Livre d'Or

I am a recently-tenured professor with a Ph.D., and I'm not sure that your experiences are that representative of people in other areas of academe. My impression is that you work in the sciences; I am a professor in the humanities. The worst part of getting a Ph.D. in the humanities is not finishing the Ph.D. It is trying to get a job afterwards. The difficulty of getting a permanent full time job is something you don't even mention (one of the reasons I guessed that you work in some field where there is the prospect of getting a job in the real world after the Ph.D.--not an option in my field in the humanities). More on that here: http://chronicle.com/article/Just-Dont-Go-Part-2/44786/

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.