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I consider myself fortunate that I realized most of what was talked about in this article was true while I was about halfway through grad school. The fundamenta

I consider myself fortunate that I realized most of what was talked about in this article was true while I was about halfway through grad school. The fundamental realization that given the size of my classes, where my peers were competition for any academic job, combined with the fact that I would literally have to wait for someone to die before I could get one of those jobs, was enough to knock me right off of the academic track. I might've even put up with postdoc hell, and the "6 year job interview " that is the tenure process if I thought it would have come to something. But, when you have 50 people competing for the same three openings in a year, and only one chance per year to apply, the odds don't look very good.

twblalock 10y ago
Same here. Leaving grad school was the best decision I ever made. The year I left, there were only 2 or 3 positions in my field in the entire United States, and one of them went unfilled because the university didn't like any of the candidates.
quantumhobbit 10y ago
Me too. Sort of. I think I realized this subconsciously before I was conscious of it. The result was two years of depression and anxiety before I got everything straight and quit. I don't know if it was wasted time or not. It was a long time to not be in the workforce, but I learned a lot of skills while working on what turned out to be dead end research projects. I have a job now that requires merely a fraction of those skills. But maybe I wouldn't have gotten the job without my half phd. Or maybe I'd have a better job if I finished. I'm still pretty frustrated by the fact that what was presented to me as a failsafe career path was anything but failsafe. This is pretty much the same problem with all of higher education and the current economy in miniature. Just as an undergrad degree no longer garuntees a good job a phd no longer garuntees a tenured job.
- twblalock 10y ago
  > I think I realized this subconsciously before I was conscious of it. This is grad school in a nutshell, in a lot of fields. I've seen three common responses to this cognitive dissonance: 1. Deny the brutal reality of the job market. 2. "But I couldn't ever be happy doing anything else!" 3. Leave. One of the strangest things about my grad school experience was watching very intelligent people spend years of their lives, and sometimes borrowing money they could never pay back, to pursue a degree even though deep down, they understood that it was a really bad idea. The rationalizations they came up with were pretty transparent to anyone who wasn't also in the grad school bubble. I suppose I sound harsh, but when people ask me if they should go to grad school in the field I did, my answer is always "not unless you are already independently wealthy and never need to work again."
  - maverick_iceman 10y ago
    For a long time I thought that "But I couldn't ever be happy doing anything else!" Now I'm not doing it but have a great job I'm way happier than I ever was in grad school. I wonder how I could have been so foolish.

twblalock 10y ago

Same here. Leaving grad school was the best decision I ever made. The year I left, there were only 2 or 3 positions in my field in the entire United States, and one of them went unfilled because the university didn't like any of the candidates.

quantumhobbit 10y ago

Me too. Sort of. I think I realized this subconsciously before I was conscious of it. The result was two years of depression and anxiety before I got everything straight and quit. I don't know if it was wasted time or not. It was a long time to not be in the workforce, but I learned a lot of skills while working on what turned out to be dead end research projects. I have a job now that requires merely a fraction of those skills. But maybe I wouldn't have gotten the job without my half phd. Or maybe I'd have a better job if I finished. I'm still pretty frustrated by the fact that what was presented to me as a failsafe career path was anything but failsafe. This is pretty much the same problem with all of higher education and the current economy in miniature. Just as an undergrad degree no longer garuntees a good job a phd no longer garuntees a tenured job.

twblalock 10y ago
> I think I realized this subconsciously before I was conscious of it. This is grad school in a nutshell, in a lot of fields. I've seen three common responses to this cognitive dissonance: 1. Deny the brutal reality of the job market. 2. "But I couldn't ever be happy doing anything else!" 3. Leave. One of the strangest things about my grad school experience was watching very intelligent people spend years of their lives, and sometimes borrowing money they could never pay back, to pursue a degree even though deep down, they understood that it was a really bad idea. The rationalizations they came up with were pretty transparent to anyone who wasn't also in the grad school bubble. I suppose I sound harsh, but when people ask me if they should go to grad school in the field I did, my answer is always "not unless you are already independently wealthy and never need to work again."
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  For a long time I thought that "But I couldn't ever be happy doing anything else!" Now I'm not doing it but have a great job I'm way happier than I ever was in grad school. I wonder how I could have been so foolish.