Livre d'Or

Thank you, I'm glad you found it useful. It's the sort of thing where you have lots of wisdom and a fair deal of second-hand experience, so I particularly appreciate the support from you.

I've often compared the PhD process to a Mediaeval apprenticeship, and you don't get nearly enough choice in who takes you on and becomes (almost literally) your Master. But maybe religious initiation is a better metaphor! Because very often the problem isn't that the supervisor is actively abusive or evil, just that there isn't a good fit between supervisor and student, and far too much pivots on that particular relationship.

The needing to move around a lot... in some ways I see that as inherent to academia, rather than a flaw in the PhD system specifically. There are great advantages, in that you get to travel and work in truly multinational environments, but it's really hard on families and friendship networks. For UK PhD students it tends to happen in your 20s, which can be a better time for dealing with suddenly having to up sticks and move to a new country. But in the US because the PhD is so long that career stage affects lots of people who have, or who might want given the choice, long-term relationships and kids.

The job market, that's a whole other thing. I mean, academia is specifically designed to be a steep-sided pyramid, it weeds people out very heavily at every stage, and that makes putting yourself through all this a big risk. Plus people are working on trying to fix this, but it's a big problem that you spend so little of your PhD studies actually learning how to deal with things like job applications or picking up skills that are useful for the people who end up, sooner or later, working outside academia.