I am entering my final year of undergraduate studies, and application season is approaching. Over the past year, I've been flip-flopping between plans for graduate school. There is an idealistic part of me that wishes to pursue a PhD (in my field, job opportunities are a bit limited).
For the past 7 months, I have been working in my research area of interest, doing the sort of work that I had hoped to do in a PhD program.
I've been working on 2 projects in collaboration with two PIs during this time. Both projects began with optimistic talk about completion dates within 2-4 months, but since then it feels as if we have been running in circles and other enclosed shapes.
In essence, we have been trying to establish empirically that hypothesis X is true. I have come to rather strongly believe that hypothesis X is not true, and the past 30-40 experiments we've run over the past 4 months (all involving very minor tweaks of the same experiment) have felt a bit futile. I understand that we are persisting because of a commitment to a specific theoretical perspective, but it strikes me that perhaps we should have at least begun exploring the idea of questioning/revising our theoretical stance about 20 experiments ago. With the exception of a few fleeting bursts of inspiration, my PIs are quite pessimistic about the prospects for these projects. For many months now, I have spent most of my waking hours thinking about these projects and how I might be able to 'make them work'... just waiting for some burst of insight.
Yet I have a nagging feeling that our troubles arise because we are attempting to demonstrate falsehoods. I feel like a desperate surgeon, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that my patient is practically dead.
Throughout all of this, I have developed a number of skills, to be sure. The most concrete of these might be that my programming skills and general-'emergency'-resourcefulness have improved immensely. Generally when I experience some success on either of these projects, it is simply in writing code that helps to provide evidence against our hypotheses.
Sometimes, I can't help but wonder if I'm the problem somehow. I've received nothing but encouragement, and yet the thought nags me sometimes. Maybe the only reason I worry about this is because I have no idea how often projects fail. Both of my PIs have remarked that we've been having "horrible luck", and both have mentioned other times that projects have turned out this way... But I'm slightly surprised that this is happening with 2 separate projects.
Although I have thought about all of the above fairly regularly over the past year, I am thinking about this a bit more now, as I have just experienced a breakup of a fairly long relationship due to incompatible lifestyles with my significant other. In large part, this is because there are some not-so-soft "deadlines" on these projects (for example, I am expected to give a public presentation near the middle of the summer... but I may try to cancel this talk). As a result, I was spending most of my hours in the office, trying to make things work... and sometimes being met with small, illusory successes... but ultimately failing. My stress and my lack of availability ultimately led to the end of our relationship.
Even ignoring this recent breakup, I frequently find myself wondering whether pursuing a PhD would be "worth it". I'm a quiet person who would spend a lot of time studying, reading articles, and working on various personal projects (many of which would probably be outside of my research area) if completely left to my own devices. I'm not too social, and I've spent most of my life in isolation, devoting all of my time and energy to various personal projects.
For this reason, people who have known me since I was young assume that a PhD is the natural next step for me. I have also long assumed this...
But I get the sense that what I really want in life is the following:
1) sufficient financial/other freedom to work on personal projects (programming/mathematical and artistic)
2) a life in which I am not isolated from others, and in which I can sometimes have free time to relax
3) a job in which I might work on problems that have a certain type of impact - say on the level of analyzing other peoples' data or designing a program to solve other peoples' problems (essentially, I suppose I am growing increasingly disinterested in having a career that hangs on theorizing... but I like the fulfillment of wrestling with a novel problem and finding a solution)
I do not know how to begin to achieve these rather general goals. I've begun to truly appreciate what a large commitment a PhD would be. I'm very interested in my field and following new research developments and ideas within it... but I'm no longer sure that the realities of research in my field are right for me. Generally, I don't know what to do other than pursue a PhD... But one option I've considered is to pursue a Masters degree in an Applied-Math/Computational-Statistics area (not my field, but these are technical 'tools' used in my field), and aim for a job outside of academia.
The hope would be to find employment in which my goals/responsibilities would more often be concrete (like a math or programming problem) and not constantly shifting... I get the sense that it might be possible to achieve a slightly less stressful lifestyle this way.
Otherwise, I'm simply not sure what the best course of action might be for me. Upon reflection, I've realized that my absolute ideal lifestyle would be as a freelance worker, or a fairly independent employee - perhaps as a programmer. Yet this is likely unrealistic - especially considering that I would almost certainly need a few years of self-study and working on open source projects to be ready for that sort of work.
I realize that there is quite a lot in this post. If anyone can offer some thoughts or advice, it would be greatly appreciated.
