I dropped out of a top-ten math PhD program because I looked around and thought, "Most of these guys aren't going to get jobs, and I don't feel like one of the

I dropped out of a top-ten math PhD program because I looked around and thought, "Most of these guys aren't going to get jobs, and I don't feel like one of the exceptions. I'm not going to spend five years in graduate school to end up a failure." Of course, by "job" I meant a tenure-track research position in a livable city, and by "failure" I meant... well, basically, by "failure" I meant my father, who taught at a small, bad public university in a rural wasteland. I'm pretty sure my mom hated him for every hour and minute she had to live in that town. If I picked up a wife or girlfriend in the hip, thriving city where I lived, would she follow me to Bumfuck, USA? Would I let her if she wanted to? I constantly obsessed over the fear of ending up teaching hopeless kids at a double-directional school in a little town at the end of the universe, watching my kids grow up alienated from their provincial peers and underserved by the school system, burdened with the knowledge that it was my failure that forced my family to live there. So I quit and got a job as a programmer to keep myself afloat while I figured out what to do with my life. It turns out there are lots of challenges in computing, and I've worked alongside a couple of math PhDs on interesting problems. I think grad school would have been a lot more fun if I had realized that failing to get a hot tenure-track position wouldn't ruin my entire life.