"Dear brilliant students: Please consider not doing a PhD."

[Krypton]

Food for thought.

Below is an increasingly viral opinion post that entered the blogosphere yesterday. It might inspire some of you PhD hopefuls into thinking a little bit longer and a little bit harder to ensure that you're really ready to embark on this (oft-troublesome) journey.

 

 

Dear brilliant students:

Please consider not doing a PhD.

You're in your final year of university. You're doing really well, you're getting stunningly good marks and lots of praise from your tutors. You've probably never been so happy in your life, you're using your incredible brain to think about really interesting, really hard problems. And you're starting to be aware of the frontiers of knowledge in your field, the stuff that isn't in textbooks yet, the stuff that people are right now actively trying to find out. Perhaps you did a summer project or a long finals project where you got a taste of actually doing some original research yourself, and it was mindblowingly awesome. 

What could possibly be better than spending the rest of your life doing this kind of thing, and hopefully even getting paid for it? Probably everybody around you is encouraging you to go for a PhD, because after all that's what brilliant students do. And universities look good when their best students go on to PhDs after graduating. The academics you most look up to are telling you that you, yes, you, could be like them one day. If you're at an elite university, you're perhaps experiencing the negative side to this, whispers and gossips and subliminal messages that anything other than a PhD is, well, y'know, a bit second-rate really. 

Look, I am in fact a career academic. I know exactly what's attractive about it, I've made considerable financial and personal sacrifices to get myself to a position where I can work in a university environment and spend my time doing groundbreaking research. And yet. The gateway into this life is a PhD, and the PhD system is deeply, deeply ****ed up when it isn't actively abusive. Doing a PhD will break you. It's pretty much designed to break you. Yes, even you, you who are brilliant (that almost goes without saying; it's because you're brilliant that you're contemplating doing a PhD in the first place). You who are resilient and have survived several kinds of **** that life has thrown at you just to get to the point where you're about to graduate with a brilliant degree. You who have the unconditional support of your family and friends and partners. If you have every admirable personal quality you can think of, if you have every advantage in life, still, getting through a PhD will grind you down, will come terrifyingly close to killing your soul and might well succeed. It will do horrible things to your mental and physical health and test to breaking point every significant relationship in your life. 

I'm writing this because it's PhD applications season, and because I've just come back from a conference that was supposed to be about networking for early career researchers and basically turned into a group therapy session for trauma survivors. And this is the winners of the system, those of us who actually graduated from our PhDs and found jobs in academia, and to a greater or lesser extent we've all survived by becoming the monster that tried to devour us. One of the workshop leaders "joked" about how he spent most of his PhD reading self-help books about how to recover from a nervous breakdown instead of academic texts, and pretty much everybody nodded in recognition. This sounds hopelessly exaggerated, I know. But seriously, the conference was run by an anthropologist who does ethnography of scientific research, and her work leans on psychological / anthropological models of collective trauma.

The thing about a PhD is that it's a criminally stupid way for highly intelligent people to train other highly intelligent people. The basic plan is that you attach the student to a supervisor and give them a number of years to "make an original contribution to the field". Countries other than the UK sometimes include a bit more actual educational structure than that, but also usually expect PhDs to take longer, and still include a number of years where the only goal is "produce a thesis". And since I did my PhD at least some progressive universities have started to include some figments of actual skills training as part of the programme, but it's never more than minimal. 

So one of the ways that a PhD breaks people is that it's a huge task, where the final aim is extremely vague and there are often few meaningful intermediate goals. Brilliant student, you're probably self-motivated and hard-working. Still, it's pretty hard to stay motivated when you're not getting any kind of feedback or sense of achievement, when you have no real deadlines on a timescale you can usefully think about. It's research, so at some point it will get bogged down and you'll spend many months or even years pursuing a dead end. Short-term student projects are carefully designed to give at least some kind of results in the few weeks available; actual research isn't that predictable, which is good because the whole point of research is to investigate an unexplored area, but also pretty gruelling if you're used to getting good results when you put in hard work. It's not like working hard to complete an essay or project and being rewarded with good marks. You work hard, really really hard, and you often get no reward at all, you just realize you've been wasting your time. 

If you get through all this and actually manage to discover something new, you have to write a thesis about it. That means spending several months where all you do is sit at your computer thinking and writing about an extremely narrow specialist area, the area in which you are almost the world expert and which you've been thinking about constantly for the last several years. In some ways everything depends on this task (ie it determines whether you actually come out with your PhD and the prospect of making an academic career); in other ways it's a massive amount of effort for essentially no return. If you're really lucky, your thesis might be interesting to a few dozen fellow-specialists. For most people, nobody will ever read it except your supervisor and examiners. If you have found anything that's interesting to a broader group than that, you'll have published it already as a journal article or book or conference proceedings or whatever is the accepted method in your field. Writing up will make you hate your subject, no matter how much you love it going in.

The combination of doing research, which is almost by definition mostly unproductive, and writing up is really soul-destroying. It's isolating, it's unrewarding, it basically makes people depressed and exhausted even if they started out with excellent health and confidence and so on. If you're at all prone to depressive illness or low self-esteem in the first place, it's hard to imagine anything more calculated to exacerbate those symptoms. The whole system of academia is set up based on extremely able people looking for every possible flaw in the work of other extremely able people; this hopefully means that only really rigorous research becomes accepted and relied on, but psychologically it means that no matter how good you are you will get a whole lot more criticism than praise pretty much all the time.

I should also note that if you're expecting to work 40-hour weeks, you'd better be registered as a part-time student, and if you don't have the health or stamina or external circumstances to manage that, well, it's going to be extremely hard to get through the system at all. PhD studies are so ridiculously open-ended, and so ridiculously competitive, that there's a ratchet which leads to success depending on being willing and able to put in as many hours as humanly possible (and quite often people attempt to do more than that and end up destroying their health and lives). Academia does have the advantage that hours are often a lot more flexible than in the business world; it's quite often possible and even expected to work at times that suit you, your metabolism, your external commitments etc rather than having to be present at a physical place of business 9-5 Monday to Friday. But the sheer volume of work is, well, not just enormous but essentially unlimited. The thing about not having any specific goals is that you can never really say that you've "done" a task, so you keep going. 

In the best case scenario, you get a stipend that (by virtue of being tax-exempt) is just about enough to live on for precisely three years. Pretty much all PhDs take more than three years to actually complete enough research and then write it up, even assuming you will definitely never need to take a break for medical or family reasons. So at some point, even "fully funded" students have to do this incredibly tough intellectual work while money is at best uncertain and in many cases there just isn't any. There's been controversy on Twitter recently about universities asking prospective students who aren't fully funded to produce evidence that they can lay hands on enough money for three years' living costs and fees, which of course is dreadful, financial status shouldn't be a barrier to academia. But in practice, if you don't have external resources to draw on, say parents or a partner who can support you, significant savings, skills you can use to earn a serious hourly rate for sporadic freelance work, it is very difficult to finish a PhD with enough money to cover food, shelter and other necessities. And, well, my hypothetical audience here is a brilliant student who's just finishing their undergrad degree, so likely already has fairly substantial student debt, and probably doesn't have the sort of resources I'm talking about.

So it's very likely that by the time you get those letters after your name, you'll be financially worse off than you are now. If you're lucky, only a little bit worse off, if you're unlucky, you (or your loved ones) will have spent serious money. And if the money doesn't exist, well, at some point you might have to choose between finishing your PhD and having enough to cover rent and food. There's also opportunity costs: you're brilliant, right, which probably means you have at least a better-than-average chance of getting an actual graduate job, potentially earning say £75K in three years. Of course, you're not thinking about a PhD because you want to get rich, you're motivated by the joy of discovery. But there's a difference between not getting rich and actually impoverishing yourself. And finance is one of the biggest reasons why people in fact don't complete PhD studies.

Where it crosses over from being just miserable and soul-destroying into actually being oppressive or abusive is in the relationship between supervisor and student. A supervisor has very nearly unlimited power over their student's entire life. Even a supervisor with good intentions has reached where they are in life by being good at their subject, not particularly by being good at training future academics. And all supervisors are themselves the product of this deeply dysfunctional training system. 

The best thing about academia is the same as the worst thing about academia: once you get to a certain level, you have almost total freedom to pursue what you find most interesting. This is one of the big reasons why people put up with the low pay and the limitless hours and the constant scrabble for funding and all the other awfulness. But the fact is that few academics are going to be passionately interested in things like, oh, equality and diversity policies or even health and safety sometimes. Lots of academics are basically quite well-meaning, but never get round to putting in the time to make sure their practice isn't oppressive. In the sciences particularly, they may have absolutely no training or education about social justice issues. 

Some of course are actively sexist, racist, homophobic, you name it. Senior academics come closer to being genuinely irreplaceable than you see in most normal jobs; only that particular person has expertise in their specific area, and only that particular person has that particular fellowship which brings money into the university. They're nearly untouchable by HR, and anyway it's culturally seen as part of the deal, the egg-heads come to work for peanuts in the public sector precisely because they don't have to waste their time with petty little bureaucratic details.

Now obviously the law's the law; students can of course bring complaints against their supervisors if they are being mistreated or discriminated against. Obviously this recourse is extremely costly in any job whatsoever, but in many ways it's worse for PhD students. If you don't get a PhD you very likely can't work in academia at all, and supervisors have vast amounts of power to prevent their students from completing their PhDs if they are crossed. Plus, with the multi-year, open-ended task that is a PhD, if you leave the course, no matter how bad conditions get, you end up with nothing to show for your years of hard work.

I know some specific individuals to whom this might apply, but for several reasons I want to make this point in a more general way. First of all I don't want anyone to feel personally targeted by this; this post did in fact start off as a comment to a post about the applications process, but then I decided I didn't have the right to say this kind of thing directly to someone, and if I did it would do more harm than good. And secondly, I want to get this out there, as an account by someone who knows the system from the inside. I want to talk about this stuff in the open, to reduce the extent you have to be a member of the secret club of people with personal connections in academia to know all this.

Brilliant student: I went into my PhD with every advantage you could think of, financial and emotional support from my parents, about as mentally stable as anyone I know, very high self-confidence, healthy and able-bodied, strong support network, the works. And yes, I'm female but I have been socialized in ways that feminists regard as male: I pretty much expect to be taken seriously in all situations and I've always been encouraged in my ambitions and had plenty of role-models and have never had to use up my energy fighting sexist microaggressions, much less overt sexism or sexual harassment. And with all those advantages, my PhD was a soul-killing ordeal; I think only now, 7 years after graduating, I'm starting to get back to functioning as well as I did when I was a brilliant student ready to start a PhD. And honestly, my PhD experience was better than about 95% of my peers; I only had to deal with incompetence and never malice, for example. And my university and ultimate boss were willing to step in and help me fix things when my relationship with my immediate supervisor ran into difficulties. 

I really don't want to come across as arguing that only people who are well-off, male-ish, white, English-speaking, straight, able-bodied and either single or with partners who are willing and able to be entirely supportive and never in the least bit dependent, should consider doing PhDs. Part of what's wrong with academia is that it already skews heavily towards people who have these sorts of advantages, so I most certainly don't want to contribute to that unfairness. You're brilliant, you are passionate about your field, goodness knows I want you to come and join me in furthering human knowledge! If you would like any advice from me in terms of playing the system, proofreading your applications or help picking a department where your PhD will be somewhat less miserable than it might be, I will be only too delighted to help. But I also want you to make the decision with open eyes, I want you to know that the costs of doing a PhD are higher than you can probably imagine right now.

I expect you, brilliant student, won't really be deterred by this. Likely you'll believe it will be different for you or it'll be worth it or you just plain can't imagine doing anything else. In fact, if I seriously thought this information would put you off, I probably wouldn't publish it. But when you plumb the depths of despair, when the whole system is conspiring to kill everything that makes you brilliant in the first place, I want you to remember this post and know that it's not just you, this is a very common, almost a universal, experience of what putting yourself through a PhD is like. And then just maybe you will one day be in a position to do something to make the system incrementally less awful.

 

[t1racyjacks]

I'm not a brilliant student so all this doesn't apply Q.E.D.

[Two Espressos]

Most of what's written in that post is exceedingly obvious to anyone serious about pursuing a Ph.D., so it's curious that the piece is written like it's saying something revelatory.

[PhDhopeful2013]

Most of what's written in that post is exceedingly obvious to anyone serious about pursuing a Ph.D., so it's curious that the piece is written like it's saying something revelatory.

Agreed. If someone going into any field or any line of work has unrealistic expectations about it (i.e. "i'll be CEO by 25!"), then they will surely have a reality check to come to grips with. Similarly, if someone hasn't fully vetted the trade-offs and opportunity costs associated with his/her job or field of choice, then he/she may be surprised down the road. Also a person's interests and goals change over time and with experience, which adds to the complexity of finding a fulfilling livelihood balanced with personal and material contentment. All of this is part of maturing, becoming an adult, and getting to know oneself fully, and unfortunately handling some substantial disappointments and challenges along the way is necessary. the process is not unique to academia, IMHO.

[Usmivka]

I think attribution is important (a basic requirement in academia, and a problem by absence on the web), and there are no links or other identifying features in this post. It makes it hard to evaluate whether the author is someone relevant or otherwise worth reading, which in turn makes it really tough to jump the "too long, didn't read" hurdle. So I looked it up (made harder since the next highest hits were similarly unattributed posts made by the same  poster, but on the college confidential forum) and think it came from here, a particularly verbose UK blog. Others can now evaluate the provenance for themselves.

Edited January 25, 2013 by Usmivka

[MoJingly]

And what about getting a PhD but without the end goal of working in academia?

[TeaGirl]

And what about getting a PhD but without the end goal of working in academia?

 

That's actually my goal. I want to work in industry research and I need a PhD for that. I have a parent in academia so I grew up hearing frequent stories about students, PhD, coursework, etc. While it isn't something I hate, especially now that I'm teaching as an instructor, I just don't have much interest to pursue it as a career.

 

It seems to me that many of these articles refer perhaps to non-STEM fields. I think it differs significantly from one field to another.

I was reading the PhD guidelines for one of the universities I applied to and it isn't actually that open ended. You have to take quals after year 1, advance to candidacy at year 2, and are allowed a maximum of 5 years total to finish your PhD. That doesn't sound very bad at all, especially since after the first year you usually get funded through an RA and the work you do for that usually is your PhD work.

 

I think the most important thing of course, is to get a good advisor who is willing to guide you a bit when you stumble. I have heard some horror stories, so research a prospective advisor well and ask his students about him/her.

Edited January 26, 2013 by TeaGirl

[bamafan]

That block of text is bigger than the Berlin Wall...

 

But in all seriousness, I agree with Tea Girl. In many (most?) STEM fields, not only is a PhD beneficial for industry, it is often necessary if you want to ever move up. In some other fields, job prospects may or may not be more limited in terms of what directions you can go (ie mostly teaching).

[dtkunz]

She actually tips her hat to one of the most helpful things I bring to the table: I would love to teach, but I plan to work in the local church as well, and I don't intend to become a pure academician.

 

My field (hopefully) is religion, and if there is anything I am both aware of and saddened by it is the need to fix most systems from the inside.

[Eigen]

It's also worth noting that frequently, at least in STEM fields, when people talk about academic jobs, they're really only paying attention to schools with graduate programs, R1/R2 institutions.

 

That's only a fraction of the colleges and universities out there- about 300 out of 4300.

 

If you're really interested in teaching, mentoring, and working with undergraduates, there are a lot more available options than the ones people frequently look at.

[raneck]

This just sounds like someone who jumped head first into the shallow end without looking, and now assumes that everyone else is as shortsighted as he was (after all, he was brilliant!). While the "you should really think about this first" message is important, it could be delivered without the hysterics.

[RubyBright]

Sure, it's a little scary to think you could easily end up at a university like that (assuming you're brilliant)... but the PhD students I know at my school are not downtrodden or mentally abused. In fact, the one working in my lab seems relatively content with his lot in life, as long as it doesn't drag on too long, and his cohort seems to largely be the same. Yes they put in long hours, and they work hard, but as far as I can tell, they're far from being destroyed. The professors are collaborative, and seem to treat their students pretty well. Maybe this less abusive model isn't a common situation, but I see it, and I know it exists. 

Edited January 29, 2013 by RubyBright

[TeaGirl]

I'm coming to see that the ones who do the worst mentally and emotionally at graduate school may be the ones who had the least idea of what they were getting into. I think if you go in with clear goals, realistic expectations, and understanding what it will take to get that PhD, you are less likely to come out feeling abused or with such a cynical view of the entire process.

[mbs191]

Agreed, tea girl!  When I was looking at PhD programs back in 2010, and visited a few schools up and down the East Coast, one school stood out (in a bad way) because one of the professors I met with GRILLED me about why I wanted to do a PhD, and even had a chart from an article she had written about why PhDs were mostly unnecessary and that with a Masters degree, you could pretty much do 85% of what you wanted, etc.

 

I'm all for realistic outlooks, but, IMHO, this professor, much like the writer of the blog article, contains some bitterness / resentment that could be taken as trying to help others not fall into the same trap, but at the same time comes off as sour.

 

Just my 2cents 

[sansao]

I stopped reading after it said doing research was unproductive by nature, and that even worse, you have to *gasp* write about it in a thesis. Is this person serious?

[katerific]

I'm not a brilliant student so all this doesn't apply Q.E.D.

 

I have got a high five for you right here.

High five, brother.

[Linelei]

I would like to point out that, as far as I can tell, this is a UK citizen who went through the UK system. I don't mean to make blanket, generalized statements (like the author of this blog did), but I have heard from multiple people that UK PhD programs tend to have far less guidance, support, and/or supervision than American programs. I'm sure there are people for whom independence and lack of guidance is a great work environment; I even tend to enjoy open-endedness and independence. But ultimately I decided not to apply to UK programs because I wanted more rigorous and guided training. I will hopefully have the rest of my career to be independent (within limits, of course). 

 

It's disturbing to me that this person doesn't take into account more differences in countries, subjects, and styles. My closest friends at my current institution are all grad students and, while they certainly are stressed about things sometimes, all in all their souls are not crushed and they have plenty of time and energy for relationships, friends, hobbies, and even outside work. Yes, I am fully expecting a PhD to be a ton of work. And I have also heard the transition can be very difficult if you are a traditional student who goes straight to grad school. But come on: insisting that your experience of a "soul-killing ordeal" is the norm for everyone else? That hyperbolic style really puts me off. 

[ANDS!]

If that was a "blog post" someone needs a refresher course in blog posting.  I've read critiques on Hemingway with less words.

[Guest |||]

I gave up reading when he insisted that a ph.d will break you

 

 

I often mingle in the grad student lounge and yes we from numerous fields moan and complain about how terrible and backbreaking a ph.d is

 

 

 

However, this is nothing compared to most jobs.  Does working in graduate school suck?  Sometimes, of course.  Is it rewarding?  Incredibly.

 

Even if I come out with a ph.d and no job, the years I spent earning the ph.d are by far more rewarding than any job I could have held in the meantime, or other menial tasks I might have been doing.

 

 

Also, as much as we moan and complain, its not thaaaaat bad either.

[wildviolet]

Also, as much as we moan and complain, its not thaaaaat bad either.

 

Yep!

 

At least now I can go to the bathroom whenever I need to instead of waiting for my planning period or lunch break (I used to be a secondary science teacher). And I have more than 30 minutes for lunch! And I can go out to a nice restaurant for lunch... or stroll through the university's lovely gardens... or work in my PJs from home... or have great, stimulating discussions with my advisor. It's not a bad life.

[RiseofthePhoenix]

Yes, getting a phd will challenge you financially, emotionally and mentally. Yes, the work load is heavy and working hours long. I don't understand how any of this is supposed to be revelatory in any way. If you're an undergrad going in, then know that this is the beginning of your preofessional career. You're really being hired on as junior faculty inthe sense that, hopefully you're getting funded and paid to do some kind of work as well as do research.

Also, I'm getting really tired of hearing people drop the "oh, you're the adjunct generation/no more jobs for you" line. I hear the same thing from nurses, doctors, electricians, bankers, lawyers..etc. Long story short, while I appreciate the endless spiel for what it is, the bottom line is that grad school can also be fun and a great place for personal and professional growth if you learn to navigate the waters.