I went the masters route and after 7 years in industry, I have almost exclusively ended up in ad targeting, customer profiling, ad optimization, and recommendation algos area.

In the end, I am glad I didn’t need to pursue another 2-3 years of school beyond my masters. As I was ready for a nice paycheck and a masters in DS can get you to that end.

I am proud of the projects that I helped pioneer. In industry, being a Data scientist may as well make you a rocket scientist to most other devs and business functions, which means if you have a good application or model you can champion it from end to end.

I will say this, I am stilling paying off student debt that would have been at least double had I finished a PhD. If you want to push the limits of what computers and mathematics can do then maybe the ivory tower is best for you but if you want to get a product out there and say I pioneered a product that delivered $X MM in revenue and get a cushy job with a nice paycheck, I think Masters can you there.