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I'm beginning to hate my PhD

  • 08-12-2016 3:47pm
    #1
    DisgruntledPhD
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1 ✭


    They say every PhD candidate goes through the "second year blues", and I've been no exception. Over the last year I have been seriously questioning my decision to accept the offer for my PhD over a job in a Pharmaceutical company that was willing to start me on a salary that would easily have been €13-15k more than I'm currently on.

    Money is not everything. I know that. If it was, I'd have taken that job in 2014 and never looked back. At the time,I thought I was doing the right thing. I had just finished my undergraduate course and I had been offered a four year funded PhD on a new instrument. With no family or commitments tying me down, it seemed like a no-brainer, so I jumped at the chance and invested myself into becoming a Doctor of Philosophy.

    Looking back, I was so motivated when I first started. I had been off all summer after my final year exams and was enjoying the break away from studying, projects and assignments. I hit the ground running and much of the first year was spent publishing two review papers and gaining experience on the instrument. Nobody at my college had ever used my instrument before so it was a tough first year. Many small problems became major stumbling blocks that in some cases took significant amounts of time to overcome. That's to be expected, I guess.

    And while the last 8 months have been spent semi-productively in terms of method development, the motivation I started out with has been slowly seeping out of me, to the point where days and weeks are passing me by without a single productive thing being done for the benefit of my project.

    I've seen PhDs complain about so many things while doing their research. Thankfully, I don't have an issue with my instrument, or funding (so far). But ever since those reviews, I feel as though nothing I've done has mattered, probably because there are no tangible outputs to show for it.

    I have thought a lot about quitting over the last year. And while seeing my former classmates earn so much more than me doesn't help matters, I'm more jealous of the fact that they seem free, while I feel stuck in position, without a direction to go in.

    I'm not the kind of person to quit anything - I've always been too proud. I'm also too logical, so I could never leave something without having a plan B lined up. I just don't know what else I would do. My undergraduate course was something I never really saw myself doing, I just kind of fell into it. And then the PhD happened in a similar way. I almost looked at it as a path that was being set out in front of me.

    But now I'm not so sure.
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