| Most of your post reads as if you really don't want to do a PhD, but are looking for someone to convince you to stay. We can't really help you with that. If you really want to do a PhD, I thought I should add a clarification regarding this: > Equally concerning to me is that I think I'd likely be miserable during the PhD process. It seems very lonely, and I don't find much enjoyment from, say, sitting in my office reading papers all day. My PhD was by far the most intellectually stimulant job I ever had, and now that I'm in industry I find myself missing it. This is of course dependent of your research group, but some of my weekly PhD activities included * a weekly seminar where we would all read a new paper and discuss it * a weekly course on specific research topics - first it was Neural Networks, then it was Reinforcement Learning. We made a point of having a programming part to it, in order not to remain purely theoretical. * optional courses on topics that each one of us found interesting * discussions with other researchers who would come to our offices and ask for input regarding a specific problem they had * a weekly "meeting" in which we got together to have cookies and talk about life Add the yearly sprint to get things ready for a conference and the random tasks such as organizing a conference, and the end result was that there was always something new to keep myself busy. Of course, not all PhDs are like mine and some people are truly miserable. But it's not a given that all PhDs will be like that. |
Doing phd research didn’t keep you busy?