this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
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I've said it before, but one reason I didn't pursue a PhD is that there appeared to be an element of hazing in the entire thing.
Several of the PhD students I knew were languishing for years trying to get their thesis together, in what can only be described as poverty.
Meanwhile, half of the professors were miserable, and if they made good money, it was because they were very focused on how to make money. The happiest postgrad I knew was a senior lecturer who had given up on becoming a professor.
The best you can hope for is that your personal area of interest happens to have a lot of funding.
Yet these people almost universally seemed to think, "Well, that's just how it is. The nice thing is that if you can get an academic position, it sucks less than being a PhD student."
I have a PhD because I thought I wanted to go into research. And while I loved research, that didn't come close to cancelling out how much I loathed all the non-research shit you need to do for funding and keeping a job.
Then I went from academia into corporate R&D, and realized I basically started to hate doing chemistry in general. Mostly because it reminded me of all the stuff I hated.
Im now super happy as a safety consultant, and my PhD sometimes helps in convincing people that I do in fact know more than them. It also covers an ugly spot in the wallpaper, a purpose it fulfills much more frequently.
I got my current teaching position by essentially volunteer-professoring while doing some grad work. Super exploitative on paper, though that wasn't the intention of anyone involved (tiny college hated by the conservatives so they kinda had to wing it every time legislative fuckery happened). But it's rough, I don't make enough to pay my (incredibly cheap) mortgage so I'm in the awkward position of having been financially unemployed for a year while still working full time. Not to sound too whiny but man, the culture of "Guess I'll starve because I just love my students so much" is absurdly toxic. And that's coming from someone firmly part of that culture.