Comments on: Things I learnt during, and about, my PhD

By: ACH

ACH — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 02:37:37 +0000

I did not have the greatest of times during my PhD’s either, absent disinterested supervisor and a fieldwork “collaborator” who made everything more difficult.
But even with a PhD life’s no picnic, I resigned from my Post-doctoral fellowship yesterday, as I could not take any more.
I was offered a position to undertake a proposed project I had submitted, and they guaranteed funding. After many fruitless meetings they decided that the guaranteed funding was not in fact “available” and that my “advisor” had not even read the proposal and just wanted me to support his post-grads so he did not have to.
What’s more I am not eligible to many outside funding sources as I am a British citizen working in Thailand, and though my faculty here said I could apply to the university for funding-my advisor would not let me.
Additionally my faculty is the only one in the Uni who does not house it’s staff-or rather it houses all staff except Post-docs (and there are only 2 of us), and despite the fact we have to pay insurance monthly-we can’t claim…
This is only a small selection of the problems here (a full list, even in bullet form would go on for many pages).
Sorry for less optimism, but I am starting to think that you have to be insane to get into the academic route in the current atmosphere…

By: CS

CS — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 03:06:21 +0000

I am due to submit in three weeks, and googled your site with “i hate my ph.d. dissertation.” Unfortunately I agree with most of your observations by now and currently (I hope that will go away after a few weeks of rest) wish that I never did this thing. Sigh …

By: DPlainview

DPlainview — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 19:39:07 +0000

Since I came to the conclusion during my 1st year that nobody will read my dissertation, and no one cares………….why don’t they just give me the damn PhD already?

By: Vasilis Mavroudis

Vasilis Mavroudis — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 10:40:56 +0000

Very informative…phd is a difficult choice…

By: sp

sp — Mon, 30 May 2011 10:42:35 +0000

I am delivering my Ph.D. this Wednesday after 4 years and I have been having super-high stress levels for the past two years. The situation is exactly as you describe it, it’s torturing for the last few months. There were many times I ended up saying that I hate my life. Don’t take up a Ph.D. guys, really….

By: sanchai

sanchai — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 23:38:12 +0000

in some way this article helped me. anyway, i hope i finish soon.

By: Anna

Anna — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 23:05:25 +0000

I am currently completing 2 masters degrees. I found your blog after a particularly infuriating meeting with the chair of my thesis committee. I hate him I hate him I hate him. But the worst part is that he and I are in the same ethnic community, so his name will follow me, and my future children and my future grandchildren for the rest of our lives. Your blog and a few beers helped me unwind, and realize that I am not alone in my grad school hatred.

By: Tosin

Tosin — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 08:27:44 +0000

Ah-mazing write up, and sorry about the suckiness of the experience. It’s such a lonely road, hard for anyone to understand who is not you / going through it with you.
I too failed to finish the PhD. I went in to “learn more stuff” and boy did I. But I was depressed because I was failing to be a successful PhD student: pass the exams in time, and start being active with papers and conferences. Basically I was staying mum. I was still learning (everything in sight, not just my field) and not ready to say anything yet.
Now years after leaving, it seems to me that I deserve a “qualification to conduct research” that I might not have earned while in grad school for 4yrs 10months. I don’t know, somehow, I’m just putting all that learning together, and I feel very able to solve bigger problems with better technique than before school. But sadly, by your metric, I’m “on sabbatical” which means I still have the no PhD/failure thing as well as the eternal “sticking with it” thing.
I can’t bring myself to go back because I’m happier now than then (I don’t know what I’d have done without my shrink), but I can’t quit because it’s so do-able (more now than ever) and it’ll give me closure, a qualification that I covet, and the chance to learn a little more stuff.
Excellent and true write-up. PS: the PhD where I schooled didn’t seem to have a 3year or 4year plan. Did you do your work in Europe? Bcos in the US it seemed to me a formless “n” years.

By: Brian

Brian — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 07:07:47 +0000

I think universities should fire academics if
for X years, they cannot win any significant external funding, nor if no Y number of first
authored papers in N years. They should not
get paid for 3 months out of a calendar year,
so that those whose who are not worthy of
industry relevant consultancies will find out
their real value. I think that is the way to get
rid of incompetent annoying people from the
university campuses.

By: InTooDeep

InTooDeep — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 15:50:53 +0000

Wow! When you wrote this, I was finishing up my 3rd year in my C.S. Ph.D. Now, I am moving toward the end of my 5th year, with no end in sight. My university does not have firm deadlines for Ph.D. students. The numerous external funding sources I have used don’t seem to care how long I have been here, and I am rather convinced that I could be a Ph.D. student for life. (Could, not should!) I am not sure what you mean by “fining” universities for non-completing students. Perhaps we are in different countries, or you are using some sort of public funding, whereas I used private grants. Differences aside, the rest of your article was spot-on.

I entered the Ph.D. program with a B.S./M.S. and after I had a few years of experience in the real world. I began my Ph.D. because I was dissatisfied with boring/repetitive/non-original industrial work, and a Ph.D. seemed a fast-track to interesting new things. I began with no clear idea of a topic I wanted to research, but my advisor told me that the funded research, with which my tuition and stipend were paid, would provide ample fodder to find a topic. He was right, sort of.

Around the time that you wrote this article, was when I realized that the line of research I was doing was not only flawed in such a way as to render it useless in the real world, it was actually so flawed that neither I, nor even the best bullshitter in the world, could slip it past a dissertation committee. I still feel stupid for even thinking of that idea, and at least slightly bitter at my advisor for letting me work such a transparently bad concept. After this realization, I spent the next 6 months or so trying to find a similar topic inside of the overall area I had spent so much time studying, before coming to the depressing realization that I simply did not have the mathematical background to make a real (in the academic sense) contribution to this area.

I was dangling by a thread, and jumped on an idea in a completely different research area that my advisor had suggested to another student a year before. Unfortunately, after several months of reading, I concluded that this idea had been done repeatedly about a decade before, and my advisor simply hadn’t known about it. Cue a few more months of searching that research area for a another topic, with no good ideas for a defensible topic. Then cue a longer period of generally thrashing around looking for any topic at all.

That brings us to the current situation. Like you said, I haven’t quit, but I haven’t really “stuck it out” either. At this point, I have mentally given up the possibility of finding a defensible topic. I guess this proves that I was really never qualified to do original research, which I suppose is the purpose of the Ph.D. program.

However, I have spent way too long in academia, and academic C.S. is far too different from industrial C.S., so without a Ph.D. or recent experience, I can only hope for an entry-level job at this point. Even worse, since my resume clearly shows that I am “damaged goods”, having spent so long in academia with nothing to show for it, even the more desirable entry-level jobs are closed to me. (Why hire this 30-something loser when we can go with the fresh and peppy 22 year old?)

So I have lingered as a grad student, doing the bare minimum to not get kicked out at annual-review time, but with no real chance of defending a dissertation. Go search for phdcomic #1012, “Your life ambition — What happened??” <– this is my life, sad but true.

My question to the original poster: When you said you would never finish, did you only mean that you would never be personally satisfied with your dissertation? Did you eventually defend a dissertation and graduate, or did you actually quit? That part was not clear from the article.