A Good Enough PhD
It just needs to be good enough. Perfectionism and self loathing team up and combine to make the best/worst misery spiral.
Most PhDs kind of suck. By that I mean they're cobbled together, too obscure, not practical, or just plain messy. And thats FINE. Science is messy, despite what every pop-sci article will lead you to believe. My PhD isn't going to change anything major, its not going to be groundbreaking. The justification for my work is loose at best, and is dependent on technology that just does not exist in practical applications yet. There are many flaws in my work, lots of half baked assumptions and shortcomings and straight up errors. But its fine. Its good enough.
Yet I think about quitting my PhD every day. every. single. day. At this point I'm not quitting for three reasons.
- I'm so close.
- I've made a commitment.
- I'm doing it for me.
There is definitely some sunken cost fallacy going on here. I'm 3.5 years deep into a PhD with another 12 months to go. So close! everybody says. I know they mean it as like a "cheer up youre almost at the finish you got this", but it rings kind of tone deaf when I share that Im feeling burnt out and the response is basically "well just do some more work then its over". But I think I can stick it out for another year, my mental health is starting to improve, life feels less heavy and monumental, and there's been fewer days where I can't get out of bed.
When I first started my PhD in 2021, part of me wanted the respect that comes with a doctorate. I think that part of me is dead now. Asking people to call me doctor feels gross and cringy. I dont want to identify so closely with my work, I get meaning from other things now than when I started. I really just want to live a good life, I dont want to become a CTO at some startup and Change the world. I want to do good, help people, and live my life. I dont want to be Dr. Beaumont, I want to be Bruce who happens to have a PhD. There were many other reasons I signed up for this and basically none of them apply now. One is that I was unconsciously seeking some sort of validation that I was enough. I felt a need to prove my self worth by doing a hard thing. This realization came after my dad's outburst and restarting therapy, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. And so now I'm reclaiming my PhD as something I'm doing just for me. Not to prove something to others or the world or to abate an inferiority complex. I could quit and do fine (and man do i think about it a lot) but a part of me still wants my project to work, to at least complete it, for my own sake. There's power in reclaiming this degree since its gotten away from me. I made a commitment to myself and my now wife (girlfriend at the time) that if we moved to [college town] I would finish my degree in under 6 years. I'm happy to say that I'm on track for four and a half. This is mainly due to alot of overlap between my master's and my phd, but Im still proud to be making such progress.
But the time has come to focus on getting out. Im ready to be done for a variety of reasons, one of which is money. I have a BS in aerospace, an MS in nuclear and lots of work experience. I could take a job right now and easily 4X my current salary. Yes I get a tuition waiver but that's not real money, its called a waiver for a reason. The bursar basically gets told to put an OP coupon code on my student bill and it gets (mostly) zeroed out. No money changes hands. So with my small stipend I get guilty when spending any amount of money not for bills or groceries. $10 to develop that roll of film I'm super excited to get back? Heart twinge. Ordering pizza because my wife and I started drinking beer at 4pm and dont want to cook? yeesh. I constantly have to remind myself that money is for doing work, it is meant to be spent or saved not sit around doing nothing. But just another spare grand a month to get some breathing room would be killer. I am very fortunate to have a wife that also works in STEM and helps support us a lot. Together we make just enough to cover all bills, all basic needs, save a decent amount each month, and give our two dogs a good life.
Most people dont end up working in a field or project aligned with their PhD. A PhD is meant to be your first major professional research project, of which there will be many more. My advisor's PhD is in theoretical bubble dynamics, and now he does experiment most of the time. My PhD is experimental with a skosh of modeling. I want to go back to simulation work and theory after graduation. I'm not pigeonholed like some people think a PhD will do, at worst a PhD can be treated as years of intensive work experience in an adjacent field. In practice its treated as a demonstration of your skills on a significant undertaking over several years. The topic is usually besides the point. That being said, I don't want to work in a lab anymore. It is satisfying to work with my hands and turn wrenches, but the D in R&D sucks for lab work. Three days of labor before you can do a vacuum test and then it fails? Congrats now you can do it reverse, debug the leak, then rebuild it for another three days. Fun right? Simulation you just type in the pressure you want and you move on. I'm not averse to the real world and touching grass. I love hiking, I want to rebuild a classic car, and would love to a have a huge garage with a lift to work on our vehicles, I love analog photography and the physical nature of it. Its just that with work, I wish it would just work. I cherish the idea of clocking in, doing a good job, and clocking out. Thats it, no ruminating about it in my off hours.
All of this to say, Im ready to be done. I dont really care about the work anymore, the goal now is graduation instead of furthering the research (which are not necessarily aligned). I'm trying to lower my standards and just crank out any old slop because honestly the minimum is approval from my committee, and I know more about my topic than anyone else soooo how difficult can it be to convince my committee I've learned/done enough. I've realized that's really what a PhD is, a confidence game to get signatures on your document. Ideally your work helps further humanity in a significant and meaningful way. But those last two aren't requirements. The PhD just has to be good enough, and I find that comforting. It makes it feel more doable.
Song recommendation for the day: Ego Death by Polyphia.
-Bruce