A PhD state of mind (2018)

This style of editorial is becoming more common, and IMO is almost useless. Saying that &quot;Advisors should take care of their students&#x27; well-being.&quot; doesn&#x27;t account for the fact that incentives are for advisors to overpromise to funding agencies and drive their students hard to make up the difference. They control funding&#x2F;compensation, graduation, and paper piblication&#x2F;author order, and are set to personally benefit from faster results at higher difficulties.<p>In my advisor&#x27;s lab, this was done by encouraging competition between students. If a student didn&#x27;t make experimental progress in a month, a second student was told to work on the same problem. If that didn&#x27;t work, he would collaborate with postdocs in other labs, sharing ideas and results to get high impact publications quickly. Students needed to publish results as first authors to graduate, so becoming a mere coauthor on someone else&#x27;s publication after a year of work was a huge setback. One (independemtly wealthy) student was desperate to graduate and published as a first author through another lab with our advisor as a coauthor, and was told that the paper would not be counted. I don&#x27;t know a single student who graduated without having a breakdown on the way, but the professor in question has become quite famous and received many awards and fellowships in professional organizations for their high-impact work, the department is becoming famous in that field, and the funding agencies have extended funding to pay for five more years with 50% more students.<p>These hand-wringing editorials suggest nothing that will change incentives or hold ruthless PIs accountable.

Here are a couple of relevant quotes from Freeman Dyson (who does not have a PhD):<p>“Well, I think it actually is very destructive. I&#x27;m now retired, but when I was a professor here [Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton], my real job was to be a psychiatric nurse. There were all these young people who came to the institute, and my job was to be there so they could cry on my shoulder and tell me what a hard time they were having. And it was a very tough situation for these young people. They come here. They have one or two years and they&#x27;re supposed to do something brilliant. They&#x27;re under terrible pressure — not from us, but from them.<p>So, actually, I&#x27;ve had three of them who I would say were just casualties who I&#x27;m responsible for. One of them killed himself, and two of them ended up in mental institutions. And I should&#x27;ve been able to take care of them, but I didn&#x27;t. I blame the Ph.D. system for these tragedies. And it really does destroy people. If they weren&#x27;t under that kind of pressure, they could all have been happy people doing useful stuff. Anyhow, so that&#x27;s my diatribe. But I really have seen that happen.&quot;

This doesn&#x27;t surprise me. PhD students remain in a vulnerable position. They are not only intelligent and sensible, but also often exploited by the hierarchy and underpaid. The cynic in me sees the whole procedure of academic ordination as a kind of humiliating ponzi scheme, based on effort justification and the sunk cost fallacy.

I know people working in a research lab where the PI refers to some of the members as &quot;slaves&quot; in front of everyone. The power differentials are utterly out of whack. It&#x27;s not remotely surprising what the results are.

Students swiped doorknobs in our chemistry building and analyzed the swabs by mass spec. Antidepressants were found on every one of the doorknobs...and no one was even surprised by that outcome. My boss&#x27; estimate about how many grad students are on some sort of psychiatric medication is &quot;all of them.&quot;

Well, it seems that everyone describes the PhD as a tragic experience... for me it wasn&#x27;t.<p>I don&#x27;t know exactly why that was, probably a mixture of how it is organized&#x2F;work culture (Italy is clearly not the US), the extremely caring and human supervisor, and a not particularly competitive field. I would argue that also my fellow PhD candidates were not as stressed as I read here (antidepressants on every doorknob? No way.)<p>Now that I&#x27;m done and I moved to another university in the northern part of the EU, I&#x27;m still not convinced, by looking at candidates here, that the PhD is such a tragic experience,but maybe I just know lucky people.<p>Did anyone here have a <i>positive</i> PhD?

“Being a graduate student is like becoming all of the Seven Dwarves. In the beginning you’re Dopey and Bashful. In the middle, you are usually sick (Sneezy), tired (Sleepy), and irritable (Grumpy). But at the end, they call you Doc, and then you’re Happy.”<p>Maybe I&#x27;m suffering from effort justification. However, I believe I learned a great deal about the art and practice of study.

After reading this, the cynical part of me would say that the start-up world is in competition with the academic world to recruit the best talents. So, it keeps publishing biased articles about the drawbacks of doing a PhD. For similar reasons, it also publishes articles about bad experiences in the corporate world.<p>However, I do remember that, during my PhD, about a third of my lab mates had some kind of mental breakdown. Some suddenly cut the bridge and stopped going to the lab. They would not answer to emails or phone calls.<p>I would say that in the CS fields, successful PhD are most often a very positive experience, and bring a lot of professional opportunities. The program itself is very intellectually satisfying. And now, many of lab mates have very exciting jobs: startup founders, top AI scientists&#x2F;engineers, professors.<p>However,some students that were used to study very well and have top grades, once they started their PhD program, felt completely lost and hopeless in this totally different way of working and thinking. They had to work (mainly) alone for years. So, if no output came out, they felt very depressed. On top of that, the failure to publish usually extends the length of the PhD program...

This study does not seem very robust. How do we know that folks that enroll into PhD programs are not just more likely to have mental health issues? There is a positive correlation between IQ and mental health issues at least at the higher end of the scale and this could be a manifestation of that.

I mean, I spent 10 years working essentially around the clock. I burned out, my mental health crumbled, I isolated from friends, my marriage fell apart. I&#x27;d never ever go through that for an employer. It&#x27;s funny. With complete freedom to choose when and how I worked, I worked myself to the bone. I&#x27;m much happier with a job where I&#x27;m defensive about my time and wellbeing

Burned out, hit my limit, and needed to take a break in grad school twice. Once due to contract work (had to pay my bills, so spent a week writing testing code instead of core product), and once due to emotional exhaustion after writing an unaccepted paper (spent a week watching all 7 seasons of ST: Voyager while my ex was at work).<p>Since then (11-12 years now), the work ethic that pushed me through a PhD in 5.5 years left me burnt out after 60-80 hour work weeks at my first gig. Since stopping working for other folks after coming home (except as necessary for pager duty in some cases), I put my spare hours into relationships, family, and personal recreation. With the wife and kids, basically now just family and personal recreation.<p>Unfortunately, my personal recreation tends to look a lot like work (email support, open source projects, ...). Combine that with &quot;working for myself&quot; for the last 21 months, and I&#x27;ve experienced more pain and stress in the process of building a business than I did getting the PhD (solve all the problems, all the time, no academic advisors, no end in sight). I think at this point I&#x27;ve needed to take explicit &quot;I am burned out on this&quot; breaks at least 5 times in the last 21 months.<p>I&#x27;ve been trying to explicitly &quot;not work&quot; in the evenings to cut my own work-driven exhaustion. Trying to do something fun (work on non-work fun software, handle correspondence, play video games, etc.), but at least half my evenings end with starting an overnight &quot;run forever, log failures&quot; set of unittests, or at least updating my daily worklog.

A lot depends on advisor-student compatibility. Different students need different mentorship styles, and some students require a lot more hands on help than others. Research is incredibly hard, especially when just starting.<p>Much of my stress during my PhD was self imposed. I felt like I needed to keep up with the peers I respected, and I knew the metrics required to get the jobs I wanted were hard to reach. It&#x27;s very easy to get stuck in your own mental bubble. That said, as a professor, I became much more sympathetic to my own advisor. It&#x27;s easy to criticize when you haven&#x27;t actually done the job.<p>Now that I&#x27;m a PI, I feel a massive responsibility to my lab members. Being a professor is far harder than any job I had in industry. I spent most of my time helping students do research and fund raising to pay them a pittance (6% success rates for my NSF programs). I also had innumerable other tasks. Seeing my PhD students do well and become leaders in the field has been immensely rewarding, though. Keeping the lab going requires that we all do good work (publishing great papers in top places) or my students won&#x27;t get good jobs and I won&#x27;t be able to get money to pay them or educate the next group.

A bit of a tangent, but does anyone know if a &quot;paper PhD&quot; is still and option ? The first and only time I ever heard of it was during a lecture by Nobel laureate Dr. Shuji Nakamura[1].<p>IIRC, the University of Florida offered PhD&#x27;s if you published 5 papers which he did in one year.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=fUlR9DP6Me4&amp;t=2074s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=fUlR9DP6Me4&amp;t=2074s</a>

This may differ from one student to another or from lab to lab, but the general thesis is definitely true. I decided to quit academia in favor of IT industry exactly due to this high stress problem, even having a number of relative good papers published. I just could not bear it more.<p>PhD student&#x2F;postdoc life is extremely unstable: 1) you are very limited in finances; 2) you have to perform a number of different research trials and most of them will have no success; 3) you are always limited in time; 4) there is a continuous flow of grant applications, reports, papers preparation, sometimes teacher assistance works. And in the middle of this you have to find your own unique path in science, your niche.<p>In summary, you have to be ready to live in a continuous disaster during relatively long period of life. If it fits you, then you can achieve success after ~10 years of hard work. Anyway, it was interesting experience for me :)

We used to call it Permanent Head Damage - it certainly rings true many times during the course.

Vast majority PhDs end up being giant losers. Very few career choices with any money. Being a professor at age 50 isn&#x27;t a success, really.

To PhDs: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;There%27s_more_than_one_way_to_do_it" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;There%27s_more_than_one_way_to...</a>

Funny it took so long to get this research out.

I wonder if those PhDs are ready to suffer so much, why don&#x27;t they work at SV companies where they can get free sushi + 6 figure salary and lots of interesting problems to solve.<p>Why these people are so hung up on getting PhD title.<p>Or any not become a YouTuber?<p>We can easily see that ElectroBoom on YouTube is more respected in the world than any other person holding PhD in Electrical Engineering.

It&#x27;s both a money and commitment problem. Even without the money problem like in europe, ut makes a very unbalanced life to make so much sacrifice during a so long time..

No shit.