It’s not the first time I’ve thought about doing a PhD, with the intention to take on some kind of academic position in a university, primarily to teach. I’ve been able to express this desire to teach at my work in Enea Consulting, and also as part of my coaching practice, but somehow perhaps I thought of going a bit more intellectual. I had briefly thought about incorporating more intellectual elements into my mailing list but I dropped the idea as I didn’t think that was the main objective of my target audience when signing up to the list.
I did also think about starting a youtube channel and teaching lay economics topics in bite-sized pieces. That could be an avenue though I suspect such resources are already widely available online. Perhaps I’m wrong. Or I could also start a podcast discussing some of these topics – perhaps to apply economics on more topical issues.
All of these, to be able to take on the teaching role and be a public intellectual without doing a PhD. Because almost every single person who has done a PhD in my circle cautioned me against it and talked about how I would be better off learning about a discipline or subject by myself. And unless I’m so deeply passionate about a single niche area of knowledge. So perhaps I’d be undertaking my own research, something like a private PhD, perhaps not with a single supervisor but being under the guidance of many different people in my network.
Having been so critical about the education system, perhaps working on a PhD by myself or doing PhD level work by myself (ie. DIY PhD) in order to undertake deep research in a particular niche with the view of publishing some paper or a book.