How do I gain back my faith in my PhD degree?
Oh man, where does one begin...
I am half-way in to my second postdoc at what I consider to be the best research facility in Northern Europe in my field. So take my advice as such, although where you work does not say so much about you, as one might think.
How do I gain back my faith in my PhD degree?
Short answer: you don't, as long as you are in status quo. If something changes by an act of serendipity, maybe you do..
Longer answer: you might regain some faith, by reframing your reference point. In other words, change your expectations and your feelings might change as well.
Regarding the questions the student asked you:
- If optimizing your overall income is a primary concern, don't bother with a PhD. Yes, there are cases where having a phd might pay off by making a high-paid job available, but cumulative work experience, raises as well as the confidence and training you get on job will likely end up as a bigger plus.
... wish to be financially independent and have an early retirement. Can doing a PhD for five years offer this reality?
There is certainly no reason to panic if financial independency is what you are striving towards, though. I have been financially independent from my family/loans the entirety of my graduate studies, and even managed to save enough money to get a mortgage loan to buy myself an apartment (small but more than decent) while I was a PhD student.
That might be more of a statement of which country you live in (e.g. Sweden vs USA) or which city you want to do pursue graduate studies (e.g. San Francisco vs San Diego). The point is that you do make a living, you are not an undergrad anymore.
Don't even get started with pension subject, that stuff is too complicated. Practically unless you are making a stupendous salary or some wicked investment decisions there is no guaranteed early and relaxed retirement. As populations get older on average, and indirectly their costs to the society increase, the pension systems will have to undergo a significant restructuring, and I for one am expecting that to create some very heated debates and go down not so easily.
Bottomline: Do a PhD if the subject interests you deeply, or if you think you will be gaining a skill that is highly valued in industry. I am working with bioinformatics, and if I want to get a job in this field, without a PhD you are not really respected. I have some friends that have done PhDs in economics, which were highly valued and allowed them to land jobs they would have otherwise. That may not translate to every field however.
- Doing a PhD is not an education that prepares you for a profession. It's an academic degree not a professional one. You need to keep that in mind. Actually, write it on a post-it, put on your mirror at home and repeat it to yourself everyday. Twice, if you can, in the morning and evening when you brush your teeth...
It's so easy to lose track of that insight. Doing a PhD is education to become an academic, to think critically, to be able to read and teach (to some degree at least). You will get to be a better critique of others' work and your own. You will get training on reading and writing. You will most likely face the boundaries of your intellectual capabilities. But no it does not directly imply you will be better at a job, unless that job is specifically related to the things I mentioned above.
Do you think your degree has prepared you to be competent in these areas?
No, a graduate degree has not prepared me to be a competent coder, the one skill that would make transition from academia to industry so much more smoother.
No, it shouldn't either. That's why there are certificate programs, and bootcamps, Coursera and Khan Academy, and software carpentry etc etc.
However, did you stop to consider that doing a PhD might have you working on an actual problem, to which you get to design a novel algorithm to solve that problem, or to improve the solution? Or maybe a new protocol for networking/encryption etc? Having some specialized experience might make you an indispensable profile for a company looking for expertise in that field. But no by default, graduate studies do not make you a better professional.
- Re: relevance
How do you know that your model can be used by actual people, like the products people develop in industry?
In most cases, you don't! At least not for sure... You can look at citations of your papers, although even that can be misleading as people cite other papers for many different reasons. I actually asked a question somewhat related to this a while back...
In some, rare, cases you might end up doing something that changes the landscape of the field; like writing a software that becomes the de facto gold standard for a particular type of analysis. You might come up with a technique or a protocol that is used by others. Or you might even stumble on some key result, by sheer luck.
More likely, you will provide incremental additions of knowledge into an ocean, most of which will go unnoticed, at least initially. If that bothers you, that is OK. It bothers me too, and I do consider my position in academia as well. But that should not cause you any despair. It only shows that you want to be proud of your work and get the acknowledgement you deserve. Unfortunately we don't always get what we want.
- Re:Comparing yourself to the others especially on social media
While my peers on instagram or facebook are traveling all around the world, visiting new places...
Stop! Social media is literally designed to create that feeling. At the end of the day, you never know who goes home to cry about their day, no matter how amazing their Instagram photos may look, or how much "fun" they are having wherever they may be.
For many people their life online, or at least they portray their life online, has become their identity. There are many people who have analyzed this in great detail. I especially like this article (go ahead and listen to the talk in its entirety). Also read about online influencers (here's a starting point).
Edit: As @FrankHopkins pointed out in the comments, doing a PhD might actually take you to many exciting places for conferences or courses. I have been to a number of really cool places, most of which I would either not bother traveling on my own or would be able to afford at the time :)
Overall my answer(s) might appear very dystopian. But I would rather say realistic, and in any case, they are based on my experience.
I'd like to wrap it up on a positive tone, with hopefully concrete steps to help you find your way around, because ultimately, nobody can tell you if you have taken the right decision.
Here are some concrete steps I can suggest for you to feel a bit better:
Get a mentor! Someone at least 10 years your senior and ideally someone who has a life story that resembles your own. Of course finding a good match might be tricky but check whether or not there is a mentorship program provided by your university/faculty/student council etc.
Listen to that person's story, but make sure you don't fall into tutor-student relationship. How did s/he take the critical decisions in his/her life? What was valuable to them at that time, and how did that turn out later? How does the person define success?
Speaking of success, try to think real hard about what you define success to be. It's great to make lots of money, or have an h-index in the 100s but it's really not the whole picture. You might end up working yourself to the bone and still not be happy/successful enough. As a rule of thumb, I'd recommend avoiding taking anything quantifiable as a measure of success because anything that goes to n also goes to n+1.
Don't let others dictate your mindset, whether they are your peers or seniors. There is a lot of "fake it 'till you make it" out there.
Try to see where you make/made a difference. That could be helping a peer solve their problem, going to a meeting instead of your boss so that he can go take his/her sick kid from daycare. That could be helping a student in a lab, or writing to a fellow academic on the other side of the world, to help him/her sort out the mess that is a life in academia. ;)
Hope it helps!
Let me give you a perspective from someone who made the opposite choice.
I was a stellar undergrad in a top 10 engineering school, got perfect grades. I took a bunch of extra courses across many departments just because I was curious and knew I'd never get an other chance to learn things like chemistry so quickly and rigorously in a guided environment. I bounced around a few labs but always came to the conclusion that the research wasn't going to be worth as much as I'd like and moved on to the next exciting thing. Becoming a CS TA and honing my programming skills earned me one of those sexy internships at a Big 5 software company. But I realized "the real world" I'd been told to be so scared of was a cake walk. At the Institute I worked 60-70 hour weeks at least, every week. In industry all my smartest coworkers, even the full-timers were using 1/3 of their intellectual capacity. It was an easy, well-paid life, but they ultimately just kept the system running and didn't often have chances to be inventive.
So I applied to grad programs at the few universities considered to be a touch better than mine, but without published work I didn't get in to any. Ended up back at my same institution pursuing a Master's in my same discipline (Electrical Engineering), because the department was happy to give one of their best students a tuition waiver if he would TA for them. Got interested in Tissue Engineering, believing it to be the most important revolutionary technology of our age, and got in to a bioengineering PhD program. They used to pass around a list of projects new students could get involved in, just something compiled from all the PIs. I was excited and did the legwork running around talking to many of them, but their work was very much about low-level experimentation, growth factors, and live animal studies. The PhD would take 6-7 years, and I wouldn't be able to study the broader signaling/abstracted 'library' of cellular commands that I was interested in. The second year I saw the list, I went through crossing out thing after thing, now having enough knowledge to say "That will never work; that's ridiculous; there are more important questions that should be answered instead; we don't have nearly enough knowledge as a community to be able to succeed at this yet."
Jaded again, recognizing that a tax-break-friendly-science-antagonistic administration would be in control of government, still carrying a significant amount of student debt, and feeling like a child and a ghost to still be in the same place, I decided to take the EE MS and look for jobs. I'd found an ever deeper affinity for the math underlying controls, signal processing, and machine learning in those couple years, and I knew I hated vanilla software engineering, but still going up to companies and hearing "Well, with your experience you could probably do any of these things. So what do you want?" was a daunting question. I settled on AI-related software and did the coding interview circuit. In the end a defense company offered me a job in a new research division. But the VP who was pushing that got forced out, and the building never got built, and I ended up bounced around to a different site (which I was okay with) working on an ML-related project.
I loved it at first, got to build a few neat things and explore, and I was well-paid. But not all was roses. I discovered that people liked to look at the org chart to see who was right instead of valuing ideas. Certain bad actors craved control and didn't appreciate any work that didn't originate with themselves, actively stifled initiative and creativity. I'm a strong personality who stands up for himself, for coworkers, for solutions that will empirically save trouble, against bad character and denial. My immediate superiors didn't believe in healthy conflict, so it became an ugly cold war. A lead several layers up who had loved all my demonstrative and educational presentations eventually got involved, saw I was right to take a stand on certain things, and moved me to a different program, where I still get a chance to read papers and do academic things and be the "AI guru". I've watched the team I came from continue to devolve as more of my coworkers run up against the same problems and leave (9 so far out of a team of 3 in a <2 year span, many to other companies) while management refuses to admit their mistake and remove bad actors' authority.
I love my current group. They're good people, brilliant people, who work very well as a team. They're from diverse industries with complementary strengths, and they've been through a lot together. But they're jaded too! After exciting meetings with other smart groups across the company, they express pessimism that leadership will actually be able to knit efforts together. Time will tell whether that's justified and whether I'll feel the same.
I don't have to work that hard, but I'm not just keeping a system going. I'm designing, inventing, exploring. I've gotten in to skiing in the last year even though I live nowhere near mountains, because I have the time and money to go. I've been out of debt a while and am actually investing.
But I'm still dissatisfied. I worry that I lack the academic credentials (a body of published papers and a PhD) to really pursue the kinds of jobs I want later in my career. I feel like I'm left behind by an academia that moves apace. I don't have mentorship from real academics who are way smarter than I am. The climate is too hot. I'm not in a big city, and there are lots of engineers here, so my romantic prospects are limited by demographics--something that eats at my mind since the relationship I had in grad school fell apart, a particularly prolonged, painful process that took me a long time to understand and stop blaming myself for. (She still blames me for all her issues. Not healthy.) These days I've been getting in shape, reading more books, and trying to get back to a mental place where I could do a convincing round of coding interviews. I still want to go back to grad school, but I need to be positive the project I'll be working on is a good one in a good lab with good coworkers and a PI who won't abuse me, and I worry there's no way to get the letters of recommendation I would need to break in to such an environment.
The moral of the story is you will always question yourself. I and my brilliant CS friends who went and got jobs at Big 5 or elsewhere are doing work that's really no more meaningful than the arcane work you're doing. Sure, we as a society have decided we want the Systems to keep functioning or function better and are willing to throw money at the problem. But even if as a whole that's meaningful, a worker-bee's role is really small, and our products may come to nothing the moment we turn our backs, just like how the body of scientific work is meaningful, yet your role is really small, and maybe no one will read your papers. People are rarely given the chance to have or are fortunate enough to stumble in to those eureka moments that really make a difference. That's a heartbreaking reality, but we soldier on anyway, because to not do so would be giving up, because we want to be better people, because there is a chance we can make a difference, even if only as a tiny piece of that giant who's shoulders someone else gets to stand on, because "it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us." It's healthy to question yourself, even to become a little jaded, because it makes you wiser and keeps you on a path you actually think might go somewhere. We'd all rather you and the other bees be on those paths than ones you think are pointless and stand no chance of benefiting us, but we trust your hive-mind to make those decisions, and we'll accept long- as well as short-term benefits. Not all bees need to explore the same territory.
My advice is to excel for the 2 more years it takes to finish your PhD and be proud of what you've done, not because it's great, but because it made you intrinsically better. Sure, you've given up a lot of money, but a PhD carries respect with it because people know you made that sacrifice and walked through fire to get it, and that makes you tough, worthy of the really fulfilling inventive jobs out in the wider world. Instead of being like me, the most academic guy in a room with no others or the least academic guy in a room full of PhDs, you can belong. But also ask yourself the big questions: "What makes me happy?", "What do I want to do with my life?", "Who do I want to spend life with?", and don't neglect the answers no matter how busy you are, because otherwise you'll wake up and have a Catastrophe of Success moment when the pressure is gone. It happened to me after being so institutionalized for so long. It happens to everyone.
Welcome to the real world!
My read of your question is, your student is asking questions that you didn't think of before you started your PhD. In other words, you started your PhD without really thinking about why you're doing it. This is of course less than ideal - I firmly believe you should've thought about these questions before commencing the PhD - but that's in the past now, and figuring out what to do next is more important.
So now what? I recommend first to stop worrying about "gaining back faith" in your PhD. This wording makes it sound like you want to return to your old state where you just go about your PhD blissfully unaware of what happens after. Abandon this notion because after you graduate you are going to have to face the same questions. In other words, stop thinking about the PhD as though it is sacrosanct. You don't have to complete it! If you get less out of the PhD than the effort you put in to acquire it, you can (and perhaps should) leave! There is nothing wrong with leaving - this culture is prevalent in academia but you should still not feel obliged to stay.
Next, figure out why you're doing the PhD now. Better late than never. For example,
I had really no answer to this question, as I am in constant doubts myself over the rising opportunity cost of doing a PhD. There is a part of me that beckons me to leave academia immediately. It tells me that I could do so much better, be more free only if I had made the choice after I graduated with my Bachelors. Only if I knew how little I would be paid compared to my peers.
It's good that you're thinking about this now, but you still can't make an informed decision because you don't have the facts. You need to answer questions such as:
- Is money all that important to you? Of course nobody can do without money, but if you're the kind of person for whom a $500k annual salary means a lot more than $100k/year, even though $100k/year is more than enough to live comfortably, then you want to figure that out now because it indicates you are on the wrong career path. It doesn't mean you should quit, but it does mean you'll be somewhat miserable the rest of your PhD knowing there's something "out there" that you want and can't have.
- If the answer to the above is yes, then just how much money are you missing out on? How much are you being paid now, and how much can you earn if you moved to industry? This is again something to find out. Ask your peers in industry, perhaps other undergraduates you studied with.
- If the answer to the above is no, then you know you can likely earn more elsewhere but you believe that the joys of academia more than compensate the monetary difference. In this case your financial situation isn't something to worry about (as long as you earn enough to get by) and you can put this concern out of your mind.
In conjunction with this I recommend checking out your local jobs portal for what positions you can get if you leave academia now. See if you like the jobs, see if you have the skills, see how much they pay.
I cannot say yes to this question either. I do use programming every now and then, but I am in no way comparable to a person who works solely in this field. It does seem that programming skill seems to be the only skill that employers value, a litmus or IQ test for a world of graduate students with questionable credentials. Even newly minted PhDs are directly sent to software developments, albeit more specialized. No, a graduate degree has not prepared me to be a competent coder, the one skill that would make transition from academia to industry so much more smoother.
This is another tough question that should be answered sooner rather than later. What exactly are you trying to learn? What skills do you acquire in the PhD that makes you more employable than a random MIT undergraduate with a BS degree? Figure it out because otherwise you're going to be in for a rude shock when you graduate.
If you've discovered that to succeed in industry the most important thing is to be a "competent coder", then you should absolutely focus your attention on getting as much coding experience as possible. Direct your PhD towards that. Choose a research direction that involves heavy coding. Write using different languages if you can.
Alternatively, if you're completely uninterested in industry, you can continue doing what you're doing. This commits you to the academic career path, with all its challenges and struggles. Are you game to compete against all the other PhD students out there looking for postdocs and tenure-track positions? Again this is something only you can answer. Think carefully before you answer because you'll feel truly miserable if you say yes, then discover five years in the future that the academic path isn't for you (and vice versa if you say no).
(Similar points apply to the rest of the questions you mention. Get a clear idea of what you want, and what you're missing out on if you stay in academia.)
Finally, after having amassed the facts, then you can decide what to do next. The factors involved in this decision are complex, and again only you can make the choice. You could, for example, decide that since 1) you're already 3 years into a 5-year program and 2) there are interesting jobs that require a PhD in your area, investing the two remaining years is worth it. Or maybe you could decide that it isn't worth it, in which case you can start looking for a job now and quit when you get one. Or maybe you could decide that yes, you can have a better-paying career if you quit, but you don't care about the money and would rather work on blue skies problems. Et cetera.
Good luck. Whatever you choose, it's a major life decision.