Back in May, I attended a conference[1] and someone I met asked me for advice on applying to do a PhD. Half-jokingly I told them "Don't do a PhD." They said they already got that advice. I've been to quite a few conferences and met quite a few academics over my PhD and I don't think I have ever met a happy PhD student, except maybe the ones that are just starting. I've talked about this with people who are doing postdocs or working as professors now and pretty much everyone agrees that graduate school is miserable.
This article probably provides a less biased perspective on the situation for graduate students across the globe. The data they present seems to suggest that happy PhD students do in fact exist, but a pretty large proportion of survey respondents (around 40%) are not satisfied with graduate school and more than half are getting or seeking help with anxiety or depression relating to their studies. While those numbers are less bleak than the total absence of happy PhD students that I proposed, they are still pretty astounding, and they suggest that I am not just a jaded graduate student ready to be done with academia.
Still, I think it is quite depressing that I can find so many people that can acknowledge how bad the system is set up, yet there seems to be no real movement in making it better.
Diagnosing broad systemic issues is no simple task and probably not something that can be done within a blog post. I have not done a rigorous study on the problems and issues with graduate school, but I can speak to my own experience and the experience of those around me. I can boil it all down to three key problems:
Extremely imbalanced power dynamic between supervisor and student
The sunk cost of graduate school
Everything must be perfect
I am fortunate that this is not an issue I had to deal with myself, but I have seen it happen enough to know that it is very common for grad students to have unresolvable issues with their supervisors. These range from more mundane problems like the supervisor not being very helpful to more significant issues like bullying and sexual harassment.
Due to the nature of graduate school, there is very little recourse to deal with issues with your supervisor. Since you are typically doing research that your supervisor is a specialist in within your university, it is quite difficult to change supervisors to someone who will be able to provide the scientific insight you need to be successful in your thesis. Knowing how universities operate, I also imagine it is quite logistically complicated to change your supervisor in the first place. In more serious cases like sexual harassment, I've heard it can be "easier" but it's also quite rare for there to be any consequences for the professor in those cases.
And changing supervisors is just about the only option you have if there are problems with yours, because they are the person who has the most control over when you graduate. If you try to get a third party involved in a conflict between yourself and your supervisor, the supervisor can possibly hold you back from graduating in retribution. It's a power dynamic that makes it extremely challenging to do anything about problematic supervisors, and as a result, they continue to be problematic and cause problems for other students.
In Canada, a PhD is supposed to be 4 years. I am at the end of my fifth year and just successfully defended, and I know people who have taken 8+ years. At a certain point, shouldn't you just quit and move on? Well if you do that, however many years you spent doing your PhD are now useless, employers don't care that you still have all the research and lab skills, they just want you to have the degree. You could put down your years in the PhD in your resume as a "research assistant," but depending on the type of job you want, that may not be helpful, or it may not be enough. I've been pretty burnt out the past year or two, but I kept up with it and while I am glad that I am finally done, I wish I could have left sooner. If this were a real job, I would have quit by now, and it really wouldn't have been a problem. If graduate research was just a normal job, you would still walk away with years of experience in research that would be recognized as real, meaningful work. If getting a PhD was just about getting enough years as a "research apprentice", it wouldn't matter if I moved on and worked somewhere else, doing something else, I would still have the experience. Instead, I had to keep going, because otherwise all my years would have had very little payoff.
When you are trying to publish scientific papers, your case has to be airtight. You have to be prepared for almost any counter-argument, and you need to have as much high quality data as possible. Depending on how many different techniques or methods you use in the paper, that can be a daunting amount of work, and you have to do it all very well without mistakes.You also need to be able to present that data in an easy to understand format, whether that's with attractive plots or well labelled images, you have to be able to present that data clearly. The paper itself also has to be written very clearly with well defended arguments and ample amount of background research. So in preparing a scientific paper you have to perform the techniques to perfection to collect as much data as humanly possible, you have to beautifully and clearly present that data, and you have to be an excellent writer who has kept up to date with all the papers being published in the field. That is a lot to be expected to be excellent at, and I wonder how many other careers demand excellence in such a varied skill set. In my grad studies I have been a software engineer, a petrographer, a laser technician, a data scientist, a graphic designer, a lab technician, a geochemist, a teacher, a field geologist, and a writer. While there are some of these that are more amenable to cutting corners than others, I have to do a good job at all of this to be successful, and I arguably had a less diverse range of tasks to do than other folks I know in other fields. The cruel irony of it all is that none of those skills are "supervision", which is the primary job of a professor!
My solution is very simple: abolish graduate school. It's an archaic holdover from a time when science was mainly performed by rich white people who had more time than they knew what to do with. Today, it feels like it's a system developed to exploit cheap labour to do scientific research. I can imagine a system where instead of "graduate researchers" people are just "researchers" with different levels of experience. Everyone gets paid like employees and have the rights of employees. People can quit or move jobs, and it doesn't matter. Maybe you start as a "research assistant" then move to a job elsewhere as a "research scientist" after a few years. Or maybe you go into a different career entirely. Perhaps people can even be specialized to specific tasks, like programming, or lab work, or writing and everyone collaborates on a cohesive research team.
I realize this isn't as exciting or glamorous as having your own research project where you can dive deeply into a subject and become an "expert" of a highly specific field, but the glamour of graduate research wears off pretty quickly, and before you know it, you are a student trapped in a system that feels broken and backwards. I realize that this post reads like the ravings of an extremely burnt out graduate student, but there are very obvious flaws in the current status-quo, and we need to question why things are done the way they are without any clear benefit[2].
| [1] | My last one ever as a graduate student and maybe for the rest of my life? |
| [2] | Except for the universities exploiting the free or cheap labour that graduate students represent |