A PhD program is an investment of years of your life with an uncertain outcome - and as with other investments, due diligence matters. Researching the program

A PhD program is an investment of years of your life with an uncertain outcome - and as with other investments, due diligence matters. Researching the program you're entering and the PI you'll be working for (not 'with', for) are critically important steps. When interviewing for a lab, pay particular attention to their anti-fraud procedures (data retention, lab notebook policy, etc.). Read everything they've published - is it coherent, or obfuscated? Secondly, you have to have an income, meaning a stipend that allows you to lead a normal-ish life, and if the only way you can get paid is to teach classes, then your time for doing research will be cut in half. Likewise a decent PI will be looking for certain characteristics that make investing in you a good idea - intelligence, diligence, tenacity, etc. The vast majority of grad students won't publish anything very significant as a grad student, so don't worry about that so much. Something like 75% of published papers don't get a citation count > 10, and that's often just the PI citing their own umbrella of work. This may appear like wasteful use of resources, but the significant research can be so valuable to society and industry that even a 5% success rate is worth the societal investment. As far as careers, social networking is the academic game, but skill development is what counts more in industry, and most grad students don't go into academic research careers (as production of PhDs >> open academic positions). Teaching skills are undervalued in the USA, incidentally. P.S. being happy half the time is good enough; trying to be happy all the time tends towards manic behavior, and often eventual nervous breakdown.