[sunahsuh]

I recently left my PhD program too (I'm "mastering out" in local parlance ;)) and what this post doesn't address is what I found to be the hardest part: making a decision to leave a world where people that leave are construed as a failures (note: contrary to my expectation, I've only received support in my decision from my awesome and anomalous department.) (Also, I should note that I left a software industry job to do the PhD so I knew I shouldn't have difficulty finding a job.)

For anyone who wants to take the leap but is afraid or unsure, I offer some words that were incredibly helpful for me from some of fantastic friends. To quote my amazing advisor from his response to my "I'm leaving" email:

'We had a Head of Department at Lancaster who used to stomp around the corridors moaning - "I've just lost another student to industry. He's got a great job, has a starting salary bigger than mine, is working on a fabulous project with better resources than we have. In what mad world is this judged as a failure?"'

And another colleague, who's currently a junior professor: 'You know, most Ph.D.ers are smart and successful people. Hence they have a difficulty in saying “This is not for me”. They instead say “I’ve been successful all my life, and I finished everything I started, so I should finish this as well”. By saying that, they choose to hang in there for many years in a depressed state.

Sometimes, the most courageous thing and the best thing to do is to quit when you know you would rather work in another capacity, or when you know you don’t want to work in academia. I congratulate you on your decision and I hope the best for you. ( In case you later decide to come back to academia, it will be waiting for you, so I would not worry about it.)'

Best of luck, those of you that are struggling with the decision. If you're anything like me, if you decide to leave you'll feel better than you have in years =)

[ajdecon]

I took the same route, "mastering out", and that cultural perception that "leaving your PhD is failing at life" was my biggest hurdle. I knew I could get a job, knew that I could probably find something interesting, but the looks of pity and disgust from my colleagues were not so easy to ignore. I think the comment I heard most often was, "what a waste."

Until I was actually out. Then I started getting furtive emails asking me questions like, "how do you write a resume?", "is the pay ok?", and most often, "are you happy?"

I still think a PhD is absolutely worth it in many cases, and trains you to be a scientist better than any other path. But it's a long hard road, and there are many people out there (me included) who do it because it's presented as the default path. If you're interested in physics, or biology, or any other science, it's just what comes next after undergrad. And that's not a good enough reason.

Edit: 'You know, most Ph.D.ers are smart and successful people. Hence they have a difficulty in saying “This is not for me”. They instead say “I’ve been successful all my life, and I finished everything I started, so I should finish this as well”. By saying that, they choose to hang in there for many years in a depressed state.

This.

[_delirium]

Part of that's due to incentives; like a corporation, universities don't primarily think institutionally about what's in your best interests. Hence you also rarely find companies happy that you left to take a better job, though you might find some individual managers who're supportive of a decision to move on.

For universities, people who leave PhD programs earlyish are a particular negative, because at least in the US, typically universities subsidize the masters portion of your education if you enter into a PhD program, out of research funds or departmental TA funds, whereas students who enter explicitly intending to get a masters have to pay tuition, and don't usually receive a stipend (though a few can land TAships). What they expect in return is that later in your PhD you'll publish a bunch of papers which bring them some prestige, help out on grant applications, etc. So if you enter a PhD program, stay for 2 years for the coursework/masters portion, and then leave, from the university's perspective it's like you're really a masters student who somehow tricked them into treating you as a PhD student for 2 years, and got away without paying tuition--- but without staying long enough to produce the expected ROI in publications. It also hurts the graduation-rate statistics in some ways of calculating them, and as education is getting more metrics/assessment heavy, that can matter too.

At least, that's from an administrative/bean-counter perspective; from a cultural perspective among researchers themselves, attitudes are more varied and have more complicated reasons. In areas where industrial partnerships are important, I think the reaction is often fairly positive, because a former student now working at a large company is a good connection for a lab to have.

Some of the negative reactions I think are just due to people not conceiving that other people could have different preferences/aptitudes. You can also find the reverse, where e.g. the attitudes if you left a startup after two years to pursue grad school can range from confused to "you're throwing away a golden opportunity" type views, to outright derisive ("couldn't make it in the real world"). Unfortunately I think it's pretty common for people to be pretty invested in what they did as the definition of success (whether it's research or entrepreneurship or whatever), and to generalize that to thinking that people who quit that route and try another one are therefore failures.

[rgraham]

This is funny to me. I decided I was definitely leaving during an internship and most of my coworkers and friends thought it was a great idea. My advisor and closest academic colleagues were supportive as well.

I joked that the PhD program was like a girlfriend no one liked, but they waited to say so until I quit.

[eli_gottlieb]

Do keep in mind, while we're all bashing academia, that there are those who go the opposite direction. I finished a researchy undergrad, went to industry, basically got miserable, and have gone right back to apply for PhD programs. I'm incredibly happy to know I have at least the one admission, even if it doesn't have guaranteed funding!

[sunahsuh]

Just for full disclosure, I did the same, in that I did research and publication as an undergrad, worked in industry briefly and then went back to do a PhD (in my case, I had gotten in before I finished undergrad and deferred my admission to work for a bit.)

Personally, I'm not bashing academia per se -- I think it's great for people with the right mix of temperament and motivation. The travesty is that so many people that start PhDs go in without a clear understanding of what the degree entails and what characteristics are necessary for success in their programs and the tenure race. I could go on for a long time about the reasons but I think a lot of it boils down to the way schools work up to undergrad -- the kinds of qualities that get you good grades up through college are not well correlated with the things that make you a great researcher. The worst is in fields where the norm is for undergrads to go straight into PhD programs.

And please note I'm not at all saying this as a comment on your situation. I suspect the fact that you've done research as an undergrad probably means you have a good handle on what you're getting yourself into =)

[eli_gottlieb]

I quite agree, actually, and I'm glad that my undergraduate department had an actual course to solve this problem.

CS491DD: Empirical Research Methods in Computer Science

One of my favorites, despite the incredible workload. Though for my field I would have preferred Formal Research Methods in CS, but hey.

There's also the NSF-sponsored Research Experience for Undergraduates program, which is basically "summer internship in graduate school." If you do those and like it, you should go for a PhD, because you like academia.

On the other hand, I really didn't like industry when I got there, and for that I blame the fact that I didn't have an industrial internship in college. I didn't know what I would think of full-time industrial programming until I got there.

[arethuza]

"to leave a world where people that leave are construed as a failures"

That was very much the view when I left - is it a view that is particularly common in the UK?

[sunahsuh]

I can't speak to that, except what my British advisor said =)

[anotherthrow]

I'm sure this is a personal thing, but I agree completely - and I think it's often self-imposed. It's only after leaving academia that I can accept that successfully completing my PhD wasn't a failure, or tantamount to admission that it was a mistake.

On PhD programmes you're often dealing with people have been conditioned from an early age to view themselves as defined by effortless academic success - finding something hard, or accepting that there are interesting challenges outside academia can be very difficult.