I want to add to this post - in my experience, a crappy PhD project with a great advisor is orders of magnitude better than a great PhD project with a shitty advisor.

A shitty advisor will make your life horrific - will pile a toxic combination of guilt, uncertainty, with just the right amount of compliments to make you keep going while hating your life. I've seen many brilliant colleagues completely burn themselves out because of this.

I've had an excellent advisor both for my PhD and later my postdoc - and while I've had strong disagreements with both, they are now excellent friends and people who I really cherish.

Before you accept a PhD in a lab, talk to your advisor's students privately, and ideally also to her ex students.

I am PI and Lecturer at top 10 World University and this is the advice I give to my students: don't focus too much on the project; chances are that in 3-4 years you'll move on and work on something completely different anyway. The working environment is the most important thing:your PI, your lab mates, the department/institute. Having said this, I agree with those who say Science is full of jerks. Two out of two of my advisors when I was PhD students and then postdocs where jerks. However, there is also people who try really hard to be as nice as possible yet maintaining a friendly and competitive/ambitious environment. They are just very difficult to recognize a priori if you are a student or a postdoc.

This is so true. The project you take on is the least important aspect to consider. First is the lab, second is your supervisor, third is money (does you supervisor have any), and coming up lucky last is the project. I don't mean to say that the project is unimportant (it is actually really important), but that as an inexperienced researcher you are not really able to pick what is going to be a good project (neither is you supervisor unfortunately). It really involves a bit of luck, but if you are working in a great lab with great people who have money then you much more likely to end up working on a great project than you are by just trying to pick what be a great project from the start.

Wow your priorities is very much the same said for startups: too much emphasis and commitment on the initial product idea (project) in the beginning and not enough attention to the possible risks coming from the team (lab), the supervisor (angels, advisors).

Back in 2011 I wrote this about the similarities between being a scientist and being an entrepreneur: http://lab.gilest.ro/blog/of-scientists-and-entrepreneurs/

This is so true. I was naive going into grad school and got an email over the summer from a professor who wanted to work with me. I thought "well that sounds interesting" and accepted his offer immediately.

I got VERY lucky. My advisor is absolutely amazing. He goes far out of his way to make sure I am taken care of. He finds conferences for me to attend, fellowships I can apply for, and research collaborations with other professors. He even takes the grad students in his group hiking.

But I realize this isn't typically the case. I feel bad for some other grad students in different departments that are essentially free labor, with advisors who aren't as great as mine. I'll reemphasize: I got lucky. But if you are considering getting your PhD, eliminate the dice-roll from the equation and find a kind, caring person to do research with, because it makes a world of a difference. I would argue it is the most important aspect of getting a PhD, and it can make or break your time in grad school.

Everyone told me grad school would be the most difficult, grueling time of my life. In fact, it's the exact opposite. I get to wake up every day, work wherever I like, and I no longer have classes so the only thing I have to do is research. I get to use the world's best supercomputers and neutron sources. I'm essentially getting paid to have fun. Plus, I have access to all my university's resources (health insurance, workout centers, library, a large student body to interact with) without any of the administrative overhead that professors have (grant writing, internal politics, teaching).

Yes yes yes yes yes.

Well said.

Find out how many of your advisor's former students want to continue working with him or her. That might be a good measure of how much they want to deal with him or her once they don't need to.

> I'm talking real life risks to your mental and physical health, destruction of relationships, opportunity cost, and (potentially) the vaporization of that awesome scientific career that you spent over a decade building because the one person in charge of you with no oversight decided they didn't like you.

This person's rant describes my experience reasonably well. Insomnia? Check. Neutral-at-best advising relationship? Check. Declining general health due to overwork and stress? Check. Narcissist/psychopath on my committee? Check. Know somebody who ended up in a psychiatric hospital? Check.

Check. Check. Check.

Edit: I was in a top-5 science/engineering PhD program.

Thanks for posting this. I don't think your experience is uncommon. I have actually worked in two separate academic labs and both of the PIs exhibited some sort of sociopathic behavior (lacked empathy, were extremely self-centered, set forth incredibly unreasonable expectations, etc.). I've tried to convince myself that they simply lack good managerial skills but I think something else is afoot. The academic system and funding climate breeds and selects for these sorts of egotistical investigators. They have to work extremely hard to sell their work to funding agencies that are tightening their belts to begin with against a flood of newly minted PhDs/post-docs that have sunk nearly a decade into their own education just to catch the slightest break. It would make sense then that the only types of people who would follow this carrot-on-a-stick model are those who have thoroughly convinced themselves that they are better than all of the others and should be the recipient of all research funding in their field. Couple this with the fact that nobody gets funding for having humility or admitting that they are wrong and you end up with cut throat competition where salesmanship is valued over the skills of a good scientist or student mentor. Not to mention the bias a bright undergrad gets from a professor on whether or not to pursue graduate study.

I'm not surprised you and I have had negative experiences in academia pursuing an advanced degree. I agree that the politics of it all prevent some of the more unfortunate stories from surfacing because who doesn't need another letter of recommendation or reference these days. It's not hard to find the culture of exploitation in academia. I'd really like to know the numbers on what grad school drop outs go on to do. Even more interesting would be how they're doing in the mental health department.

On a more positive note, I appreciate this article for being a collection of advice for someone considering getting a PhD. More resources like this should be made available to young undergrads still on the educational conveyor belt.

Countering your counter-point: this seems like the most pessimistic comment about doing a PhD I've ever seen. There are many types of department, many fields, that don't operate like the type of setup you are describing. I'd be damn surprised if anyone in my department is waking up with "screaming nightmares" or is "on their way to the psychiatric hospital" - though maybe I'm just ignorant about my peers, or got a lucky roll of the dice.

I'm not saying this doesn't happen, or trying to diminish your personal experience, but you've presented your dark scenario as being as inevitable as the happy scenario you are railing against.

I'm in a finance PhD program at a top US school. What he says is quite close to the true, from my experience with friends in finance and partly economics (the marketing and accounting people seem to be having healthier lives in my school).

I have several friends who are depressed or have a diverse array of issues, none of which existed before grad school. Yes, I completely agree that "your mileage may vary", but I've seen it happen many times. Asshole advisers that have you at their mercy. Gruesome grading hours for no pay. Etc.

For instance, I just got an email a few hours ago about my weekend. They told me I have to work for 19 hours between Saturday and Sunday afternoon grading MBA exams ("work" is of course generous because the word usually implies me getting money out of it). What can I do? Nothing really...

[Details: I need to proctor MBAs exam on Saturday until noon, and then I have to help grading 400 exams which NEED TO BE GRADED on Sunday afternoon (because the profs go on vacation early on Monday and also MBAs want their grade fast). The prof. told me that at 2.5 minutes per exam (for my part), it will take me 16 hours, besides typing the grades and the 3-hour proctoring. That's 19 hours of work in a 24 hour lapse. And they don't blink an eye, because I just have to take it (it's unpaid because it's "part of scholarship")

Sure, I can complain, but if I do I'm dead and will be called a troublemaker (seen it happen a few times). Moreso, my grading load is on the low side compared to some friends who spend an insane amount of time grading, teaching, and preparing slides for their advisors.]

That much grading in that short of a time is bullshit. Sorry that you've had that dumped on you. But you're right, it's not going to pay off to complain about it.

Was that stipulated in the scholarship?!

Yes, it says we have to work 6-8 hours a week for them doing RA and TA work, but to not worry as "in practice the workload is much lower". My problem is not with teaching/grading/doing silly RA work [1], but that they expect me to spend my entire Saturday and most of Sunday doing it just because the faculty are flying away early on Monday.

I don't know how to put it, but it's not just a matter of working, it's about feeling respected. And I think that component is not there.

[1] My last RA work involved going to the website of the top 100 US and international business school, and collecting the number of assistant professors and the details of all the female and African American asst professors. It seems MBA rankings are starting to include that in their rankings so the faculty wants to recruit in those demographics. (And when I reported back that there was not a single African American assistant prof in finance in the top 100, I was told to go back and include the next 50 in the list).

You've put your finger on something important: "it's not just a matter of working, it's about feeling respected. And I think that component is not there." By paper measures I'm doing decently in academia, but in practice the working conditions, pay, and level of respect from others in academia who don't know my work are not good. (I've made some choices in employment based on geography rather than prestige and will not be allowed to forget that in the near future.)

"67 percent of graduate students said they had felt hopeless at least once in the last year; 54 percent felt so depressed they had a hard time functioning" (quoted in http://scienceblogs.com/thusspakezuska/2009/02/23/grad-schoo... I don't have access to the original publication.)

If someone in your department was waking up with screaming nightmares, would you know about it? Most people don't want to talk about these issues.

I know it sounds unrealistically pessimistic but it's very similar to my experience. Colleagues developing a host of awful conditions due to a terribly stressful environment. Doing a Ph.D. was my biggest regret.

At first I was thinking you are doing an excessive amount of fear mongering but then I read this sentence

"I bet that at least one of your fellow students will wind up in a psychiatric hospital."

I knew two students in my Ph.D. program in math who ended up in a psychiatric ward.

Full disclosure, I'm ABD in math and quit because I saw no future as a math professor at a research institution. In retrospect my advisor was not a good fit for me either. I wish I had left the program earlier than I did the opportunity cost was indeed quite high.

>At first I was thinking you are doing an excessive amount of fear mongering but then I read this sentence >"I bet that at least one of your fellow students will wind up in a psychiatric hospital." >I knew two students in my Ph.D. program in math who ended up in a psychiatric ward.

Sorry, but this is also anecdotal fear-mongering. I just graduated with a PhD in CS, currently doing a postdoc, and do you know the number of people in my program who ended up in a psychiatric ward? None.

So, what does this tell us? Nothing. These are anecdotes. They give you at best a sample size of ~50 people, and a highly biased one at that.

I agree that we need to share both positive and negative stories from PhD programs (and honestly, I've seen plenty of both sorts posted to HN – the stories being told are not as uniformly rosy as the GP claims), but maybe we need to supplement these with an actual accounting of the risks and outcomes of a PhD in a given field, rather than ghost stories and fairy tales.

In general, people don't discuss mental health problems openly, so anecdotes about not seeing mental health problems should be weighted less than those that observe problems. Still if you had done a search for '"graduate student" "mental health"' instead of complaining about anecdotes you would have found a few things more substantive:

According to http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previou... :

> According to a report from the University of California (UC), nearly half of graduate students said that a mental or emotional problem had interfered with their academic work in the past year. Yet, little is known about the mental health problems that affect graduate students, including those in science.

> In one of the few studies on the subject, ... Nearly 40% of graduate students reported feeling hopeless during the previous year, 78.5% said they had felt overwhelmed, 27.2% said they had felt depressed, and 54.5% said they had felt stress over the past year ranging from “more than average” to “tremendous.”

> A 2006 report from UC paints a similar picture. About 60% of graduate students said that they felt overwhelmed, exhausted, hopeless, sad, or depressed nearly all the time. One in 10 said they had contemplated suicide in the previous year.

More details about that study are at http://scienceblogs.com/thusspakezuska/2009/02/23/grad-schoo... :

> 67 percent of graduate students said they had felt hopeless at least once in the last year; 54 percent felt so depressed they had a hard time functioning; and nearly 10 percent said they had considered suicide, a 2004 survey found. By comparison, an estimated 9.5 percent of American adults suffer from depressive disorders in a given year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

The American Psychological Association, at http://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2012/01/heal.aspx , says "87 percent of psychology graduate students reported experiencing anxiety, and 68 percent reported symptoms of depression. Even suicidal thoughts — with a prevalence of 19 percent — were relatively common."

To follow up on the suicide issue, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9357084 says graduate students were at greater risk for suicide than undergraduates.

It's true that people don't discuss mental health problems openly, and so they're less observable. However, the initial comment was about being committed to a psych ward, which is observable, so I think it's fair to offer anecdata in the opposite direction.

You are right that I should have done a search for the relevant data before criticizing the use of anecdotes. Perhaps this should be a rule for online discussions involving anecdotal evidence – the poster should also make an effort to see if there's real evidence out there.

Thanks for posting data!

Medical privacy laws in the US makes it hard to draw those connections. Can you tell who has been admitted to your nearest psych ward?

The OP wrote "I bet that at least one of your fellow students will wind up in a psychiatric hospital", not that you would know that to be the case. I doubt that the department head will tell people that student X is no longer in the program because of mental health reasons ... nor pretty much any other reason.

A friend of mine killed himself a few years ago and it took months before I could finally learn how he died, as no one would say more than "died too young." (A social worker friend of mine did clue me in that that's code word for a suicide.) Now replace that with "decided to leave the program" and how do you know what happened?

There is no need for precise data. The link is to a set of suggestions for people thinking of entering graduate school, made almost universally by people with PhDs. The OP objected to the lack of information about the dark underside of graduate school, and pointed out the likely survivorship bias.

I think you are unfairly raising the bar on the OP by calling for more rigor. If you think it's anecdotal fear-mongering then you must also object to the original responses, as their individual experiences are also anecdotal, and perhaps even anecdotal whitewashing. Their advice did not include any real evidence either.

> I think you are unfairly raising the bar on the OP by calling for more rigor. If you think it's anecdotal fear-mongering then you must also object to the original responses, as their individual experiences are also anecdotal, and perhaps even anecdotal whitewashing. Their advice did not include any real evidence either.

Oh, I do! I was trying to allude to that by including "fairy tales" in my first comment, but I should have been more clear.

Ahh, no, I misread the intent of your final paragraph. OP means "original poster"; what does GP mean?

If you agree that sharing both positive and negative stories is needed then what is the point of your post? I didn't claim to provide any evidence. I merely stated that I thought the GPs post was overly negative until it hit me that I did indeed know two people who ended up in a psychiatric ward. That is all. There aren't any claims about this being normative or in everyone's experience.

EDIT: I stated in my post that I'm ABD and that I did not complete my program so that people would know that possibly my statements nothing more than sour grapes.

most of cs PhD means a good job and good future. this does not apply to most of other major.

Most of CS is that

Not necessarily a CS PhD

After your BSc, every degree has a negative impact on your hireability. Every hiring manager has seen a flood of domestic Masters of CS and foreign BSc of low quality. I'd say a hack bootcamp has more weight now than a masters. PhDs are considered 'tainted' by academia.

That really depends on what kind of job you are pursuing after your PhD. I don't think most PhD holders in CS would go and become run of the mill software devs, but instead would hold a researchy/freeish position in the company.

One of the most difficult things to learn as a CS PhD is that you aren't an engineer, you are a scientist, so you spend your time learning to approach problems in rigorously scientific ways. In some ways it's a career switch. Doing development work after that can be a strange shift.

"approach problems in rigorously scientific ways"

CS is more math than science. Running an algorithm to find out its (asymptotic) running time would be laughed at by most CSs,they would go by calculating big-o

Having done a CS PhD it very much depends on the field. Yeah you'd be laughed at for running an algorithm to find out run time, but areas like information retrieval tends to involve humans and their reactions enough that experimental design is at the forefront, rather than big-o.

There wasn't any that I know of from my math PhD program that wound up in a psychiatric ward - I might have been the craziest one, but I ended up ok in the end, largely on my resilience.

I left after 4 years, and in hindsight, I wish I left sooner. The wasted time did give me more of a sense of urgency in anything I do though, so that I do not end up regretting what I have done professionally.

Amen. Having gone through -the process- intact, relatively speaking, I've had the pleasure of the misfortune to experience everything mentioned first or second hand.

Two close friends that weren't so lucky, now six years later still circling the drains on the psyche ward.

Another close one that gave up literally two weeks before dissertation time never to return, now years later still oscillating between relief and regret daily.

I had it easy with a return tick trip from the normal institution to the mental one, mixed with two periodic strong bouts of insomnia and a thankfully short period where a bottle of crimson red before lunch got the engine going.

Tons of things to add but indeed, it's hard to be anonymous about this sort of stuff.

Several years later I'm still in the state of "glad to have gone through it, yet had I known in advance what it would entail there's not a single chance in hell I'd accept.".

Before you project your anecdot as a massive generalization of all PHD programs, consider the fact that at least in computer science, there are VERY happy PHDs working at Google, Twitter, FB and others who are glad to have an expertise in fields like machine learning, NLP, IR and computer vision which otherwise would be difficult to attain. Many of these people in fact got hired at these companies because of their PHD degree. In fact, just about few years ago Google had reputation of sweeping clean pretty much all CS PhDs from top 50 schools IIRC. So getting PHD in fields like CS is definitely not a waste of time. Now sure you can end up with bad advisor but that's where you are supposed to do your homework ie background checks on professors and consult former students on their experience. The process of choosing advisor is very critical, you need to find your cultural fit and you need to have very strong intersection on research areas. If you don't have a lot of choice then you are likely underqualified and you would end up choosing something suboptimal that is destined to make you unhappy. Perhaps you were better off just looking for real job in that case instead of insisting on PHD degree. Either way I don't see why your experience with your advisor should be a reason to universally downgrade all PHD programs out there.

harveywi never suggested that a PhD program was all doom and gloom nor that it was personal anecdote. I, for one, agree with harveywi's observations.

Carl Vogel - one of the people questioned on the site - does too, in the comment: "The world is full of miserable grad students. Stressed-out, depressed, uncertain about when or if they’ll graduate and what will happen to them when they do. Far more people go into Ph.D. programs than should."

Vogel is the least optimistic about graduate school of the people interviewed, and also the only one who is neither a PhD nor a current PhD student. This is in line with harveywi's comment about survivorship bias. Your response assumes the same bias, by only considering those finish a PhD from a top school, and diminishing the 50% who did not finish by saying they were "underqualified" or solely at fault for making a suboptimal decision, not recognizing that resolving that question of staying in school (and the potential to be hired at Google) vs. leaving (and being branded 'underqualified' by people like you) is no simple matter.

While you worry about survivorship bias, you also want to be careful about confirmation bias :). If you only know miserable PHDs because you know more people who been in to bad programs or so-so schools then world would look very gloomy indeed.

I don't understand your point. Could you explain it, and hopefully in context of my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8722219 which provide some links to research which suggests that "67 percent of graduate students said they had felt hopeless at least once in the last year; 54 percent felt so depressed they had a hard time functioning; and nearly 10 percent said they had considered suicide, a 2004 survey found. By comparison, an estimated 9.5 percent of American adults suffer from depressive disorders in a given year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health."

Some of the research was for UC, which has neither a bad program nor is a so-so school.

So how is this really different from getting a job? On the job you would also have a manager who has exactly same position and powers you attribute to adviser. You are probably moving across US to get some job X, just to find a manager who is jerk and being a new person you probably have less credibility and mobility. Sure, changing jobs are easy but nevertheless you can't do that endlessly. I guess only big advantage I see is that you probably get paid more, although I doubt fair because you would be considered fresh out of college anyway. In return, you probably have much more higher stress and tight definitive schedules.

So if your choices comes down to getting a job in industry vs doing PHD - there are few advantages for sure but everything you have described seems to apply to both options more or less.

The way that the success or failure of a graduate student's scientific career is in the hands of a very small number of people without oversight has no parallel in private industry. If you're lucky and spot trouble early on you can maybe get a new project/advisor, but you can't change graduate programs. You're committed for 4-6 (or 7 or 8) years. Contrast this with industry, where you can leave an abusive job after a year or two and still have a very productive career.

Even in the worst case that an evil manager fires you from your first job, you can get another. You probably will. In academia, if your halo ever loses its shine you can never get it back. There are no do-overs or next-times when it comes to your scientific reputation.

Also, don't underestimate the importance of money. Materially speaking, the opportunity cost amounts to many hundreds of thousands of dollars. And in terms of psychology, only people who've done it know how much it sucks to still be making $25k/yr in your late 20's. It's worse than ever now that we have Facebook as a mirror to show us where we could have been if we'd chosen industry instead.

This is really just not true. Mostly because in a normal job you don't receive all of your pay in a lump sum at the end of 5+ years. The degree of lock in you see in a phd program creates this kind of strange indentured servitude situation where the phd candidates have basically no recourse in most situations. In a real job you can just quit when there is sexual harassment happening, you basically can't in a phd situation without losing everything. You generally can't even switch PIs without losing years of work.

Exactly. I knew someone working for a professor in the US under the Fulbright program. They were supposed to have limited hours of work so that they could also take classes. It was the professor's first year participating in the program. The professor had the same course load as normal but offloaded it all on the Fulbrighter.

The professor would yell and treat the Fulbrighter the same way an emotionally abusive parent would (I saw emails). It caused crippling anxiety. But the student thought there was nothing they could do, it was a prestigious program they had worked hard to get accepted into. It was a huge honor and everyone at home was proud.

It was a small school where the professor was the also the head of the department. The person could complain to some external HR or appeal to the Fulbright program to be reassigned or something, but that might not work out, might make things worse with the professor, and at best would set the person back a year to try again with someone else the next year; and what if that someone was also a sociopath?

No, it is nothing like getting a job or working in industry. A former boss, and a mentor of mine, who graduated top class w/a B.Sc. in physics from the University of West Indies at Mona, and a M.S./Ph.D. in CS in the USA from a top notch school, AND has 25+ years of hard core industry experience in addition to his educational background more or less reflects the sentiments of the first guy who commented (HarveyWi).... And walked away from all the b.s. mostly because he is a purist and idealist at heart, and believe it or not, he found it easier to manifest that in code than in his day to day dealings as a professor at the university he studied at, where you have degenerate Ph.D./tenured professors who barely earn their keeps and others who bust their ass and never see tenure because of something completely unrelated to the amount of papers they produce/collaborate on or courses they teach.... not to mention dealing with lazy graduate students who want a grade rather than want to learn.... and don't even wanna mention undergraduate, he just wouldn't deal with their crap - so he refused to teach any undergrad courses.

This man is one of the most accomplished engineers AND scientists I have ever known... with deep knowledge of computer science, and prior to it, physics, both theoretical and applied. A genius, to say the least.... (in my view).

And he bolted from academia and said, good riddance.

You have NO idea what you are talking about - and while your generalizations are nice and soothing to you, they are invalid, bogus and do a disservice to people who might actually be considering a Ph.D. and weighing the trade-offs before they embark on something so monumental as a Ph.D. program..... that will eat a huge chunk of their life.

I'd MUCH rather see responses like harveywi's rather than the rosy stuff these guys posted ... and if all the crap doesn't extinguish that last bit of desire to dig yourself into a whole from which you won't be able to get out of for quite a while, then by all means, go get your Ph.D.

My personal take on Ph.D. is, unless you want to teach or perhaps work in research at well-funded government labs or massive corporations that can afford to throw away money at research (i.e. Microsoft Research or IBM), there's truly no need for anything past a Masters degree....

I despise analogies and metaphors, generalizations - not because I don't use them in my day to day programming :), but mostly because they serve no purpose other than to tickle someone's ego or fancy.... present some kind of a twisted map into a territory that is completely unknown to the person embarking on it.

Unless one has a TRUE heart for teaching... for giving his or her life over to research... and by heart, I mean you've wanted to do this since you were 10.... short of this, doing a Ph.D. is only a symptom of a deeper psychological issue...a compensation for something that is lacking in the emotional makeup of a person... perhaps a desire to look good and a fear to admit vulnerability in front of others....or in front of authority.... or as in one case I've seen, in a moment of truth/epiphany/serenity/whatever you want to call it, a 5-tuple Ph.D. man admits to getting all of those degrees to prove to his daddy that he is smart...because his dad scolded him when he was 9 for not getting an equation with a single unknown right after the first or second time... ya know, because 9 year olds are supposed to get equations on the first try.

I am GLAD Harvey and the other guy who did the "check check check" on Harvey's response posted the kind of paint in the ass of an ordeal a Ph.D. is....

And nothing against you, but I'd appreciate if you or anyone else not make weak projections via analogies/metaphors/generalizations whatever logic your mind intuits while reading this or any other website, because your attempt at ameliorating the reality of what a Ph.D. means (even more grueling than medical school or getting a law degree/passing the bar) can seriously screw someone up.

It is, in my view, BEST to get first hand experience/testimony from people who have done it (or know someone who has, which is my case, as I know my friend for 15 years now), and you want to ask them not only about the benefits of the Ph.D. but also about the ginormous cost to the person's entire being.

Whomever is reading here, please take both the positive AND the negative or however you wish to paint the information, to HEART, before you commit to a Ph.D. And then commit, or not. Do ANYTHING but sit on the fence about this. The LAST thing you want is to piss away 5-10 years of your life and then wonder if you did the right thing. Anything or anyone that can successfully dissuade you from such a lofty goal, you should thank him or her for saving your life.

If you don't, you still might thank them 10 years later...

I am sure there are geniuses that have walked away from shit jobs in industry as well.

I suspect that the time investments for "getting a Ph.D." versus "getting a job in industry" don't quite match up.

In normal job, you can quit without forfeiting a few years of work, and needing to wait 0.5-1.5 year for another work opportunity. Plus, you can deal without recommendation from your previous boss. In academia, no matter how but it turns, you can't.

Power to say "I quit" at expense lesser that many years, is a great power you don't realize.

This is a really excellent summary. I'd like to add though, that the 'people stuff' you mention - which I think you are spot on about - continues after the PhD; and furthermore it is a fact of life in nearly every other mildly competitive sphere you might decide to participate in, in nearly any area of personal or professional life.

One of the most important lessons I learned was how to spot different kinds of pathological personalities from a distance.

This is a really, really painful - but invaluable - skill to acquire and I am firmly convinced it can only be learned through the school of hardest-knocks.

There is some truth in what you say, but I disagree with your last point. It doesn't have to be learned in the school of hardest knocks. In particular, learning from experience is best done in a context where experience doesn't cost too much, where you have room to maneuver; in this case, you're better off learning how to deal with pathological personalities in a commercial environment where you have much more freedom to walk away than you do in academia.

> how to spot different kinds of pathological personalities from a distance

Could you expand upon this? What catches your eye, what do you "look for?"

Not got a PhD here, though I do work in academia, so I am surrounded by them.

While I wouldn't recommend it unless you are really into your field of study (basically I see academia like a ponzi scheme at the moment with far more PhD's than future PI positions). I would say that describing it as having "real risks to your mental and physical health" is a bit over the top. Sure anyone can take their job so seriously that they are stressed out and are damaging their health, but that's not a requirement of doing a PhD and not specific to it either. Plenty of PhDs seem to take things easy around here and most seem to have a decent life until the last year when they have to knuckle down.

I intentionally found interviewees to bring a variety of perspective. Some are very positive. Carl definitely brings the perspective you offer.

There's a difference between variety and sample. I fully expected this website to be a big red "NO ...unless..."

Is the awful side of PhD-dom really that secret? I haven't been to graduate school, but I know tons of people who hated (and a few who really loved) getting their doctorates. And I had professors who openly warn some of my peers. I'm just not clear if I'm lucky, or your opening is a bit hyperbolic.

I would say yes and no. What we don't really know are probability and severity. And any of us can imagine that those things don't apply to us because we're exceptional in some way, especially when we really want to rationalize getting the degree.

Probability? Dropout rates are published, but only in aggregate form. That doesn't reveal what actually happens to people. Situations involving faculty misconduct are likely to be un-reported, and it's probably easy to blame the student.

Severity? What's the actual impact of dropping out from a PhD program? You don't get to be a professor? Most PhDs will never get to be professors. Opportunity cost? Sure. I won't downplay that.

The psychological toll? I would take it seriously, at whatever rate it's actually happening. Grad school isn't just a job. It's like working for an extended period, for a lump sum payment, while absorbing 100% of the risk. The controversy over graduate education, while justified, may have the effect of further raising the stakes, if Professor and Failure are widely believed to be the only two possible outcomes.

Disclaimer: I enjoyed grad school, though I took 6 years and came very close to quitting. When it's good, it's great. It can be the kind of "good work" that many of us prefer, even if it's stressful, over easy work that's boring.

If I were to compare it to anything, it would be like starting a small business, i.e., lots of risk, opportunity cost, and massively deferred reward, with a similar implied psychological pressure: Millionaire or Failure.

A few observations based on limited data...

A good friend hit everything right. MD/Phd on a full ride followed by a high-prestige post-doc that included international research. It took him until his late 30s to be comfortable financially, but now he's in his early 40s worried about tenure since the NIH is cutting grands. And he doesn't have a lot of backup options.

The painful thing is I can't think of him doing anything else with his talents. It's unfortunate.

The flip side is I see a lot Phds in areas like Computer Science, Math and Physics who can reinvent themselves as soon as they decide the Phd hamster wheel is done. (Or can step off a few years in)

I continue to feel extraordinarily lucky about my experience with my PhD. It was grueling, it was tough, but I had some fantastic support. I know many who weren't so lucky, and the effects are profound.

Sounds very similar to law school and the legal profession. For some reason, law attracts lots of sociopaths.

Geez, for all that stress and risk, you might as well start a company.

From my experience, people in the corporate world tend to be all that and also low on IQ.

I see no reason to commit before you get to know your supervisor/boss well.

At the office you do 40 hours a week making bank, doing a PhD you live it 24/7 at will be lucky to save. You listen to your friends talk about their vacation, hobbies, and families. You are uncertainty about you abilities, in addition to willful academic fraud. Then you depend on an adviser who views you as a tool for personal glory, and doesn't feel morally obligated to act different because they were treated in the same manner. The only thing that will get you through is love of your work but you most likely already compromised on those dreams. This is the experience of many PhD in the physical sciences, who do experiments all day and will never become professors.

I took more or less one of the paths described in the article (internship -> undergrad -> drop out -> startup -> startup -> startup -> research lab), and everything seems like a mess in its own way and I feel like why I'm not wrapping burritos now is out of luck/ meeting people along the way/ hacking my way through this mess.

At this point, I can't imagine going to academia or industry through traditional means, it's just too much of a mental drain to watch how expectations don't match reality in everything around me, despite being pitched constantly on otherwise.

> "you quit your job and drag your family halfway across the US for this "golden opportunity", and then you find out that this person is by far the biggest jerk that you have ever met and you cannot work with them."

Honestly, now. If you're bold enough to take this kind of risk , be bold enough to recover from a bad decision.