Among the many interesting things about graduate school is its propensity to spark greater drinking than I ever thought possible. After preparing (most of) a three-hour talk on using R, I definitely found that celebrating America’s greatest brewer-turned-patriot was useful. (For the benefit of readers who are serious snobs, my favorite beers are much more hoppy and more indie than anything brewed by such a large producer.)
I’m more interested, though, in the thoughts of those who have problems that can’t be solved by the sweet release of Mr. Adams’s brewery. In particular, Dan and I would like to hear from students who are either at the end of their rope with graduate school–or who have already passed that point, and decided to leave.
There’s no way around it: Grad school sometimes sucks. For those who left: when did you decide it was too much? For those who are struggling with whether to stay in: What keeps you going? What pushes you out?
Please post via comments or feel free to email me with your stories. I hope it goes without saying, but anonymity is super guaranteed.
I’m in, I love it, and I’m staying for the long haul. That said, I’d say there are definitely more things that can push you out than keep you in. Long hours, work load, lack of funding, lack of faculty and fellow grad student support, the 5-6 years a PhD will demand, etc. If this is your life, walking that road can be a herculean act of sadism.
For me, I was lucky/I busted my ass in undergrad to get into top programs that then were willing to fund me for the duration of my studies and waive tuition. Having guaranteed funding is huge. I also have a phenomenal advisor who is investing in me and treats me like a colleague, not indentured labor. My department is also small, so quality face time with faculty and senior grad students is easy.
It goes without saying that it’s a ton of work, and when I’m 8 hours into a paper or analysis with no end in sight, sometimes I wonder why I left a sweet private sector job and a higher paycheck. Honestly, though, I LOVE this stuff. Reading. Learning. Teaching others about what I love and seeing them come to, maybe not LOVE, but at least appreciate and know about what I do; it’s a straight up high. If you don’t have the passion, even with a great advisor, funding, an original project, and all the other potential upsides, grad school won’t be worth it. Grad school is not the place to go because you don’t know what to do with your life, or because you don’t want to grow up just yet. It’ll be at least half a decade. At least be happy during that time doing something you like.
Why frame it as a rational decision?
Why not?
I can think of a joke about how attending grad school is irrational in the first place, but I doubt that’s what you meant. Can you unpack this comment more?
Sure. I should start by saying that I agree that some people may at some point think it is rational for them to leave grad school.
However, unless you’re interested only in _those_ people, and say, not in those who “choose” to leave it after much emotional distress and frustration, then your framing of the question is limiting.
If you’re interested in all possible answers, then perhaps it would be better to frame it as: Why do people decide to leave grad school?
Alternatively, you may want to explain to us how and whether emotion relates to your understanding of rationality and rational decision-making. (Awesome people like Jonathan Mercer have argued that emotional beliefs are a key part of rationality, with which I agree to an extent –the extent being the murky point at which talking about emotion risks losing its distinctiveness.)
There may be other more social forms of reasoning/pressure that lead people to leave grad school (“I’m sick of my parents calling me a slob, and my friends a loser”), but I presume empirically they may be less frequent.
All fair points. (Note that the title and the post actually approach this differently.)
Your initial question did, however, force me to think through some of these issues (and now I have more to think about). Obviously emotional states (and here different from what I understand Mercer to mean) matter in decisionmaking too: to take an extreme example, we normally don’t think that eating a whole
goddamnit.
a whole quart of Haagen Dazs is acceptable, but romantic comedies assure me that in some emotional states it is.
So I think there’s a range of issues to be considered. At the one extreme, there’s a homo economicus simply calculating expected utility; at the other end, perhaps there’s folks with “objectively” great chances who are depressed, stressed, or sad and so decide to drop out even though they should probably have made a go of it.
And why limit it only to grad students. Even tenured profs up and out because of the struggle. Those would be interesting stories to hear.
I agree. Why not talk about people who dropped out of high school? Elitist swine.
You might have been raising an interesting point to which I might have responded in a clarifying way and we might have actually had an interesting conversation about something. But any blogger that responds to an earnest commentator by calling them an elitist swine is clearly defensive, aggressive, and not interested in conversation– not to mention an elitist swine (viz. high school dropout). Too bad that thanks to PM, my first time trying to engage on the Duck of Minerva will be my last time.
XV: sometimes internet communication goes horribly awry. I think PM was trying to make a joke, but it obviously didn’t look that way.
I agree that it would be interesting to discuss this issue. It does strike me as appropriate for a different thread, though.
Thank you for the gracious intervention, dnexon. But I’m finding no angle on PM’s comment that is even remotely interpretable as a joke.
Well, I do offer my apology and I promise a more hospitable reception should you comment again.
Sorry for my absence, which clearly was ill-timed. Actually, it was exactly meant as a joke — the “Elitist swine” was directed at me via the sock puppet in whose voice I was temporarily speaking. (I don’t think I’ve ever used that phrase sincerely–in fact, the politics that it implies are so distinctive from my own that it never crossed my mind that someone could have actually thought I meant it as anything BUT a joke.)
So, yes, I can see the potential for misunderstanding there. And I’m sorry that it arose, which, of course, is
The point I was trying to make was that this post already deserves the #firstworldproblem tag, but from the point of view of a graduate student (or, to be more precise, from my point of view) it’s a little harder to consider the claims of tenured professors to burnout as deserving of attention or systemic remedy. I don’t know–maybe someone else can persuade me differently–but I do definitely sympathize a lot more with graduate students on this score. Since, after all, they make (essentially) no money, are subject to incredible stresses, and don’t have the fallback of, um, tenure.
“And I’m sorry that it arose, which, of course, is” entirely my fault.
And on rereading this comment AGAIN, I find that I’d neglected to write the words that I’d set out to write, which were:
“I’m very sorry for my choice of words, for not being more hospitable, and for writing something that clearly offended someone badly. I apologize.”
Allow me to make a counterpoint to feters’ narrative. I am in a PHD program. I consciously pursued it since highschool not because of any passion but because Grad school is my best strategy for vertical social and economic mobility. It has high rewards and is less prone to discrimination once you are in. (less not absent). It is a decent career track and in stark contrast to the jobs my parents hold it crucially is supposed to provide stability and independence at the same time. I’m sure I will come up with some dissertation topic, the courses are easy enough to finish and I do enjoy exploring the discipline (by no means equivalent to learning more about the world). It is true that I did have some inclination towards studying the social, but this was more of a minor plus rather than a driving engine that led me to the program. It is an enjoyable process leading to a hopefully materially rewarding occupation in a very unstable world. I have nothing against the passionate, but I find romantic notions of the higher calling of learning or the pursuit of knowledge to be naive. I do not know if this is a minority position, though I suspect it is not. It does seem to be something shared by international students, 2nd generation immigrants and those who perceive themselves as being from minority groups in America. The more pragmatic approach to grad school may be what it takes to ensure surviving the cynicism that sets in after a couple of years. Naturally I hope to have some success, but more realistically I will probably join the faceless masses in a solid satisfying job.
As a serious beer snob, my complaint with this article is the gratuitous defamation of Boston Beer Company brews. You really have no clue about what they did for the entire brewing industry, or about their wide variety of smaller batch beers, do you? No, they’re not my favorite brewery, but lumping them in with the likes of InBev and Coors is like lumping Norton I of San Francisco in with Saparmurat Niyazov.
Shame on you, you can’t even pander to us properly!
This was, I’d thought, the most obvious joke here. But my reading of Beer Advocate suggests to me that real hopheads do regard Boston Beer Company as being much more macro than micro. (didn’t a Mass. or federal law have to be adjusted to keep Boston Beer in the micro category?). (What these means for e.g. Goose Island given their recent tie-up with a real macro is beyond me.)
For myself, I am Stone Brewing Co. 4 life.
Link here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2010/05/when-is-a-craft-brewery-just-a-brewery/57211/
“For me, I was lucky/I busted my ass in undergrad to get into top
programs that then were willing to fund me for the duration of my
studies and waive tuition.”
For those considering a Ph.D. program, this bears repeating – if they don’t fund you (and won’t fund you long-term), do not go. It means that they really don’t think that much of you – they don’t *mind* having you around, but they’re not going to pay for it. And with $30-$60K of expenses per year, you can not physically pay back a Ph.D. program out of earnings.
I encourage prospective students to think very long and very hard before attending a PhD program without funding. But this isn’t factually accurate. At Georgetown, for example, we do not have enough GSAS supplied fellowships to cover the students we want to admit, so we admit some without funding. We do not see a dime of the their tuition, so we have no financial incentive to admit them. In fact, given the sausage-factory nature of admissions, your typical no-fellowship admission would have received a funding offer with minor changes in committee composition, the mood of an individual faculty member, etc.
Wrong. I wasn’t funded my first year. Then got a four-year ride, and also borrowed to fund my last couple of years to finish. I’m a tenured professor now and paying off my loans.
I was in the same boat as Donald. Came in unfunded. Took out loans. Now have a tenured position. Was able to pay off loans through small inheritance.
That doesn’t seem like particularly sound financial planning. I’m not criticizing your life, but this is just not good advice for folks considering the vocation.
When should you leave graduate school?
When you are any of these people:
https://history.msu.edu/people/graduate-students/alpha/
https://www.hist.umn.edu/people/gradStudents.php
Because no one has told them yet that none of them will have jobs upon graduation.