| I currently am both a full-time employee and a full-time PhD student at a US university. Recently I finished my coursework and passed a qualifying exam so now I"m a "PhD Candidate" which means I can focus more on research. It's been very difficult to do both school and work simultaneously. It helps that I enjoy learning the material and have had some truly outstanding professors. The biggest challenges for me have been (in no particular order): - Group assignments with unmotivated or unethical students. In 3 separate instances, I caught a student in my group attempting to submit blatantly plagiarized work (simple GitHub search to find the duplicate code). Other times I would be the only person to write any code that actually worked. - Seemingly pointless bureaucracy, like a form certifying that I completed all my coursework which needs approval by 5 people and a minimum of 4 weeks processing time. As far as I can tell, this form only asserts that I passed >90 hours of coursework, which is already in my transcript. - Not enough one-on-one time with my advisor. - Not enough guidance on the publishing process. I have collected anecdotes from some professors and snippets from my advisor, but I would have appreciated some formal training. I would have gladly swapped some independent study credit hours for a course about academic publishing. On the plus side: - COVID restrictions forcing classes to be online really helped with logistics. - I used to have imposter syndrome pretty bad. But comparing my work to that of other PhD students across a broad range of topics has proven to me that I'm at least better than average for this university. Maybe I am a big fish in a small pond, but some of those peers have FAANG jobs now. So maybe I'm actually getting pretty good at this stuff. |