Why do older grad students become bitter?

I think the psychological aspect of first failure and injustice is rough on grad students.<p>Hypercompetitive to get into a good enough BS program to get into a MS program yet unlike post-BS tracks like med school, 98% aren&#x27;t getting that job in academia and will fail out.<p>Its a pyramid with a very pointy top, much like college football usually doesn&#x27;t lead to a NFL career.<p>Meanwhile the &quot;failures&quot; who were not smart enough to get into a good grad program are making incredible salaries etc.<p>98% of them when they don&#x27;t get that tenure track professorship &quot;Hey I listened to advice, obeyed, played the game of education, played it VERY hard, put in incredible hours, won top positions, now where&#x27;s my reward I was promised?&quot;<p>(I get this emotional response originally from my favorite server at Dennys who did a K12 education degree, busted her butt, got a top half of her class place, back then they were overproducing ed degrees to such an incredible extent she never got a teaching job, came home with her student loans to the same server job she had at Dennys when she was in high school. If you&#x27;re going to try to climb a job pyramid where most people don&#x27;t make it to the top, don&#x27;t take out loans to do it... Anyway she sounded a lot like some MSCS students and grads I&#x27;ve met while programming.)

There is one aspect that was not touched on, which I find to be quite cruel to be honest. There is an obsession with forcing academics to move around. If you do your undergrad in one university, then you should pack your bags and move to another country to do your Ph.d at another university and then do it again for all your Post. docs. (I am not sure if this is more of an EU thing or if it is a worldwide phenomenon).<p>Abandoning your entire life and moving to another country is hard and it takes a huge toll on your mental well being, especially as you start approaching your 30s. And it just plain makes life harder, when the circumstances are hard enough already. And all of this for what specific benefit exactly? This aspect is so ingrained that, for example I see job ads, where they say, &quot;to be eligible you should not have spent the last x years studying or working in this country&quot;. In fact let me quote:<p>• Must not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc.) in Germany for more than 1 year out of the last 3 years. This is in line with standard mobility criteria for a standard Doctoral Training Network.<p>And then a couple of lines below they boast about a family-friendly environment, and how they prioritize disadvantaged individuals, without a hint of irony. It is neither family-friendly nor a suitable position for disadvantaged individuals if you force them to move away from their support networks to a foreign country.

Burnout + Isolation + Financial burden + Career uncertainty + Unrealistic expectations = disillusioned old phd student

As somebody from the UK, six years feels such a long time. Our PhDs are usually three years, although there&#x27;s more specialisation earlier on at the undergraduate levels, and people might have done masters first, so you are launched straight into research pretty much when you start. You generally have four years from the start to submit your thesis and three years of funding, although I don&#x27;t know if that has changed at all since I did mine.<p>I knew two years into my PhD that it wasn&#x27;t what I wanted to do - I did see it to the end as I was concerned how it would look on my CV if I quit (not sure if that was a good decision or not, but I think I am glad I did finish it!). But I think it&#x27;d have been really hard if it had been four more years rather than just another one or two.

&gt; A decent STEM PhD student stipend in the US is about $40k.<p>I don&#x27;t know where that number comes from. In most universities you&#x27;d be looking at $20k-lower 30k, sometimes less. In fact, in public schools, salaries for teaching assistants&#x2F;research assistants are public data and people can look them up.

overwork, bad salaries, competition, bad relationship with supervisors are often mentioned but I think this is not the whole picture.<p>I would focus more on research itself. Research can be really shitty. It&#x27;s extremely open ended, so you may be a brilliant student with exams, but feel clueless about what to do when there is no clear problem and no clear solution.<p>Science is now extremely incremental compared to 50 years ago, meaning that you work on a tiny problem and you only try to take it forward by epsilon. This is different from the idea we often have of science as &quot;eureka!&quot; and revolutionary changes of paradigm. Most of our time we only aim to publish some paper on something, and move on, even without fully believing in what we&#x27;re trying hard to convince reviewers of. Which is a horrible feeling.<p>All this causes one clear phenomenon: lack of motivation. <i>Motivation is essential</i> for any hard job. But it&#x27;s very very hard to keep motivation high, let&#x27;s be honest, on working like crazy on some project that ends up in a paper that probably almost nobody will ever read.<p>I don&#x27;t ever want to do that again. And it&#x27;s not about the salary, or my boss, or working long hours (I don&#x27;t).

&gt;Only 15% of postdocs end up being tenure-track faculty.<p>It&#x27;s strange that the most intelligent people don&#x27;t overcome that limit. There are billions of people on earth who could benefit from education to become more productive. A share of that gain could pay for many more &#x27;tenure-tracks&#x27;, they just wouldn&#x27;t be called like that.

<i>Only 15% of postdocs end up being tenure-track faculty.</i><p>And what percentage of PhD graduates get postdoctoral positions? I saw a statistic somewhere (sorry, no source at the moment) that showed something like 2% of PhDs actually making it to a faculty position.

Another factor I’ve wondered in both myself and others: those who choose to be grad students often do so because of irrational unresolved issues or dissatisfactions with life. Grad work doesn’t help with these issues at all, only adds more problems or compounds them, and leaves you with a good amount of bitterness that you might not even understand.<p>Increased age or progress increases the chance that these unresolved issues are manifesting or compounding.<p>For me, I was looking for things in academia that just weren’t there, and I was too dumb to know what I was really looking for.

I’m just waiting for my depressing postdoc to end so I can take the money and then im out of here. Have hated every moment of it, considered suicide multiple times, etc. Very bad

&gt; When I entered grad school, I noticed that the older grad students just seemed... oddly bitter? The 6th years were living in a different world from us 1st years<p>&gt; You may need to move on for the sake of your life, but your experiments aren&#x27;t working and the committee says you need one more paper to graduate. It&#x27;s really hard to balance this, especially combined with the lack of money.<p>&gt; Only 15% of postdocs end up being tenure-track faculty<p>From an engineer&#x27;s point of view, working for 6 years at some organization with no significant professional growth sounds dystopian.<p>I can&#x27;t picture why someone with above average work ethic and very likely intelligence would put themselves through that.<p>Downvote me as much as you want, but there is something seriously wrong in a society that tolerates these schemes.

I found myself nodding in agreement, as this all sounds very familiar to me as a former graduate student (except the final &quot;applications of science&quot; section, because I was in philosophy).

I feel like most people have to evaluate their chances to bail out once in a while, as they get lost in their path. It prevents hours, days and years of useless anxiety for the weaker of us.

For what it&#x27;s worth, you don&#x27;t have to do a PhD where you making starvation wages. There are plenty of well paying PhD programs in Scandinavian countries, The Netherlands, etc. During my PhD in Norway I made approx. 55k USD before taxes. This paid for a flat by myself, traveling on holidays to my home country, etc.

Oh this is wild, I didn&#x27;t expect this to make it anywhere outside of my little site. Thanks for dropping in!

Possibly b&#x2F;c of the first graph at<p>&quot;Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;philip.greenspun.com&#x2F;careers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;philip.greenspun.com&#x2F;careers&#x2F;</a>?

But… Does it become better after leaving academia? I am just done with my PhD and will leave for industry in 1 month. Even having finished my PhD, I can’t see light at the end of the tunnel. Suggestions?

They... don&#x27;t ?<p>I don&#x27;t know where the person is studying, but it&#x27;s not a general phenomenon.<p>I have still students around me, and the number of years don&#x27;t seem to make them more or less bitters.

If you have a Facebook account you can see memes about grad school life in the &quot;High Impact PhD memes&quot; page. Relatable

1. If you put a sixth grader in second grade, they wont be happy because they are doing a lot less than they should and could be doing. I think this feeling applies for sixth year students, that know they could be starting a real job or building a family.<p>2. Academia is built on the the theoretical.<p>Learning is cool, and theories are nice, and colleges are full of kids that don&#x27;t bear the responsibility of their actions. But most people eventually get the nagging and uncomfortable suspicion that the world that they are being sold doesn&#x27;t quite match up to reality. A feeling associated with bitterness, cynicism, and denial.<p>OT&gt; IMO, this one reason why academia is so strongly leftist. Socialism and Communism are theoretically utopian, but <i>can never work</i> in the real world. Ditto to monetary theory (if it was so reliable, the profs would all be rich and retired), and liberalism (unfortunately, since I really buy into the theory), and other agendas that are popular on campus.