I left my PhD

For good, healthy, non-malicious reasons

What we do:

Describe, Explain, Create, Share.

Our ethos:

Serious Play.

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Describe

Five years ago, I moved to Vermont to work as a research assistant on a large brain study. I wanted to learn about what academic research entailed after returning from my long trek in Spain and decide whether or not graduate school was right for me. I liked learning, diving down intellectual rabbit holes, and talking to people, so a PhD in clinical psychology seemed like a reasonable career path.

Along the way I took an introductory data science course. This sparked a surprising interest in programming and statistics. I liked it so much that I started building Shiny apps for fun to help the researchers in my lab with their projects. Later on one of the lead investigators told me about the Complex Systems and Data Science program and encouraged me to apply. It seemed worth checking out given my new curiosities, so I began completing the prerequisites (I studied psychology in undergrad and had virtually zero college math under my belt) and eventually applied to the masters program. I was accepted to start in the fall of 2020.

In the interim I explored a bunch of other stuff too. I journaled daily, wrote poems, and devoured books. I formed friendships with people from around the world, learned how to handstand and slackline, and fell hard for the guitar. What I wanted most was to discover what I loved. Certainly learning and self-directed play was a big part of the picture. Nothing else made me feel quite as alive.

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Explain

I did well in my masters courses and enjoyed what I was learning, but I wasn’t that excited about doing academic research. I knew this well before starting graduate school while reflecting on my first independent research project.

Long story short, I didn’t enjoy it. I bemoaned the literature reviews, academic writing, and how little inherent feedback I received from the work. I never really knew if I was moving in the right direction, and what was deemed a discovery was less than thrilling to me.

Maybe I was missing the bigger picture, I thought. They weren’t merely hunting for p-values; they were asking and refining questions, proposing and testing hypotheses, defining and advancing science. My optimism was often revived when I reminded myself of this. But when it came to actually doing the work, my mind was resistant and someplace else. Perhaps I liked the idea of becoming a scientist more than actually being a scientist.

But I hadn’t yet considered what I would rather do, what else I could do, where else I would go if I graduated with my masters. My personal and creative pursuits certainly wouldn’t pay the bills, nor did I really want them to. I also didn’t want to compromise and settle for any ol’ job either. The ones within reach seemed boring in comparison to the academic air I breathed on the daily. In truth it was all I knew, and I didn’t want to face the hard choices that would have to be made if I took my ambivalence seriously.

I also liked the people in my lab. I’d been with them for four years and felt comfortable with the team and the work we did. So when conversations regarding the PhD came around, I wasn’t surprised that they thought I’d be a good fit. It just made sense on paper. I had the necessary background and skillset, and it was a seamless process to bump me up from masters to PhD student.

Perhaps I’d learn to like doing academic research too, given enough time. The idea of it and all the romantic antics it encompassed still had appeal: the creative freedom, working in the space of ideas, contributing interesting science, being mentored by smart and driven people. I wanted to be like them. I wanted develop the kind of mind that could find disparate connections amidst the unseen affairs of the universe. The start date was June 2022.

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Create

Something is off. Sitting in my apartment, alone, eyes glazed over a research article on the relationship between competence and resilience, a sad irony is rippling through my body. My will to continue is breaking despite my growing scientific aptitude.

Maybe I’ve forgotten to account for a hidden variable, a lurking confounder that is inflating the magnitude of my expected effects. Maybe there’s a non-linearity at play. Maybe I don’t understand the terms and definitions, the rules of the game.

Definitions: Resilience is positive adaptation in the face of adversity. Resilience is the capacity of a system to bounce back from unanticipated perturbations. Resilience is a framework for studying and understanding how individuals overcome risk exposure.

They’re worried. He asked me why progress has been so slow. This is *your* project. My body tenses at the thought. Are you still interested in it?

Perhaps the dynamics have changed. It’s possible that my priors are ill-informed too. But if the equation describing the system has been wrong the entire time, then its solution is utter nonsense.

I sketch the play by play and review the parameters of my project. I run through my assumptions and spot it almost immediately: an ecological fallacy. Effects at the population level don’t always translate to individual differences in process and outcome.

I close my laptop and walk out into the November air. This is *your* project. It’s refreshing. The last leaves of fall falling, winter on the horizon, the light darkness draped over the city. Are you still interested in it? The sun sets at four these days, so it’s hard to see where I’m going. But I remind myself that we were all born in the dark.

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Share

Not long after accepting the position, I knew that the PhD wasn’t right for me. Adverse bodily symptoms started appearing despite any obvious indicators of poor health: sharp headaches, chest constrictions, difficulty breathing, poorer sleep. It was also increasingly difficult to relax and do things I normally enjoyed. Guitar chords sounded duller, rest felt less restful, and I constantly felt on edge. And during work hours, rather than ask and chip away at research questions, I made pretty plots, refined my code, and learned more statistics. The latter tasks were important, but I was avoiding what was supposed to be my central focus as a budding researcher.

The signs were there but I continued to doubt if leaving was what I needed to do. I was still working through some personal things, and maybe, I thought, this was what I needed to focus on instead. Maybe the work itself wasn’t the issue, but rather my attitude toward it and the role (hole) I expected it to play (fill). Maybe there was a set of counterfactuals that I hadn’t yet considered. Maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough. Maybe I could science the shit out of a personal dilemma.

What I feared was not knowing what would come next. I had no plan, no vision for myself and the life I wanted to build, which was yet another sign that I had some serious reflecting and exploring to do. This would take time, time I felt I didn’t have in my struggle to remain semi-sane. But slowly, I began to feel that it was okay to leave without a clear sense of direction. That rest and space were necessary prerequisites for clarity and action. That wanting something to be different was enough of a reason to go.

Baby steps were taken. I started applying to a few jobs, all of which I was rejected from. I expected as much and took each one as a lesson in humility and a reminder that interesting work could be found outside the ivory tower. Every interview boosted my confidence and sense of optimism. And then I got lucky. I really liked this particular team and they me, the projects they were working on, and their relationship to the work. It felt like a good fit, and it felt even better knowing that this was more than enough.

It still wasn’t easy to take the final steps of leaving my program—some mourning for everything that doesn’t work out is always necessary, as a close friend put it—but for the first time in what felt like forever, I was willing to embrace the new unknowns before me. I wanted to see what was possible on the other side of fear.

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Serious Play

The game was to produce academic papers—publish or perish as they say—and I didn’t want to play this way. I was too slow and too focused on details that were interesting and fun for me but ultimately hindered my research progress. I was more content supporting researchers with the technical skills I had and focusing my creative juices on other things. Some attention has been given to the kind of role that would have suited me, but the support and incentives just aren’t there yet.

Prior to starting the PhD, my Dad told me that I was more likely to leave the program than I was to perform poorly. He knew that my ambitions had always been personal, and it was true. I told a friend two years ago that “I’d be happy doing this for the rest of my life—reading, writing, practicing guitar, making stuff, no matter how insane or poorly, in good company.” I want to honor this more intentionally in the coming year now that my job situation feels more settled, especially the good company.

The company I want to have is with the kind of people with whom I could easily list as emergency contacts for the soul (practically speaking would be nice too haha). I want to be better company for others too. This involves being kinder to myself and more comfortable with my quirks and way of being. It also means giving love to others more freely, and expanding my sense of what love is and can be. And touching grass more often, as the kids are saying.

In retrospect it seems like leaving was always going to be the outcome. But it certainly didn’t feel easy or inevitable, and it wasn’t just about the PhD. There were many psychological hoops that I had to jump through to get here. Part of me still doesn’t believe how dark it got at certain points, how hard it was to move through and process, where I’m at now with regard to feeling whole again. I see and feel now that the project of fulfillment is messier than the abstractions we use to define and chase it. It’s more like a garden that requires constant care and attention than it is a to-do list to check off, an emergent property of a system in motion, something irreducible to the sum of its parts.

I’m glad I tried it. I learned a lot, especially about the context within which science is conducted. I have a better sense of how science really works and appreciate more fully the fact that there are real humans behind it. Messy, passionate, beautifully flawed humans united by the fundamental impulse of discovery. It’s not the impenetrable, monolithic enterprise I once thought it was. It’s something even better. Maybe I’ll return, one day. Maybe.

I still don’t know what I want to do for a “career”, and I still don’t quite have a sense of the role I want it to play in my life. But I have faith that I’ll figure it out as I go, the way I always have. I want to regain the trust of my instincts and feel more comfortable in uncertainty. What I need is to grow up a little and see the bigger picture again, that the exit is also an entrance.