Dear brilliant students:
Jan. 22nd, 2013 02:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livPlease 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 fucked 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 shit 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.
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 fucked 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 shit 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.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-28 11:24 pm (UTC)So I am currently in my final year of PhD (*SOB*) and... okay. I'm still glad I did it? Because even though I am in an absurdly tiny specialist area and I'm not sure anyone other than me or my examiners will read my thesis, it is still cool, and I am glad to have had the experience of doing research. And because if I hadn't, I would have always always always asked myself "what if?"
But oh my god do I hear you in this post. I went in wanting to be an academic and having been set on that goal for years. Now I'm pretty sure I would not be one for love or money, because it would make me MISERABLE. I talk to my mother (whose career trajectory looks like it'll be very similar to mine - maths PhD, then going into IT) about things like "oh god I just want, you know, the feeling of actually succeeding at something, that what I do is actually worthwhile" and she nods wisely and tells me she remembers feeling the same way during her PhD. I take up knitting and almost cry over a scarf because I actually have something to point at and go "I made this! From scratch! Me! and I can TOUCH IT it's THERE!"
(and they warn you about it they warn you but you don't listen because you can't imagine it until you've been there.)
also I count my lucky stars for my supervisor. (My dad is an academic himself yes I come from a ridiculously academic family what of it, and he gave me the following advice when I went supervisor hunting: "An interview isn't just for them to figure out if they want you, it's for YOU to learn if YOU want to work with THEM." That was amazingly amazingly useful and I am glad I kept it in mind.) Because, uh, I kind of popped up in a meeting three months after I started going "surprise! I just got diagnosed with a disability! And it has kind of... severe effects on my studies. And it's a disability you will have heard of except that my case is nothing like the stereotypes and my difficulties are not part of the popular image of it at all." And it has caused serious problems through the course of my PhD and he has been SO FANTASTIC throughout. And at the same time I see the other guy in our working group and how he treats his students and go "if I'd been working with him, it would not have worked. I'd have had to give up."
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-30 08:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-30 11:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-31 02:06 pm (UTC)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 am not trying to put down your experience, because I've seen it often enough to know there is truth here, but having seen my brilliant ex-boyfriend struggle, and several other brilliant friends not make it, I wonder if that was half the problem. A PhD is a very late stage to discover that you are just one among many.
I am not brilliant. I graduated with a 2i. I have never been top of the class at any time in my life. I was warned ahead of time that a Phd could be deeply boring at times, and it was. I was a feminist, but I was also working class and spent most of my time at uni feeling inadequate. I was also very sick (I weighed 6.5 stone the week of my viva, having been diagnosed with celiac--finally--seven days before). I also did not get a grant and worked as a visiting lecturer for the first two years of my PhD and had a full time job after that. I mention these things only because you frame this piece in the way you do. I am no superwoman. Very far from it.
At no point was I ever in a position of the kind of expectations you outline (my family regarded a PhD as some kind of failure).
I loved my PhD. I loved my supervisor (who I will name, Professor Edward Royle, at York), I loved my research, I loved writing up. I loved the articles I wrote, the people I worked with and the mentors I found (tho I would like to note that most of the feminist women in my area were very hostile, and seemed to be committed to "only room for one at the top", and I benefited from the mentorship of older men in the end. I know that's a kind of privilege).
The thing that always kept me going, and it is what I say to applicants now, is that I never thought of the PhD as anything other than the PhD. It wasn't a route, it wasn't a stepping stone, it was the thing I desperately wanted. And the other thing that kept me going was a hell of a lot of experience of failure, so that when things went wrong, that was just par for the course, and while my brilliant colleagues fell by the way side, I did the solid tortoise trudge.
This is the advice I give to my PhD students.
1. Only do a PhD if you want to do a PhD. There is no other good reason for doing it.
2. Have a project on the side: when you get bored, work on the project (ie never stop altogether).
3. Build up networks, and feel free to talk to people other than me.
4.Be a tortoise: all that matters is that you get there in the end.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-31 02:22 pm (UTC)dissenting opinions
Date: 2013-02-04 08:10 pm (UTC)Re: dissenting opinions
Date: 2013-02-08 10:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-14 11:39 pm (UTC)A). Whether or not you had research experience prior to starting it (I did; in the sciences it's one of those "musts" for getting into a good program, so I was already well-acquainted with the feeling of "FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT"),
B). What field you're in, and
C). Whether or not academia was your only choice of job (in what I'm doing, it's not, and we're largely dissuaded from doing it because, well, it's thankless).
Then again, I'm hardly "brilliant", so maybe that has something to do with it...
I've definitely run into sexism in the field, but being in the PNW with a PI who is considered one of the top in said field, especially in this area, and is also a major feminist helps. Without my PI I'd be floundering.
*I realized this through my second year, for anyone going, "so why'd you do it, then?"
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-01 07:11 pm (UTC)The worst part is finding a job
Date: 2013-02-15 05:25 pm (UTC)I attended one of the universities in the US most famous for psychological abuse of its graduate students, yet I made it out more or less sane, and I enjoy my work. However, I finished the Ph.D. in 2005. It is much, much harder to find a job since 2008, and I feel very sorry that my younger colleagues, many of whom have written books and do brilliant work, are unable to find permanent employment. Some of my friends with Ph.D.s think of their graduate student years as a kind of paradise (depending on their graduate advisers, and on the amount of financial support they got during those years). The worst part for them is being adjunct instructors who make about $3,500 per course, with no job security and little chance of permanent employment. I tell my undergraduate advisees to think of becoming a professor as something like becoming a professional artist or a musician. The odds are stacked against you, but if you're passionate about it and have realistic expectations about what you're getting into, you should still go for it.
Re: The worst part is finding a job
Date: 2013-10-11 03:08 am (UTC)The only people that should get a PhD are those that are have so many advantages and are so intelligent (1 in 100,000 rarity) that they will be actively sought out and will have problems finding employment.
Re: The worst part is finding a job
Date: 2013-10-11 03:09 am (UTC)...that have so many advantages...
...and will have no problems finding employment.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-06 06:59 pm (UTC)Have Dream Job, Got offered PhD
Date: 2013-05-09 07:31 pm (UTC)Reading your "Consider don't get a PhD" has enhanced my anxiety about the whole thing. I've also experienced the negative sexist 'white old boys club' during both my undergrad and MS. I'm really thinking of not taking the offer along with the huge pay cut now, as well as considering I also need to start a family real soon as the time clock is ticking.
Absolutely agree
Date: 2013-06-18 08:40 pm (UTC)Very well written and very realistic.
Finishing up my PhD
Date: 2013-10-11 03:03 am (UTC)I am finishing my writing now. I started with one adviser and had to switch (1st adviser lied to me about my funding situation to get me in their lab).
I grew up poor, and as a result finished my undergrad at a university few have heard of (they gave me a full academic scholarship and I could live at home because it was nearby). Flowing from that, I later attended decent, but not elite universities for my graduate degrees.
All aptitude tests I've taken place me above the 1 in 1,000 rarity level. I have a BS, MS, and soon PhD; and I think I've had only one teacher/prof that was obviously more intelligent than myself, but of course many were more knowledgeable in their field.
The problem I have now: I am by far more capable than my dissertation committee. We agreed on my work, and I've accomplished it. But despite how carefully and thoroughly I explain it, they do not understand or grasp what I have done. I may not have my dissertation approved for this reason. They think it makes no sense simply because they cannot wrap their mind around it or they are rather closed minded (e.g. if it is not directly aimed at fixing a known social problem, but instead adds to general knowledge, then one member considers it useless).
I'm very upset.
You're right, Liv
Date: 2013-10-19 04:05 pm (UTC)So I'm going to the uni counselling service as soon as I can and I'll talk things through with them. I hope to have made my final decision within a month.
Academics seem to give up their lives to do it. The only two that I admire in my field are admirable precisely because they are well known for having other hobbies and interests. So I did try to emulate them for a while. But I think they have a resilience and social advantages that I don't.
So I think I'm just going to try to be a normal person again. If any of the friendships I've made in academia last beyond my quitting, I'll be surprised. But hopefully one or two of them will. :-)
Thank you :)
Date: 2013-10-30 12:22 am (UTC)I have been following a PhD for the last 6,5 years and the end is in sight. However, I have wanted to quit so many times and been pushed to the brink of suicide on several occasions as a direct result of the unspeakable, insanity-inducing shit that I have had to endure. I feel nothing but the deepest hatred and disrespect for several of the people I have had to work for and (completely uncharacteristically for me) I genuinely, sincerely hope that they come to some kind of serious physical harm in future for what they have done to me.
Allow me to explain; in addition to the usual PhD crap of competing with fellow students, enduring colossal arrogance, being utterly ignored, criticised, marginalised, and watching time, money and lives flow down the toilet for years on end in some kind of ghastly extravagant waste of government money being spent solely to crush other people and feed the narcissistic egos of a few abusive individuals who mistakenly consider themselves to be geniuses whilst ripping off the work of their students, I have had to literally beg for money every three months and "reapply" for my position (note: this is not very motivating, especially when money is not short. I feel like a cheap, trashy neuroscience hooker).
My work has also been stolen and published uncredited and 2 of my 3 supervisors have been openly abusive and made the harshest possible comments about my personality, professional and my personal and romantic life, including comparing my dead baby to a used condom. For example:
- "you destroy all your relationships" (not true; friends with everyone, a wide, lovely social circle, always very popular at school and university and with both sexes)
- "I spoke to everyone about you and they said "yeah, he's kind of ok but quite weird"" (the relevance to my work here is not readily apparent. And again; friends with everyone, built collaborations with two labs, went for a placement in one that I enjoyed enormously and made excellent data for a high-impact paper. Disregarded.)
- "why don't you fuck off back to your own country" (this is from a 50-something professor to a freshly-arrived 20-something inexperienced grad student within 6 weeks arriving and being terribly enthusiastic and working all the hours I could. Pleasant character.)
- "what the is this fucking shit your are producing? don't fuck it up" (assessment of my work; produced alone, with no supervision. Turns out to be excellent quality and is then presented at a conference as his own. A paper is then produced **UNCREDITED** TO ME including my novel, never- before seen findings. = FRAUD, MISCONDUCT.)
My personal favourite:
- "do you cry each time you throw away a condom? Everyone has abortions and people die and it's never a problem for them. You are both stupid" (after my girlfriend suffered severe and incapacitating depression following an abortion we had so that I could continue my PhD and she could continue her studies and I was pressurised into speaking about my personal life and describing a couple of issues in confidence, including the person I was closest to in my whole family dying young from cancer in that same space of time).
After this last insult I had to take leave for 9 months as there was a very real danger that I would have just fucking lost control. I have never felt such consistent, blind hatred of another person to the point where I felt I could not control my actions, but this was that point. I was pushed beyond my limit and had to take a step back. On the positive side I became really awesome at my chosen sport by using this energy constructively. Rather than smashing his face into the ground repeatedly for insulting my dead child, relative and partner, I did it to something else. I could almost laugh at how another human being can be such an utter dick - if I wasn't secretly hoping that one of his children also dies. Although I wouldn't wish that, would I? There are some things you just don't say.
This sordid list could easily stretch out. However, fortunately for me I have worked outside of academia for 6 years and had on the whole extremely pleasant, normal, functional relationships and excellent feedback from pretty much everyone I have ever worked with (or completely neutral at worst). The everyday kindnesses that I have experienced and become accustomed to in my previous life have buffered me somewhat, but conversely made what I have experienced all the more distressing and utterly unacceptable.
Ultimately, I must say that I find all of this deeply, deeply embarrassing. None of this has anything to do with science and everything to do with some deeply disturbed, fundamentally flawed, colossally immature people who just don't know how to behave themselves. I try to rise above it.
Thanks again anyway; your blog post made a real difference to me.
Breakdown
Date: 2016-04-03 11:54 am (UTC)Lesley
Thank Liv
Date: 2017-05-30 06:29 am (UTC)Worthless PhD
Date: 2018-10-14 03:34 pm (UTC)