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

kryptonsa36 · January 22, 2013, 11:59pm

Food for thought.

Below is an increasingly viral opinion post that entered the blogosphere today. 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.

RacinReaver · January 23, 2013, 11:50am

Good to see that a number of the problems that author has with PhDs aren’t necessarily a problem for PhDs here in the states.

I will agree about how they feel about writing up a thesis. Basically, everything in my thesis has already been published as a paper. Only now I have to go back and rewrite all of it because that’s what’s required. =

kryptonsa36 · January 23, 2013, 1:31pm

Yes, and consider that PhDs across the pond share these sentiments even though the length of graduate programs there tends to be shorter than those here in the States.

juillet · January 23, 2013, 1:36pm

It’s funny - I’ve seen this narrative about 30 million times (the brilliant student whom everyone pushes to get a PhD, and who walks wide-eyed and naive into the abyss desiring praise and the life of the mind) but it does not reflect my personal experience at all. I got good grades - not stunning, but good - and I got encouragement from professors, but not heaped-upon praise. It was my own personal decision to pursue a PhD, and I went into it with both eyes open (and full funding). I knew about the dismal market (because a cursory Google search will turn up hundreds of articles about it) and I didn’t originally plan to become a professor, so I got the kinds of experiences that would be valuable to non-academic careers as well as an academic one. I entered academe because I wanted to do research and I really loved it, despite the cons of a research career, not because I wanted to live “the life of the mind.” Actually, the life of the mind sounds kind of boring.

And I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment that the PhD is designed to break you, “will come terrifyingly close to killing your soul and might well succeed. It will do horrible things to your mental and physical health…” That’s all true, IMO. And my program is actually a touchy-feely, collegial, friendly place to be. My advisor is amazing and truly interested in my work and career; I’m fully funded with an NSF; I’m married and have close friends and enjoy my life. And yet…it’s still true! The process is 5-7 years (or more) of pure grueling intensity. And it doesn’t get less intense; you just learn to deal with it better. But before you learn to deal with it better, there’s a breaking point (or several), a point(s) at which you think you simply cannot take anymore. Everyone in my cohort has been in psychological therapy at some point. (I’m in the US, by the way, so it’s not limited to UK academics. Yes, the model is more educational here, but it also takes longer, and you are STILL expected to make a contribution to the field in the form of your dissertation).

That said, some of it doesn’t ring true. I’m in the social sciences, myself. My program does have meaningful intermediate goals (finish coursework = MA, finish comprehensives and dissertation proposal = MPhil, finish dissertation = PhD, there are a clear outline of goals for each semester and each year). There aren’t any hard and fast deadlines, but that’s YOUR responsibility, because one of the features of an academic career is that no one gives you any deadlines. Thus, part of a PhD program is to teach you to make and meet your own deadlines. I can’t say I’ve spent months pursuing a dead end; it is possible, however.

In the social sciences, the goal of your thesis is to publish 3-5 journal articles out of it. So while yes, theoretically your dissertation is going to be in some specialist area, it’s not true that no one else should care about it. At least in my program, part of the dissertation topic selection process is picking an area at which exploration needs to be done. My own dissertation is planned around 4 papers that I hope to publish out of it, and it’s in a cutting-edge area of my field. I’m not saying that I’m not going to hate it, I hear everyone hates it when they’re done, but that doesn’t mean it has to be obscure.

Also, whether research is isolating depends a lot on your field. My field relies on collaboration - almost no one sole-authors papers here. And it can be rewarding, but it depends on what your reward structure is. You have to learn to really like and become motivated by intrinsic rewards, because there are few external ones. But yes, parts of the process can be very depressing and isolating and exhausting. You have to be really good at self-affirmation.

Also the joke is that you can work any 80 hours you want in academia. Including at 4 am. I’ve gotten emails from my professors at 4 am.

My supervisor does NOT have unlimited power over my entire life. He has some power over my dissertation topic, and sort of the flow of my research in some aspects. But he doesn’t have unlimited power even over my academic life, much less my personal life. Part of this may be because I have external funding, but a lot of it has to do that I decided early on that I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my personal life for an academic one, so I struggle to make time for myself and my husband and my friends.

I know a LOT of academics that are passionate about equality and diversity and health and safety. Then again, I am a public health scientist who does research on health disparities.

Engineer913 · January 23, 2013, 2:11pm

Whew! I was worried there for a little bit, but luckily I’m just an average intellect but very hard working. I feel bad for all you brilliant students.

On a more serious note this seems like a very narrow cynical view by someone who most likely didn’t get the life they wanted. It’s true you shouldn’t let people push you and do your research first, but we all have different goals and experiences leading up to graduate school, that will shape us and prepare us in various ways.

It’s true in the middle of a Ph.D. many students are at the breaking point where they see friends or family off in careers in industry, with a nice house, good job, and plenty of time to spend with friends and family. However, everyone I know as a friend who has finished a Ph.D., every faculty member, or adviser I have had has always said it is by far the most rewarding thing they did in there life and they don’t regret it. Maybe all my colleagues and faculty I know are idealistic and fools… or maybe they didn’t let the world twist them into cynics.

If you want a bit of a taste though and are unsure of the 5+ year commitment, enroll in a difficult thesis Masters program in your field, with a demanding adviser. I did that and it made me crave the insanity of graduate school that much more. I’m actually about 100x less depressed or in need of “therapy” as the writer claims, than when I was working in industry. If you really want to know what will drive you insane, try working in a cubicle making someone else rich off your ideas.

zotzotzot13 · January 23, 2013, 6:38pm

just curious, do you have a link to the original?

spectastic · January 23, 2013, 7:02pm

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if someone from an affluent background, who’s not used to getting down and dirty, and who’s been entitled to everything he/she ever wanted, might feel out of place in a phd.

kryptonsa36 · January 23, 2013, 8:05pm

Just Google search “Dear brilliant students.” CC doesn’t allow links to blog posts.

molliebatmit · January 23, 2013, 10:24pm

That sucks. My program allows papers to be integrated as chapters, as long as you format the whole thing properly, so you only have to write an introduction and discussion if all your chapters have been published.

As for the original post, I can’t say writing my dissertation was so soul-sapping for me (even though I did have to write two data chapters, since those papers are in the process of being finalized and submitted). But I saw the dissertation as a required, but useful, exercise, and not as the major focus of my work – I didn’t spend “several months where all you do is sit at your computer thinking and writing about an extremely narrow specialist area”. I wrote my dissertation in about six weeks of doing experiments in the morning and writing in the afternoon.

As for the rest, I’m pretty much in agreement with juillet. A PhD is a tough row to hoe, and prospective students shouldn’t come in without knowing that it’s not all chasing butterflies through verdant fields. It’s certainly very different from undergrad, and it can be tough to adjust to a life where how hard you work is largely up to you.

All in all, while my PhD wasn’t easy, and I absolutely worked myself into the ground for about the last two years of it, I don’t think it’s made me a less-functional human being. This in particular

just seems like overdramatic pity-partying to me.

raneck · January 28, 2013, 5:24pm

Seconded on the pity-partying. 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.

snarlatron · January 28, 2013, 6:52pm

One could just as easily try to dissuade people from starting a business, taking on any number of professions, getting married, having children, or any challenging undertaking. Life is hard, and life can be rewarding.

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

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