PhD.....

It has been almost 5 months since i applied to NTU to do my PhD and got no response, the website always said 'Application under consideration'. So I was all set about going to Sydney hoping that I'll be the next Head of Investment Banking at GS or something.

Then I get a missed call this afternoon and it says A/P Ooi. When I returned his call he was all ecstatic and went, "Vignesh, can u start on yr PhD this August?". I was stunned and told him that I still haven't been accepted and that's when he told me that he held back my application due to the lack of funding and went "its a fully paid scholarship plus u'll be a TA and get a stipend for that. We can work on something else not necessarily two-phase flow*". I had no choice to tell him that I was having second thoughts about the PhD and wanted to do something else. But this is so good that its making me think twice, doesn't Dr.R S Vignesh sound good?? But it would mean having to spend the rest of my life working in some university doing research and teaching punks who'd rather be in their hostel room nailing their gf than listening to me talk about Thermodynamics, Heat Transfer or Fluid Mechanics.

I'm in a fix now. As soon as he got the funding from the HOD he called me immediately and he had lots of hope and spent lots of time grooming me into what he called a student with 'outstanding research potential' but now I'm just walking away. I feel a moral delimma now as if i've turned my back on someone who believed in me greatly.

So what should I do? Will the opportunity cost of turning the phd or the masters be greater in 10years?? I wish i could see the future.

*Two-phase flow was what I did for my FYP. Two-phase i.e. gas in liquid or solid in liquid flow. People have spent their entire lifetime researching stuff like this.