[lucraft]

> "You are formally invited to A WAKE for THE RESEARCH SCIENCE CAREER of FRANCES HOCUTT FRIDAY from 7 PM to MIDNIGHT"

When I quit my PhD I had an Ungraduation Party! My wife made a cake and everyone sang Happy Ungraduation To You! It was sad and happy but overwhelmingly such a relief to get out

[bumby]

What went into your decision to drop out?

Good on you too not wrap your identity too much in a credential to allow yourself that decision and also having unconditional support from those close to you.

[lucraft]

Thanks... I haven't thought about it in a long time, as it was difficult, but looking back it seems quite positive.

Three things:

1. Full disclosure at that time in my life I was rather bad at motivating myself to work independently for long periods. In hindsight starting a PhD was a bad idea for this reason alone.

2. The university closed the department I was in. I was transferred to another supervisor in another department, who was nice but saw his role as more administrative. After a while he then announced he was retiring so I was looking at moving to another supervisor again.

3. I turned out to be far, far more interested in writing software than doing research. E.g I wrote an open source unit testing library in Prolog to support my research tooling. I was learning Rails on the side. I went to the Hacker News meet-up in London, and the startup that was running them offered me a job, and the rest is history!

I had sunk multiple years into it so it wasn't easy. But in hindsight it was not even a close decision.