[perl4ever]

I always imagined a Ph.D. was about having a good idea and demonstrating your ability to develop it, defend it, and publish. What does a 14 hour day accomplish over 8? You're not pumping out widgets, right?

> the older I get, the less often I can push that further. I wake up every day wondering who I will disappoint and for too long have put myself and my health last. Of course it's not practical to quit, nor is it practical to fire such a low-wage worker.

You're...24, looking back at 22?

[RNCTX]

> What does a 14 hour day accomplish over 8? You're not pumping out widgets, right?

6 hours of teaching the courses your advisor doesn't teach, + conditioning to work for free for a predatory academic publisher.

[chadash]

> I always imagined a Ph.D. was about having a good idea and demonstrating your ability to develop it, defend it, and publish. What does a 14 hour day accomplish over 8? You're not pumping out widgets, right?

My wife is currently doing a Ph.D., and yeah, maybe you go in thinking "I'm interested in this area, let me spend 5 years really exploring and developing it". Then reality hits. You are beholden to your advisor and switching advisors is very hard if not impossible depending on your situation. If your advisor has the funding for you to spend 5 years working on your interests and has the time to help you with it, great. But in reality, your job is to do whatever your advisor wants and this may or may not align with your own interests. On top of this, in addition to research, you've got classes, teaching duties and all sorts of other stuff that may or may not interest you, but has nothing to do with your primary research, yet still takes up much of your time.

Imagine you were to apply to a job in industry where you will have one boss for the next 5 years, get paid scraps, can't switch teams and if you quit the job two or three years in, you give up all of your progress. This is what a Ph.D. is. If you have a great advisor, it can be amazing. But a bad advisor can make it hell. And even in the best of circumstances, you have to deal with a lot of BS.

[dikei]

> I always imagined a Ph.D. was about having a good idea and demonstrating your ability to develop it

My story back in grad school was most of the time I didn't know if I had a good idea. Sometime I kept doing the same stuff again and again hoping to get some new insight, sometime I tried pursuing different approaches only to throw it away a month later.

There's also the nagging feeling that you're not working hard enough when your peers are publishing left and right, which push you to work late into the night, at home, for trivial reasons.

In the end, I decided that grad school was not for me and got out with a Master Degree.