you have arrived, why Im not dropping out
I've been wanting to drop out of my PhD for a long time. I have now firmly decided NOT to.
This fall will be my fourth year of graduate school, or 22nd grade. I completed a master's degree in the middle of last year and its been weighing on me a lot to bail on it and take a job. The temptation is twofold, the first is that graduate student income is awful. Across the board, any discipline the grad students are getting terrible money for their work done. Some programs are better than others relatively, but they're all horribly underpaid for their skill sets compared to what that labor is worth outside of academia. In my case, I can take a job in industry without my PhD and start earning 4-5 times what I currently take home as a graduate student. And that's really tempting, but its super cliche but money isn't everything. We have enough to survive and every budget is tight but it's never having to pare down from rice and beans to just rice. We're okay, could of course be better but it's fine.
The second temptation to bail, which has been really weighing on my soul for the past two years, is the sense that I've been putting my life on hold. Other friends or relatives my age (26) are now having kids or moving into their second house and really settling into their lives. I also got engaged in April 2023 and thinking about marriage and getting into "adult life" has a whole new appeal I'd never seriously considered.
Currently I'm on a summer internship working full time in Virginia while my wife is back in Illinois for her own job. And it's been painful being apart. My grandfather died on my first day of work. So in being quite isolated and generally depressed, I've had a lot of down time outside of work to think about all this, about the finances like paying for our wedding and logistics of that, but more about what I actually want to do with my life.
Part of my survival plan this summer was to force myself to do a hike every weekend or at least do something and get out of the house. And I did just that, of the 6 weekends I've been in town I hiked on every one of them, and have done (so far) 8 hikes in Virginia. I've also really dove into my other hobbies like film photography and reading. I guess activities has been my coping mechanism for being apart from the love of my life. Which is new for me, when I was depressed in the past I would shut down and withdraw from people, or suppress it by doubling down on my work or studies. But the leaning into the other things in my life has made me realize that I'm not putting off my life until later. Not at all.
Staying in grad school and keeping with the PhD is not holding off the rest of my life. It's not postponing "adulthood". It's not keeping me from living. The living is right now. I keep thinking of the cliche GPS voice from the TomTom days saying, "You have arrived." This is life right now, its not some vague thing way off in the future that will come after college, after grad school, after buying the house, after the big promotion and having 2.5 kids. That's not life, life is today, it is right now. And its not a good viewpoint or angle whatever to think that life is being put off until after those goals, because there will always be more things that come. I'm not gonna stop working in science or engineering, I'm not gonna stop my hobbies, nor exploring places and trying new foods, and all those things will (hopefully) keep flourishing and creating new goals to aim for. Its never going to end. The realization that the life is right now, I have arrived, I am already living my adult life, is a huge weight dissolving away from my shoulders.
The actual completion of the PhD (from the progress I've made so far) isn't going to detract or prevent me from living what I think is a full life. Just in the past year, my wife and I were able to go see Hamilton, go to Salt Lake City to elope, and go to Yosemite for a hiking trip. Also in the past year I've gotten really into my photography and am learning more all the time. And now this summer while working a full 40 hours a week, I've done a bunch of hiking and other fun stuff in my down time.
I always went into grad school with the mentality of treating it like a full time job. Its five o'clock and you're done, close the laptop. It's not worth it. Maybe working the typical grad student life of 12 hour days including weekends would cut down my grad school time by 6 months? Like a semester and a summer maybe? But to work myself to death over that time, its not worth it at all. The pace that I've setup for myself is definitely sustainable and can be maintained for the next one and half or two years.
What I've been thinking is to do the bare minimum to get the dissertation accepted, keep the 9-5 work load, the goal is now to graduate and get out. On top of that keep living my life as I already have been. I just haven't realized it before now. I'm 26, I'm married to my best friend, we have a beautiful dog, I have great hobbies. Spending time with my wife and dog, exploring new places, cooking, taking care of plants, photography, reading, hiking, drinking craft beer with friends. It's a good life, and all of those awesome things are not on pause until I finish my PhD, that is not a reason to drop out. I can and am, enjoying all of that right now. I have arrived, my life is right now.