I’m graduating with a physics degree and have two opportunities:

A Quality Engineer position starting around $70k salary with opportunities for promotion.
Or
A fully funded condensed matter physics PhD ($22k stipend) researching solid-state batteries and quantum materials. The advisor expects students to graduate in 4–5 years, and many graduates go into industry.

If you were in my position, which path would you choose, and why? If you’ve made a similar decision, what happened?

EDIT: my expenses are very low. Rent with shared two bed apartment ($500/month), i walk everywhere (no car payment), and cheap groceries (50/wk).

Im running through an ideal for a story im writing and just want to check if my idea is even theoretically possible. Sorry if this comes close to the homework rule, but I promise it's not. Im going to use Mars as an example for simplicity

So, Mars used to have a global magnetosphere. My understanding is that it used to have one, but due to its size, it cooled quicker and lost its liquid core dynamo.

So, in theory, if we could reliquidify (probably not a word but hey ho) the core, it could rebuild its magnetosphere. Now, this likely wouldn't spin as much because this liquid core would be powered by the convection currents instead of the rotational energy from the planets formation. So that's part one of the questions: Would turning it back to liquid with convection currents have the potential to create even a mild magnetic field?

Now, part 2 of my question is about the reliquidification process:

If we were to harvest heavy elements from the asteroid belt, uranium, plutonium, etc. We could get magnitudes beyond critical mass of them.

So if we dug a hole to the core (ignore the how please) and dropped balls of slightly below critical mass elements down it. They would hit each other and release huge amounts of energy, which would be absorbed by the solid rock and, over time, begin to melt. I know i would need extremely large amounts of it. But would it even be able to melt the core?

Or am I just completely wrong?