
A PhD state of mind (2018) - lainon
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41556-018-0085-4
======
hyeonwho4
This style of editorial is becoming more common, and IMO is almost useless.
Saying that "Advisors should take care of their students' well-being." doesn't
account for the fact that incentives are for advisors to overpromise to
funding agencies and drive their students hard to make up the difference. They
control funding/compensation, graduation, and paper piblication/author order,
and are set to personally benefit from faster results at higher difficulties.

In my advisor's lab, this was done by encouraging competition between
students. If a student didn't make experimental progress in a month, a second
student was told to work on the same problem. If that didn't work, he would
collaborate with postdocs in other labs, sharing ideas and results to get high
impact publications quickly. Students needed to publish results as first
authors to graduate, so becoming a mere coauthor on someone else's publication
after a year of work was a huge setback. One (independemtly wealthy) student
was desperate to graduate and published as a first author through another lab
with our advisor as a coauthor, and was told that the paper would not be
counted. I don't know a single student who graduated without having a
breakdown on the way, but the professor in question has become quite famous
and received many awards and fellowships in professional organizations for
their high-impact work, the department is becoming famous in that field, and
the funding agencies have extended funding to pay for five more years with 50%
more students.

These hand-wringing editorials suggest nothing that will change incentives or
hold ruthless PIs accountable.

~~~
RMarcus
This would be considered absolutely batshit at all three of the R1 research
universities I've been around, which spans a significant range of prestige.

I think it goes to show how much variance there are in PhD programs. I
frequently advise undergrads to find the right lab (i.e., a lab that doesn't
have such a competitive environment) instead of picking a school based on some
other criteria like prestige, but this is far easier in hindsight. I got super
lucky -- a small lab with a good advisor.

Maybe (in addition to a strong union) we need a "Yelp for labs" where advisors
can be penalized (or recognized) for their behavior. If it were publicly
available and student testimonial could be somehow verified and anonymous
(potentially impossible), I bet administrators would put at least some
pressure on problematic PIs...

~~~
rsfern
Definitely agree with assessment of high variance in programs and even
individual groups.

I think ‘yelp for academic groups’ is an interesting idea, but I really doubt
the administration would step in unless it got really bad. But giving
prospective students better information could disrupt the flow of good
students to toxic labs, which might actually create some incentive for change.

I’m not sure I would actually post to such a service though, even though I
have a pretty good relationship with my Ph.D. advisor. Too many bridges to
potentially burn in such a small community.

For any prospective students who might read this, in the meantime you might
try briefly emailing a few current and former group members asking for their
perspective.

------
andrewl
Here are a couple of relevant quotes from Freeman Dyson (who does not have a
PhD):

“Well, I think it actually is very destructive. I'm now retired, but when I
was a professor here [Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton], my real job
was to be a psychiatric nurse. There were all these young people who came to
the institute, and my job was to be there so they could cry on my shoulder and
tell me what a hard time they were having. And it was a very tough situation
for these young people. They come here. They have one or two years and they're
supposed to do something brilliant. They're under terrible pressure — not from
us, but from them.

So, actually, I've had three of them who I would say were just casualties who
I'm responsible for. One of them killed himself, and two of them ended up in
mental institutions. And I should've been able to take care of them, but I
didn't. I blame the Ph.D. system for these tragedies. And it really does
destroy people. If they weren't under that kind of pressure, they could all
have been happy people doing useful stuff. Anyhow, so that's my diatribe. But
I really have seen that happen."

~~~
bellerose
I wouldn't go after a PhD unless being born into a rich family (with a
potential fall back). Otherwise its a ticket to an early grave and or lost
earning potential. I've encountered a few colleagues who are beyond gifted in
what makes them survive the trial. I had a roommate finishing his masters and
going for the PhD afterwards. Guy was making bank by prostituting himself to
women every few nights. Slept till noon before going to work on his research.
I cannot imagine how hard it must be if someone is pursuing the degree without
any wealth helping him/her out. I doubt scholarships would be much if any
relief. I definitely can see persons ending up in psych wards or taking their
life if it becomes too much.

~~~
pmyteh
It depends a lot on the circumstances of the individual and their
lab/supervisor. If the environment is supportive and a sufficient stipend is
provided, then it's achievable without rich parents. The environment is very
difficult to evaluate from outside, but the funding is an important go/no-go
gate: if you can't persuade someone to fund you as a PhD student, you're not
in a great position for the post-PhD job crunch, and the struggle of trying to
fund your studies in the meantime makes a difficult situation worse.

You're right, though - having a fall back is very useful. I had eight years of
outside work before starting mine, which meant that my "in case of disaster"
plan was simply to go back to my old career (albeit with lost time and earning
potential).

------
blastbeat
This doesn't surprise me. PhD students remain in a vulnerable position. They
are not only intelligent and sensible, but also often exploited by the
hierarchy and underpaid. The cynic in me sees the whole procedure of academic
ordination as a kind of humiliating ponzi scheme, based on effort
justification and the sunk cost fallacy.

~~~
gww
I think this should be extended to post doctoral fellows as well. People
generally focus on PhD students but post-docs are even more vulnerable. Many
academic places have some level of protection and oversight for PhD's. These
proections are certainly not enough. But post-docs are treated as contract
workers, where your supervisor can terminate you whenever they feel like for
whatever reason they want. In this situation you really have no recourse and
your institution owns your data so you are essentially left with nothing.

~~~
ska
I think that's a bit of a mixed bag, really, and depends on the organization
and how the post-doc is funded. Some are pretty dire, others quite good.

That being said, being a post-doc with independent funding (e.g. a national
fellowship) is perhaps the best gig in academia, except that it can't last.
You can actually spend all the time on research a PI wishes they could, and
any leverage people have on you is not financial. Burning bridges could still
hurt you of course.

~~~
Fomite
Yep. The experience of postdocs is _extremely_ varied, from the best job in
academia (and one I end up looking back on fondly) to some genuinely
hellacious stories.

~~~
gww
I suppose some of it depends on the supervisor and how much they care about
helping you develop your career versus greasing the pole behind them.

------
Glyptodon
I know people working in a research lab where the PI refers to some of the
members as "slaves" in front of everyone. The power differentials are utterly
out of whack. It's not remotely surprising what the results are.

~~~
gww
One of my supervisors used to point out various pieces of lab equipment and
equated it's value to X PhD's. It was funny and a bit depressing at the same
time.

EDIT: I do think the culture of referring to trainees as slaves needs to stop.
Even in jest it can be quite disheartening to be reminded how beholden to your
supervisor you are.

~~~
foobarian
I was at lunch once with my advisor and some visitors from a government lab
who was sponsoring us. At one point conversation went into hours and
productivity (which was particularly constrained at a government facility) and
I distinctly remember my advisor bragging about how he could get his students
to work nights and weekends to get something done. I sure don't miss it.

~~~
gww
It's ridiculous that it's a point of pride for supervisors to overwork their
students. Along a similar vein one of my supervisors used to come in on
weekends just to see who was there and he would deprecate those he didn't see
on Monday.

~~~
Fomite
It is. It's something I actively try to combat in my lab.

------
JohnJamesRambo
Students swiped doorknobs in our chemistry building and analyzed the swabs by
mass spec. Antidepressants were found on every one of the doorknobs...and no
one was even surprised by that outcome. My boss' estimate about how many grad
students are on some sort of psychiatric medication is "all of them."

~~~
throwawaymath
What if one person on antidepressants frequently visits most rooms in the
building? I don’t see how we extrapolate from doorknobs to people.

~~~
distant_hat
You can't but I did a PhD (Physics) and pretty much every PhD researcher with
me was on antidepressants for some time. It was so common that nobody bothered
to hide and people would trade information on which antidepressants would work
best while keeping their work life unaffected. In other shit, almost every
married candidate I knew went through a divorce (except for a Mormon guy).

------
gattilorenz
Well, it seems that everyone describes the PhD as a tragic experience... for
me it wasn't.

I don't know exactly why that was, probably a mixture of how it is
organized/work culture (Italy is clearly not the US), the extremely caring and
human supervisor, and a not particularly competitive field. I would argue that
also my fellow PhD candidates were not as stressed as I read here
(antidepressants on every doorknob? No way.)

Now that I'm done and I moved to another university in the northern part of
the EU, I'm still not convinced, by looking at candidates here, that the PhD
is such a tragic experience,but maybe I just know lucky people.

Did anyone here have a _positive_ PhD?

~~~
r_c_a_d
Yes, I did. My supervisor was quite old-school idealistic in that he believed
that good work would rise to the top without playing political games. We were
both a bit naive in that respect I think... and we've both had modest careers
as a result. But I really enjoyed my PhD and greatly respected his integrity.

Other people in our department rose quickly and now have international
reputations. But I couldn't treat people like they did and look myself in the
mirror every day.

One other thing that greatly helped me in my PhD was the mutual support of
fellow candidates. On my own I would probably have had a breakdown in my final
year as the intensity of writing up alone must be intolerable. That is why I
was shocked to read the comment above where a supervisor pitted candidates
against each other: that is criminal in my view.

~~~
gattilorenz
> On my own I would probably have had a breakdown in my final year as the
> intensity of writing up alone must be intolerable.

I think I agree on this one. Writing your thesis is indeed a stressful thing,
but there was always a supportive atmosphere from the other PhDs in my
department. Maybe because everyone is in the same boat :)

------
sandwall
“Being a graduate student is like becoming all of the Seven Dwarves. In the
beginning you’re Dopey and Bashful. In the middle, you are usually sick
(Sneezy), tired (Sleepy), and irritable (Grumpy). But at the end, they call
you Doc, and then you’re Happy.”

Maybe I'm suffering from effort justification. However, I believe I learned a
great deal about the art and practice of study.

------
duchenne
After reading this, the cynical part of me would say that the start-up world
is in competition with the academic world to recruit the best talents. So, it
keeps publishing biased articles about the drawbacks of doing a PhD. For
similar reasons, it also publishes articles about bad experiences in the
corporate world.

However, I do remember that, during my PhD, about a third of my lab mates had
some kind of mental breakdown. Some suddenly cut the bridge and stopped going
to the lab. They would not answer to emails or phone calls.

I would say that in the CS fields, successful PhD are most often a very
positive experience, and bring a lot of professional opportunities. The
program itself is very intellectually satisfying. And now, many of lab mates
have very exciting jobs: startup founders, top AI scientists/engineers,
professors.

However,some students that were used to study very well and have top grades,
once they started their PhD program, felt completely lost and hopeless in this
totally different way of working and thinking. They had to work (mainly) alone
for years. So, if no output came out, they felt very depressed. On top of
that, the failure to publish usually extends the length of the PhD program...

~~~
haihaibye
>> the start-up world is in competition with the academic world to recruit the
best talents. So, it keeps publishing biased articles about the drawbacks of
doing a PhD.

You think Nature has sided with startups over academia?

~~~
duchenne
Abviously not. Nature sides with academia.

This article has been cherry-picked.

------
lquist
This study does not seem very robust. How do we know that folks that enroll
into PhD programs are not just more likely to have mental health issues? There
is a positive correlation between IQ and mental health issues at least at the
higher end of the scale and this could be a manifestation of that.

~~~
barry-cotter
We have excellent reason to believe this is a PhD programme thing because this
does not happen in the closest equivalent, professional doctorates like JDs or
MDs, not does it occur in MBAs. And the prevalence of mental problems in PhD
students is far too high for any other explanation to be credible.

~~~
jacobolus
Those are completely different types of work, not very similar at all.

One is research / research training, involving projects with a large scope
unlike anything students have done before, unpredictable timing, a lot of
uncertainty and risk, and a certain amount of personal autonomy and social
isolation. The others are professional training with many small clear tasks,
more or less comparable to previous schooling students already have a lifetime
of experience with.

------
klyrs
I mean, I spent 10 years working essentially around the clock. I burned out,
my mental health crumbled, I isolated from friends, my marriage fell apart.
I'd never ever go through that for an employer. It's funny. With complete
freedom to choose when and how I worked, I worked myself to the bone. I'm much
happier with a job where I'm defensive about my time and wellbeing

~~~
fergie
I can relate to this. I sometimes wonder if creative, intelligent,
conscientious people actually need some kind of mild oppression in their lives
in order to be happy?

~~~
vaylian
Complete freedom means you have to provide the structure yourself. And that is
something that is not taught at universities or schools. I know I struggled a
lot with this. And even coming to this conclusion in the first place is
something that took me several years.

------
DrJosiah
Burned out, hit my limit, and needed to take a break in grad school twice.
Once due to contract work (had to pay my bills, so spent a week writing
testing code instead of core product), and once due to emotional exhaustion
after writing an unaccepted paper (spent a week watching all 7 seasons of ST:
Voyager while my ex was at work).

Since then (11-12 years now), the work ethic that pushed me through a PhD in
5.5 years left me burnt out after 60-80 hour work weeks at my first gig. Since
stopping working for other folks after coming home (except as necessary for
pager duty in some cases), I put my spare hours into relationships, family,
and personal recreation. With the wife and kids, basically now just family and
personal recreation.

Unfortunately, my personal recreation tends to look a lot like work (email
support, open source projects, ...). Combine that with "working for myself"
for the last 21 months, and I've experienced more pain and stress in the
process of building a business than I did getting the PhD (solve all the
problems, all the time, no academic advisors, no end in sight). I think at
this point I've needed to take explicit "I am burned out on this" breaks at
least 5 times in the last 21 months.

I've been trying to explicitly "not work" in the evenings to cut my own work-
driven exhaustion. Trying to do something fun (work on non-work fun software,
handle correspondence, play video games, etc.), but at least half my evenings
end with starting an overnight "run forever, log failures" set of unittests,
or at least updating my daily worklog.

------
chriskanan
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.

------
louprado
A bit of a tangent, but does anyone know if a "paper PhD" is still and option
? The first and only time I ever heard of it was during a lecture by Nobel
laureate Dr. Shuji Nakamura[1].

IIRC, the University of Florida offered PhD's if you published 5 papers which
he did in one year.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUlR9DP6Me4&t=2074s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUlR9DP6Me4&t=2074s)

~~~
wenc
It’s called a “sandwich thesis” and it’s quite common in some countries,
mostly in Europe. Put together a few papers published in peer reviewed
journals, write a introduction, and submit it for defense.

------
ololobus
This may differ from one student to another or from lab to lab, but the
general thesis is definitely true. I decided to quit academia in favor of IT
industry exactly due to this high stress problem, even having a number of
relative good papers published. I just could not bear it more.

PhD student/postdoc life is extremely unstable: 1) you are very limited in
finances; 2) you have to perform a number of different research trials and
most of them will have no success; 3) you are always limited in time; 4) there
is a continuous flow of grant applications, reports, papers preparation,
sometimes teacher assistance works. And in the middle of this you have to find
your own unique path in science, your niche.

In summary, you have to be ready to live in a continuous disaster during
relatively long period of life. If it fits you, then you can achieve success
after ~10 years of hard work. Anyway, it was interesting experience for me :)

------
sideproject
We used to call it Permanent Head Damage - it certainly rings true many times
during the course.

------
yargaoo
Vast majority PhDs end up being giant losers. Very few career choices with any
money. Being a professor at age 50 isn't a success, really.

------
known
To PhDs:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_more_than_one_way_to...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_more_than_one_way_to_do_it)

------
sjg007
Funny it took so long to get this research out.

~~~
sygv
The grad student writing it up had to take leave

------
savgeborn
I wonder if those PhDs are ready to suffer so much, why don't they work at SV
companies where they can get free sushi + 6 figure salary and lots of
interesting problems to solve.

Why these people are so hung up on getting PhD title.

Or any not become a YouTuber?

We can easily see that ElectroBoom on YouTube is more respected in the world
than any other person holding PhD in Electrical Engineering.

~~~
nvarsj
It's not particularly hard to understand. Some people love to work on deep,
challenging problems that can take years to solve. This kind of problem
solving doesn't really exist in the tech industry. The vast majority of
industry work is grunt work - the cutting edge would be implementing papers
that poor graduate students publish. The rare places it does exist (e.g.
Google/Microsoft research) generally require a PhD in the first place, and are
very competitive roles.

~~~
gattilorenz
Plus, in academia (at least in most countries of the EU, where you receive a
salary during your PhD... I don't know how it works in other countries) you
can focus on stimulating problems with little business value, and you can
decide on your own your research topic, which is a kind of freedom I can't
imagine in any industry.

I'm more than willing to trade a significant amount of my salary for that
freedom.

------
malms
It's both a money and commitment problem. Even without the money problem like
in europe, ut makes a very unbalanced life to make so much sacrifice during a
so long time..

------
bluishgreen
No shit.

