u/Human-Ranger5939

I’ve been offered a PhD and just wanted some thoughts.

Graduated last year with a BE (Hons) and have been working in industry for about 6 months. Not really enjoying it to be honest. Took the job because it paid about ~$20k more than other offers at the time, which made sense then… but I can see why now.

I’ve been looking to move anyway, ideally into hydrodynamics/control type stuff. Then my honours supervisor randomly reached out with a PhD opportunity in that exact area. It’s an applied PhD with an industry partner so it’s basically doing research and then applying it directly for the company.

Part of me thinks the company just doesn’t want to pay for proper R&D engineers and this is a cheaper way to get that work done. But at the same time they get what they want, the uni gets to say it’s industry focused, and I get into a field I’ve been trying to break into. So overall it kind of works out.

One thing that’s a bit different is the structure. They said it wouldn’t be a traditional thesis heavy PhD. More like over the 3 years you build up a body of work and then it gets assessed at the end on whether it’s PhD level or not. .

They mentioned there might be some paid work on the side but I’m not counting on that. It would have to be a lot to make up the opportunity cost anyway.

Just feels like a bit of a weird path compared to the usual PhD route, but also seems like a good way to pivot into a different area.

I’m a freelancer doing a lot of embedded work and I’ve been using Copilot since around mid-2025. It’s changed a lot since then, and honestly I’m starting to question whether it still makes sense for me.

I’m on Pro+, but now with the shift to token-based pricing I don’t really get what I’m paying for anymore. If there’s a monthly subscription, why am I also having to think about usage on top of that? It feels like I’m paying twice.

My workflow isn’t anything crazy either. I’ll usually spend time properly defining a problem or a feature, write one solid prompt that actually captures what I want and what success looks like, then let the model (usually Opus) generate something. After that I might use Copilot a bit for small follow-ups or testing ideas, but most of the validation is done properly on my side in the real system.

I’m not sitting there spamming prompts all day. It’s more of a think-first, then use the model deliberately kind of approach. But with the new pricing, that seems like the worst possible way to use it. One good prompt can suddenly cost way more than expected, and now the subscription doesn’t really feel justified.

I’m also not a huge fan of the direction towards more agent-style behaviour. I get why it’s useful for some people, but for me I want full oversight of what’s happening. I don’t want things running in the background or making decisions without me explicitly driving it, especially in embedded where things failing unexpectedly can actually matter.

At this point I’m trying to figure out what the move is. Do I just scale back and use Copilot as glorified autocomplete? Or does it make more sense to go straight to something like Anthropic or OpenAI via an extension and keep everything more controlled?

Feels like the value proposition has shifted quite a bit, but maybe I’m just using it wrong. Curious if anyone else is in a similar spot.