A lot depends on advisor-student compatibility. Different students need different mentorship styles, and some students require a lot more hands on help than oth

A lot depends on advisor-student compatibility. Different students need different mentorship styles, and some students require a lot more hands on help than others. Research is incredibly hard, especially when just starting. Much of my stress during my PhD was self imposed. I felt like I needed to keep up with the peers I respected, and I knew the metrics required to get the jobs I wanted were hard to reach. It's very easy to get stuck in your own mental bubble. That said, as a professor, I became much more sympathetic to my own advisor. It's easy to criticize when you haven't actually done the job. Now that I'm a PI, I feel a massive responsibility to my lab members. Being a professor is far harder than any job I had in industry. I spent most of my time helping students do research and fund raising to pay them a pittance (6% success rates for my NSF programs). I also had innumerable other tasks. Seeing my PhD students do well and become leaders in the field has been immensely rewarding, though. Keeping the lab going requires that we all do good work (publishing great papers in top places) or my students won't get good jobs and I won't be able to get money to pay them or educate the next group.