I remember in undergrad, cy briefly dated his Italian TA, and after it ended, he told me to never date a PhD student, because they have no time for you and can be a little crazy. And now that ew has finally completed her doctorate, I can say that there is some truth to cy’s assertion. Obviously that didn’t deter me, as ew and I are now married, but there are some very important realities that I learned from dating a PhD student for over 5 years.
Not all doctors are created equal
Typically, we associate higher education with increased earning potential. Especially when graduate school yields you the title of doctor. However, this does not apply to PhD students. In fact, earning a PhD probably has sapped most candidates of their earning potential, since the jobs awaiting a PhD essentially lead to more academic positions that pay very little, or an industry job that pays no more than someone who already has 5+ years of work experience.
Science inevitably must come first at some point
PhD students at some point HAVE to graduate. They are bound in very low-salary positions to an advisor, lab, and/or collaborators that may drive them bananas. Since research is actually ground-breaking, things don’t always work. Projects don’t always go as hypothesized, dead-ends are fairly common, and there’s quite a bit of luck involved with finding a publishable topic. Because of this, research can drag on for years before an actual dissertation is formed, and once you’re in the middle of research, it’s nearly impossible to start over and switch groups if you do find the work environment untenable. So at some point, usually after 4 years, PhD candidates tend to think to themselves, “I am wasting away the prime years of my life with no earnings in this god-forsaken lab. I have to graduate and get out of here.” And so, science must come first. A weekend trip is considered a visit to the lab, evenings are dominated by ways to figure out the proper chemistry or experimental design, nights are spent restlessly thinking about how to graduate.
PhDs are conflicted people
The appeal of a PhD is in fact working on things that no one else has done. Research by nature is intended to make you feel stupid; if you do not feel stupid, then you are probably not doing any interesting work. So the conundrum is that PhD students are generally smart people who do not like to feel stupid, yet they pursue a field that makes them feel stupid all the time. Additionally, research does not pay well. Companies will not fund nascent ideas, so research tends to be funded by governmental entities. So there is no potential for upside of an IPO or buy out from a company; all intellectually property will be held by universities or national labs. The only upside exists in the faint possibility of a Nobel Prize or similar name recognition among peers. But again, PhDs see industry jobs as boring and unexciting, and thus seek a paradigm shift in the way the world treats new ideas.
I think the most important thing I learned about PhD students is that they need support. Imagine starting a job that promised you the ability to indulge in your true passion in life, only to find out that your true passion is likely impossible to accomplish. Then imagine that this job demanded you to always be thinking about it, work on the weekends, feel guilty about taking holidays, and barely paid you enough to live each month. Then imagine that your work environment deteriorated to the point that you dreaded going into work every day, but you could not go search for another job because that would just restart the entire process you committed yourself to for the past few years. And now imagine doing this as your first job out of school, and five years later, you’re in the same exact position while the rest of your friends you graduated with have moved forward with their lives such that they are working at jobs they either enjoy or at jobs that actually pay them money. For those of us who did not earn a PhD, we’ll never truly understand the dedication, sacrifice, and effort it takes to graduate. At work, I complain about making investments in environmental markets that don’t really have a framework. For ew, she lived in a world that didn’t exist until she built it. So yes, PhDs may be a little crazy sometimes, and they may not always focus on things outside their immediate world, but they’re essentially put in the worst work situation possible and somehow find their way out of it, usually with a new idea that can spur the advancement of something, no matter how niche or small it may seem. And so, though ew says it was anticlimactic to condense 5 years of work into one 45 minute presentation, all I can say is that, those 45 minutes are more than I’ve contributed in the past 5 years. Congrats ew, I couldn’t be more proud.
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