fusion

I have a friend who was working at Yale Medical School post graduation and she had to work almost every day of the week. The work schedule almost as hectic as that of a graduate student. Research assistant jobs are usually about 2 year contract jobs and she quit in less than a year. You might want to try out a less intense lab before quitting. I don't know what exactly you mean by you want to stay in science. If that means you want to do research than getting a PhD is the best bet but if you want to just do some stuff related to science try interning in science policy or patent law. Your science education will be valuable in these fields.

I am in my second year of graduate school and doing a research in theoretical physics. I initially thought I wanted to go into academia but now I have totally lost interest in it. The stipend for post docs are awful and even after that the job prospects are so bad. I know people who after finishing their PhDs are just earning about 50 K and I go to one of the top 5 physics program. I am beginning to feel that a PhD is a total waste of time if I don't want to go into academia. As a person doing theory the job prospects in industry is close to nil. I don't even think I want to continue with research after I graduate. So most people who leave research in my school either go to consulting or wall street. I am also interested in business so those seem like really good options for me. My dilemma is if I should continue with my PhD and then join consulting or hedge fund or should I just drop out of grad school and get a job in consulting/venture capital. If I don't want to be in research, I don't see how doing a PhD will be of any help to me. I talked with some people who work in consulting and heard that they hire PhDs at the same level as MBAs. Is that true? If it is I think I want to finish up my PhD because I don't have the money or the work experience to do a MBA. Anyway has anyone left research after your PhD and what are the most lucrative options in terms of both work load and money?

Thank you guys for your suggestion. Ktel I feel exactly like you. I am also really struggling with knowing when to ask for help. I don't know how much I should struggle on my own before I ask for help. I just feel like I am bothering the post-docs in my lab by asking them a lot of questions. Earlier when I had just joined the lab, I was working with a post-doc on a different project and I used to ask him questions when ever I had trouble understanding or executing things. He got mad at me and gave me a long lecture on grad school culture and how I was supposed to work hard and figure things out on my own. He asked me to not do the project if it is too hard for me so I had to abandon it after putting in a semester worth of work. After that I really retracted from asking for help. I don't want to piss off everyone in my lab as I have to work with them for the next couple of years. I know I need help but I just don't know who I should ask for help or how much help I should expect. I want to talk with more people but it is so hard to strike a conversation with people in my lab. Everyone is busy with their own work and just seem so uninterested in having a friendly conversation. Since research is so isolating, I am struggling because of loneliness as well. Being an international student makes it worse as well. Half of the people in my cohort is American and the rest Chinese and for me it has been really hard to fit in to either group. With the American group most of the conversations are about American pop culture and I don't understand the reference to a lot of things and I feel at loss of words and cannot participate in the conversation. I did my undergrad in the US as well and I had no trouble making friends back in college. I had both international and American friends because there was a nice balance of American and international students from different countries, so we had conversations that everyone could participate in. Not having any close friends to talk to about the struggles that I am having with research has made things even worse.

I am a second year graduate student in physical chemistry. I worked really hard in the past year and nothing has come out from my research and now I have no motivation to work at all. I am in a really big lab and even though my PI is really nice, he doesn't have much time for his students. So most of the time students work on their own. I have been struggling a lot with my research. I have no idea what I am doing. I try to read papers and think of ideas to do a research project but since I don't have much background in independent research, I have no clue about how I should approach a problem. I talked with a couple of post-docs to get some idea on how I can solve the research problem that I am working on, they give me some suggestions but I just don't know how to implement them. They use a lot of technical terms and ask me to use methods that I have never heard of. I try to read up on them, look through programs and their user manuals and try to do it but it doesn't work out. Since I don't have much technical training even though I understand the concept, I just can't execute it. Most of the graduate students in my lab already did a masters prior to coming here or had extensive research experience as an undergrad in top notch school and are very comfortable with research. I went to a small school without much research opportunities so I am very unfamiliar with the tools used in my research. So I am really struggling because of lack of proper technical and research background. I have been reading a lot of books and papers in the past year which has helped me strengthen my background in the subject matter but when it comes to progressing with my project it hasn't been of much help. Since all other graduate students are so comfortable with research, I feel so ashamed to be the only one who is not doing well and I don't even feel like trying anymore. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can do better with my research?