because I'm relatively new to the field that I'm working in, reading a paper, even if not as rigorously, takes me some time. The main reason is that I am often not familiar with the technical terms in the paper, so I need to look them up while skimming.
While I appreciate my adviser's consideration for sending me paper X, it will often be the case that I am working on implementing something from paper Y when they send me paper X to read. Paper Y could have been a previous paper that my adviser recommended, or it could be one that I found.
Because these papers are technical in nature, so that only reading the abstract would not give me a good enough idea of whether they are helpful or not, I feel that my progress towards paper Y would be slowed down considerably if I split my time between reading paper X and working on paper Y, as the repeated context switching would waste some time. This is especially true if my adviser sends me more than one paper to look through.
I've added below some ways I thought of proceeding, and I'd appreciate any feedback on them, or any another way that I haven't mentioned.

Thank my adviser for sending over the papers, and let them know that I will get to them as soon as I'm done with the current paper that I'm reading/working on. I'm not sure if this approach would be considered rude or not.
Drop the current paper that I'm reading/working on and focus on the paper(s) that my adviser sent over. While this may please my adviser, I feel that my own progress would slow down, especially since I would be constantly reading over papers that my adviser sends over and not actually getting any work done.
Split my time between the papers that I'm working on and the papers that my adviser sends me. As I mentioned, because of the repeated context switching, I feel that this approach would slow me down.

The answer is field dependent. Can you tell us what it is?

@ThomasSchwarz I've added it at the beginning.

How many papers is your advisor sending each week?  Since "have a look" usually means take 20 minutes looking it over, this can be a problem it if is 10 papers per week.

Seems like you need more practice in reading papers, including learning to approach them with varying degrees of rigor as needed.

Maybe talk to your advisor about it? You may find out they are reasonable and don't expect you to read their quick email right away...

@TerryLoring I'd say one or two a week. The main problem with looking it over in 20 minutes is that I usually don't understand all the terms in the paper, so I would have to look them up to understand what's going on. It's OK if the terms are not part of the main idea, but it is often the case that these terms are the main idea.

@JonCuster I've read through this before. I think my main problem is that I'm relatively new to the field that I'm working in, so it might be the lack of experience that's causing me to spend time trying to understand a paper, even if I read it less rigorously. I've added this description to my question.

Could well be. It gets better, usually pretty quickly, as you pick up the lingo.

@Anyon good point. I will consider doing this.

@mhdadk if you're new to the field, reading papers and understanding what's going on in general is often more important (and beneficial) that completing your current project. And in the long run, it will help you become a better researcher and save time!

I think the bigger problem here is that you don't feel comfortable enough with your advisor to ask them. Helping you learn how to do research is exactly their job description, and they won't be able to do a good job if you are afraid of talking to them.

I read over one thousand papers and books for my PhD (not necessarily word for word), and included nearly 700 of them in my thesis. While I am probably on the extreme end of the spectrum, you are supposed to become an expert in the narrow field and a decent enough specialist in the broad field when holding a doctoral degree. Reading papers is what gets you there, along with own research. You are also very lucky that you get a selection of papers relevant to your research, which saves you a lot of reading. Good luck!

It probably would be good to try to reference it in any relevant paper that you are writing.  Similarly, if it is relevant, you can add it to your list of references for your master's thesis or Ph.D. dissertation!

@JosephDoggie just of course; after one has read it; and made sure it is indeed relevant; :) I like the idea though because then (if not permission is needed which I likely doubt but I have no real idea) you prove you have read it as well.

My advisor used to say "you should learn to read a paper without reading it". :)

As you mentioned in the comment section, since your supervisor gives you only 1-2 papers per week to read, I think it is totally possible for you to handle more than this. It seems that you spend too much time for a paper, but it is understandable as you are new to the field. It will take you some time to be familiar with the field. Eventually your understanding will be better, but you will still have to improve/practice reading skills. Knowing what to read and how to read effectively is important. Your time is limited.
Also, if your supervisor sends you something to read, it is usually something useful. It does not mean that you have to read it now.
I have my own strategy for reading papers. It does not work for everyone, but it is similar to (3). Assume that I have many papers to read. I choose one of them and spend some time on reading the first 2-3 important sections of that paper. Then I move to another one and repeat the same process. I keep doing it again and again until everything is finished. It also helps me cope with getting bored with reading a very long paper.
Last but not least, it is helpful to take notes as you read.

Emphasis on the last sentence. Not only is it "helpful" in general to take notes as one reads, but the OP is a PhD student, which probably means they'll have to compile a large bibliography as part of their thesis.

Depending on one's field, reading a research paper thoroughly can be a time-consuming process.  If one were to be able to understand a paper and make a software simulation of it, that would be worth a Plan "B" project, in my book.

One or two papers a week is nothing, especially if you are just looking over them and extracting the key points.

You may talk about this with your advisor, but I strongly suspect that an advisor sending you a paper does by no way mean that you should read it immediately. Most probably the advisor was doing some research on their own, found that paper, thought that it may be useful for you, and immediately sent it to you so that neither them nor you will forget about it. But it should not be considered an immediate call-to-action.
So what you can do is schedule some time for reading papers, say each Monday morning, and you postpone any new paper till next Monday (unless there are strong reasons to read the paper earlier, of course). (Obviously the period may be different, depending on your situation and suggestions from your advisor.) If before that your advisor asks whether you have read the paper, you simply reply that you were working on <whatever it was>, and you plan to read the papers on Monday. (And obviously do it, and this includes having some system so that you do not forget which papers you advisor has sent to you. This may be a simple "mark-it-unread-in-email-inbox", or a todo list, or just  "print-it-out-and-put-into-a-physical-to-read-folder", etc.)
This way you will not have that much context switching, and at the same time you will thoroughly read the papers.
Probably you don't even need to reply to your advisor email, or just reply with a simple "received, thank you" (this depends on your advisor and general culture, of course).

(+1) I like this answer, thank you.

Basically, if they send you a paper, saying it is relevant, then you should read it. If they don't send a paper copy then print it out and put the date received on it so that you can sort them as needed. (See below for "why" paper.)
But you are busy, so you need a way to proceed to make this reading "easy" to accomplish.
Here is a pro tip for any scholar. Always have something immediately available to read no matter where you are. This was early advice to all of our doctoral students.
Whenever you are "out and about" have one or two of the papers with you. Also carry a pen so that you can annotate them, and perhaps a highlighter. Optionally, carry a few index cards as well so that you can take notes external to the papers and arrange them as needed later.
Now, whenever you have a few moments of dead time, perhaps waiting for your lunch to be delivered or you are waiting for a bus (or riding one), pull out one of the papers (or a few of the index cards) that you are carrying and read or review what is before you. This turns "wasted" time into productive time.
Yes, you should thank them. No, you shouldn't interrupt all other work to read the new paper unless the supervisor strongly recommends it.

At the start of my PHD I commuted by bus.  That was paper-reading time, which worked very well.  A small notebook (or your index cards) is very useful. If reading offline, which I recommend, you can note down mystery terms (so long as they don;t completely block your understanding), useful-looking referenced etc. for later follow-up.  Switching your attention away from the paper to a rabbit hole of definitions built on definitions makes things a lot harder.

When I was starting out in my PhD I used to have this same problem that you're having. I realised after a year or so that when my supervisor read a paper, what he meant by this was that he had read the abstract, and then opened it up and flicked through the equations. What reading a paper meant to me at this point was that I would go through every line in detail and try to understand everything I could, following references for things I didn't understand and deriving equations.
So I would advise you that, an important part of the process of doing a PhD is learning how to read texts at different depths. I guess at the start you would be likely to need to read things in a bit more depth than your supervisor to understand as much as they do, but it's unlikely that they expect you to read everything that they're suggesting a lot of detail.
If you're unsure, you could also try asking your supervisor, "how in-depth do you think I should read this paper?", or "how much time do you think it would be worth investing on this paper?"

Thanks for sharing. Your experience resonates a lot with mine.

Yep. I say I read a paper if I read the abstract, skim through the methods, and look at the main figures. Done.

My way of phrasing this is: get an idea what it's about and how, so at some later time you can think "hey wait -- I think saw a paper about that!"

(This is an attempt to summarize the advice given in the other answers and comments in a more hands-on form.)
Your supervisor is asking you to have a look at the paper, which is not the same thing as reading it. Your supervisor is probably expecting you to quickly browse through the paper to form a first impression of its relevance to your work.
What I'd do is what others are suggesting: spend 15-30 minutes with the paper, and with Google, to answer the following questions:

What does the paper try to do?
How can this be relevant to your work?
Do you think studying it more will be worth your time?
Why? / Why not?

The answers should all be one or two sentences. Write them down. If you can't decide on an answer, write down which questions you need an answer to first. File the results in your list of known papers. Discuss these results at the next meeting with your advisor; they may be interested in your findings and they should be able to advise you how to proceed.
The goal here is not to understand papers in depth, but to navigate the space of papers. Your advisor can help you with this, but only if you can establish a dialogue on what you're finding.

Welcome to being an academic.
One important distinction that many younger academics don't make is "being ready to hear/read" vs "being ready to understand". Not every paper that is sent to you should be read in full detail. Or even in partial detail.
There is one broader lesson here, the way mentors/advisers interact with you is as much the lesson as whatever technical content they tell you.
When I got to grad school my adviser would talk about math in ways that sounded unhinged and weird to me. But he is an excellent mathematician. It was the way I was talking about mathematics that was wrong not the way he talked about mathematics. He was (still is) better than me. When I defended my PhD we went out to dinner and I was talking in the same "unhinged" way. It's just a matter of information throughput.
One thing that I think is missing from your calculations here and from some other answers is sending papers to each other is how academics interact. Your adviser is sending you papers partly so you can read them and learn from them. They are also sending you papers because that is how you should interact with other academics you work with. I send papers to people literally everyday almost. I get papers sent to me almost literally everyday. This is just being an academic.
As for how much detail etc. do you read them? If you're asking this question, you're thinking about this very wrongly. You're an academic now. It's your decision. How relevant or interesting is the paper? Not every paper should be read the same way. Some I've poured over and others I've skimmed. It's your call because you're the researcher.

Lots of good advice* but I'd like to emphasize that the strategies urged upon you (keep up the physical work, but make regular time for reading papers in addition) will be valuable to you. How many of us find things when writing the thesis introduction and background at the end of the PhD project that we wish we had known before we did the experiments? One here!
*which I can't comment on due to insufficient reputation - else I would just add a short comment.

tl;dr: Talk to your advisor about this.

What should I do when my advisor tells me to [etc. etc.]?

The answer to this question template is most usually: Talk to your advisor  and coordinate their expectation from you. Not every time you get this message from them, but when it happens the first time, schedule a chat at their office or remotely; tell them you want to attend to the request/suggestion they made; explain that you are not sure exactly what they expect in terms of scope/breadth/etc., and you would like for "meta-guidance" on that.
It is ok not to know how to best handle such requests and to ask to be told what to do. You will not appear foolish, argumentative or ungrateful.
Specifically in your case,

Because I'm relatively new to the field that I'm working in, reading a paper, even if not as rigorously, takes me some time. The main reason is etc. etc.

Tell your advisor that. Ask them whether they think you should invest the time to read rigorously, or whether they mean skimming the paper, or reading abstract / abstract & intro.

current paper that I'm reading/working on

talk to your advisor about prioritizing or scheduling ongoing work (including reading) with their incoming suggestions.

(+1) thanks for the insight.

Authors include abstracts for a reason, my advice is to go through the abstracts, and then prioritize into 3 buckets (read the whole dang paper ensure I understand everything, skim the paper for important points, skip/read later). It sounds like not everything your advisor is sending is going to be 100% relevant (just, maybe relevant). If you do this you will get a sense of which papers are seminal real quick because everyone will be citing those papers. If one of those landed in your skip pile, you pivot to read the whole dang thing.
Now, I know you said that utilizing the abstracts is probably not good enough. I actually agree with that point. You are a student, you need to get your hands dirty with the technical aspects. However, you can still prioritize based on the abstracts. My 3 categories could be broken down like this:
Paper appears directly applicable to your research topic: read the whole paper
Paper appears to only be tangentially related to research topic: skim the paper
Paper appears not to be very relevant for your topic: read later

I would suggest doing your reading with a study journal. I like the hard bound, lined journals, with page numbers and a table of contents section. That way you can create a list of what you read in the table of contents and where you can find your notes on it later by page number in your journal. The hard bound physical journal works well for me because it is sturdy, doesn't require power, and I won't get distracted by browsing the internet. But you do you, it works for me. Some folks like bibliographic tools and they are really helpful when you actually go to write so take my suggestion with a grain of salt.
The other thing is that I wouldn't try to reproduce the papers. There is value in that as a grad student, but you should just try to understand the papers. Make notes about them, and do your own thing later.


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Host Institution - Marie-Curie individual fellowship
I am planning to apply for a Marie-Curie individual fellowship. Should I be already a Postdoctoral Fellow at a particular University, which will also be the host Institution? In other words, could I assign a host Institution and in case that I receive the fellowship, I can then start working on it?
thank you

For Marie Curie fellowships you shouldn't already be employed by the host institution. These fellowships are meant to encourage mobility so you must apply to go to some other place.

could I assign a host Institution and in case that I receive the fellowship, I can then start working on it?

Yes that's exactly the principle. However be careful: you don't just pick a host institution, the key factor in these fellowships is to have a strong research plan prepared in collaboration with the host institution.


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Professor reaction to sci-hub articles
Suppose hypothetically I download certain new research articles from sci-hub which I read and eventually liked. Now if I contact the authors for follow up question/discussion, then is it a good idea to tell them that I read their papers through scihub (if they ask me how did I get I came across his paper).

Related, if not duplicate: Is it illegal to cite books that were illegally downloaded or accessed from a library?

Even if the chance of them caring is small, why do you need to mention where you got those papers in the first place?

I cannot tell you what authors would care in general, but I can tell you that most authors I know would not care at all. No one gets a dime from a paper anyway.
I advise you however to not mention such a detail: it's actually irrelevant in that context, because you would be writing to discuss the content of the paper, not the ways to get access. When you write to someone, especially someone you don't know, avoid irrelevant details: people are busy.

Also admitting that you got the paper off Scihub can get you into legal trouble (since the main difficulty with prosecution is identifying the people who're pirating the papers).

If an author were actually curious about how you accessed their article, they would probably ask. I would suggest simply not mentioning it (since they probably don't care).
As an aside, one way to access articles behind a paywall is to contact the author directly. Many journals provide authors with links which give free access to the article.

Jup, that worked very well not only during the Elsevier blackout in a few European countries a while ago. Publishers basically love to get their articles stolen given away for free if the alternative is that they are not read (and later cited) at all.

Publishers' practices do sometimes seem designed to drive researchers to sci-hub.

Ignoring legality, Sci-hub has the best interface ever to get a paper. Via the publishers' sites, it's usually (1) search for title on Google (2) browse through results because it's not always the first one (3) land on a paper page with a different layout for each publisher (4) hunt for a tiny "pdf" button (5) the "pdf" button sends you to a "smart version" of the paper, ugly, slow to load and with 100% more tracking (6) hunt for another tiny "no, I really want the pdf" button (7) finally download it.

In my field, nearly every paper (or at least a preliminary version) is posted to arXiv. Publishers participate in this system since they have no option otherwise. Of course, this is preferable to sci-hub since authors themselves control whats accessible. I feel arXiv has the UX you desire (nice interface, easy pdf access), but without the issues of legality (and watermarks). I wish more disciplines systematically participated in such a preprint system.


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Citing abstract only papers/conference proceedings
I'm doing my MS in Astronomy and Astrophysics so almost all of the literature I need is readily available on NASA ADS website (ui.adsabs.harvard.edu) with links to downloadable PDFs and HTML articles. But sometimes I come across conference proceedings, or some old articles where only abstract is available for reading but it DOES contain what I'm looking for.
Since I can't read the whole thing, is it okay to cite that?
Apart from the original links to downloadable PDFs, if something I want to cite is in the abstract but I want to dig deeper and the paper is not available for download in any form, should I look for other papers that have same information and are available or can I use sci-hub. And how fair is it to use sci-hub?

It is a bit risky to cite papers having seen only the abstract. You might be able to contact the original authors in some cases for more complete versions.
But, the safe and approved way to get access to papers that aren't easily available online, or available only by conflicting with with ethical considerations, is to go to your local library and ask the librarian there to get you a copy. Academic/university libraries are best, of course, but most libraries have some sort of access, directly or indirectly to nearly everything.
Moreover, a research librarian at a good library is a tremendous resource for finding obscure things and even related things you don't know exist.

Just for my own clarification, let's say I needed a device's operating range and i did find the value of said range in which it is operating in the abstract only. Will it still be wrong, as I am only picking a certain value reference from there. Thank you for your feedback, I'll check in with my librarian too.

No, it isn't wrong, just risky. The case you cite is probably fine, unless it relies on information in the paper that you haven't examined. Not every paper comes to the correct conclusion. In general, you want to see the argument that confirms the conclusion.

Thank you, I'll be sure to keep it in mind.

should I look for other papers that have same information and are available

That too; but it doesn't replace reading the actual paper you're citing.
Something else you could do is contact the authors and ask for a copy of the paper.

or can I use sci-hub.

Yes, I suggest you use SciHub.

... how fair is it to use sci-hub?

It is morally and ethically justified; and its use is by now ubiquitous. This use is also probably legal in most countries, although in many countries it is in somewhat of a gray area (and perhaps, in some countries, strictly illegal); but promoting the use of Sci-Hub or similar initiatives is important to degrade the usurious restrictions on the sharing of scientific information which publishers have enforced for so long; as free access to papers becomes the norm, it becomes ludicrous to try and prevent it, and complete legalization will likely follow.
Note that you do not have to explain how you got access to papers you are citing; and I've not heard of anyone being asked to do so.
There are other posts here on Academia.SX which regard this question; see the scihub tag.