To Current or Aspiring Graduate Students

One of the most mentally difficult periods of my life is being made worse by feeling like a huge cliché. We have all heard the memes of a “quarter-life crisis”, the slightly less famous cousin of the universally acknowledged mid-life crisis. And yet here I am, in my late twenties, mentally paralyzed by the single thought: “Am I really doing what I want in life?”

It is so painfully cliché that even writing it down makes me cringe a bit. But then again, clichés are exactly what they are because they ring true for so many people, so often. Here’s the background on my story:

As tremendously conceited as this will sound, I was one of those “gifted kids” growing up. School was easy, I was always being put in advanced classes, gifted programs, performing above my level, and doing myriads of extra activities on top of it all. It made me think that “smart” was an inherent trait that I had. And since I was smart, I was destined to do the things that smart people do: get all A’s, go to college, win some awards along the way, toss in a few advanced degrees and then go get a prestigious job. I’m currently on phase 4 of that predetermined path - graduate school. And what I do now, what I am now, and how I feel now are worlds away from what I expected and hoped.

There are many more honest resources in existence now than there were 5 or 10 years ago about the harsh realities of graduate school and academia. Despite that, I still find myself in conundrums that I’ve never read about and think I must be all alone in feeling. That is, until I’m brave enough to talk to someone about them, only to find out others have felt exactly the same way but felt largely too ashamed to speak about it openly.

So here it is. Grad school is an ass-whooping, confusing-as-hell shitshow that is largely about long-term rewards, the blurring or outright crossing of the work-life boundary, and the mindset that your worth and future are entirely determined by how many papers you publish and what you are willing to sacrifice to make it happen. But this isn’t new information. People before me have said this. Here’s what I didn’t understand about this information for a long time: its influence is often not overt and obvious, but rather covert and insidious, hiding in your thought process in ways that you never realized. It’s relatively easy to recognize (albeit very hard to rectify), if a boss is abusive or demands more than is reasonable from a grad student. It is ideaologically clear that if you are sacrificing your health or your relationships for a degree, something is wrong.

What’s less clear is why you feel like a failure every time an experiment isn’t successful even when failure is part of the very nature of research. It’s the reason you feel guilty for not spending your entire weekend reading research papers even when no one is explicitly compelling you to do it. It’s why the hobbies that bring you joy also give you anxiety. And it’s why the thought, “What if something else were to make me happier than this?” is absolutely terrifying. Because I cannot possibly want something outside of the degree next to my name, the prestige of my title, the recognition of a high level position in a job or university. I cannot possibly admit to myself that I want more than the “pure” academic interrogation of truth. I cannot convince people that I can love science but often hate graduate school, because surely the love of one must guarantee the love of the other. None of this can be true because I am smart, and therefore I enjoy and do smart people things.

Around 4 months ago I decided to pick up a weekend job at a restaurant. Getting a second job amidst the stress of a graduate STEM program sounds insane, but hear me out. It would be a couple evening shifts a week. It was actually a restaurant that I had worked at years earlier during a summer off from college, so I knew the company and the food pretty well. I remembered having a lot of fun doing it, and I could stow away the extra cash to help pay off my thousands of dollars of student loans. Perfect, no?

But then I developed a problem. The job is fun. Really fun. Not to say that it isn’t hard work, but damn is it fun to be in such a creative environment with creative, social people, on a team of people who really value you. It is truly the polar opposite of the graduate school experience. Now, then, enter my quarter-life crisis. So many times I have come away from a shift at the restaurant thinking, “Here I am happy, I am valued, I am in good company,” and then come away day after day from graduate school thinking, “Here I am struggling, I am useless, I am replaceable, I am stressed.” And finally it pushed me to the point of sitting down, anxious out of my mind and thinking, “What if I just…did what makes me happy? What if I just…didn’t do graduate school?”

It is likely hard to truly understand the magnitude of an identity crisis like this unless you have experienced the graduate environment or grown up in a similar way as me. It’s terrifying. So I simply spent weeks…terrified. Terrified of my own thoughts and feelings and urges. Fearful to feel angst and stress from graduate school again. Fearful to fail. Fearful to even show up, which inevitably made it worse. All finally culminating in a mental paralysis so strong that I could barely function. I didn’t want to give anything up. I was caught between dreams. I didn’t want to abandon science, nor could I fathom abandoning my restaurant family, and the only path forward I could see was more years of insomnia and fear that culminated in either complete failure in all areas or a simply a breakdown of mind and body.

And then one day, fingertips cold on a chilly October morning, staring out at the grey sky from my favorite coffee shop, I called a friend. He had graduated with his PhD the spring prior, and I often turned to him for advice. I told him everything. He knew what I meant before my sentences were even finished. And he gave me a piece of advice that was so obvious as to almost seem stupid, but I internalized it for the first time in my life. My PhD didn’t have to be a life-altering, award-winning, Nobel-inspiring degree resulting in 20 papers and international recognition in order to be valid. It could just be…a PhD. Now understand that “just a PhD” still represents an enormous amount of work and commitment. But it doesn’t have to result in Harvard. It doesn’t have to mean a life of academia forever. It doesn’t have to be an ultimatum between 20 punlished papers or failure. I would even argue that a PhD that results in no papers at all is still valid, for what are we doing other than learning to fail and rise up to try again?

My friend and I discussed all this. And then he says, “go talk to your advisor. Tell him your goals and your reality and let that customize what you do and how you treat the next couple years.” It was the first time I had realized that was even an option. Because before I couldn’t fathom a PhD that wasn’t “perfect.” But now I can.

We all have one life to live. We deserve to shape our lives to the best of our ability based on our needs, our wants, our talents, and our time. You deserve to live the life that you want. Don’t let the tropes of graduate school steal your years away or dampen the glow you have for other interests. It is one step of so many in your life. Tread carefully and with respect for yourselves, my friends. I’m off to give it a try for the first time.

Wish me luck.