Livre d'Or

This is a totally awesome comment, thank you so much for putting all this advice out there! Also I <3 your cuneiform icon.

The supervisor thing: I agree it's important to choose the right supervisor, which means being willing to reject the wrong one and turning down what might potentially be your only offer of a PhD place, a very scary prospect when you've set your heart on getting into a competitive grad field. But my feeling is that the ethics and the personality fit of your supervisor shouldn't make that much difference to your life. All jobs risk having bad bosses, but the bad bosses are (at least somewhat!) constrained from actually treating you like a slave or sabotaging your career.

I thoroughly agree with you about the joy thing. I mean, if you don't love your subject it's hard to imagine how on earth you can get through the long, soul-sucking ordeal that is a PhD. But having that love does make it even worse when things go so badly wrong that your joy gets crushed.

I think your specific advice about how to minimize the suck is very much on point, and thank you for speaking from a place of experience! I do agree entirely that lots of it is tests of your fortitude more than your knowledge or your skills, so it's vitally important to set yourself up to get through it with as much fortitude as possible. I think this is kind of a bad thing; people with the potential to make brilliant contributions to their field shouldn't also have to have extremely tough psychological armour, but that's how the reality is at the moment.