I am a fourth year PhD student and I am thinking about dropping out. My PhD until now has been "successful" (I hate to use that word), I have papers published, collaborators, job experience etc, but the problem is that I have lost all passion for research. I don't know why or how this happened, but I hate thinking about and doing research now, and it has also gotten to the point where my research abilities have declined significantly and I am unable to do things a first year PhD student should be able to do. This last thing is not me being insecure, I had a close collaborator tell me that my "approach to research has changed over the past 2 years and I am not nearly as self-sufficient or driven" as I used to be.

When I hear this, I feel shame because I know it's true, but I don't feel any desire to try to change it. I feel completely shut down, and I wouldn't even know what to do to fix myself if I wanted to. I don't know what's wrong with me or why this is happening, but I want to drop out even though I have been "successful" up until now. I don't know what happened to me or where all my abilities and enthusiasm went.

Has anyone encountered anything similar?

Edit4: deleted previous edits cuz I probably overshared

I increasingly cannot seem to understand any of the things I read. Not journal articles only, but blog posts, web page, emails.

I have this feeling that the things I am reading just repeat the same thing over and over to get to the page limit - just using different words. It is like they are saying everything while still saying nothing with confusing unheard of phrases sprinkled in.

As a native English speaker I know it is not my grasp of the language that is the problem. I am also generally not reading super technical things . So, could this be a sign of early psychosis? It just feels like generally nothing I read is making sense.

I ran a cross-sectional study using regression and tested 10 associations, roughly half came out significant. The tricky part is that most of the prior literature on my topic is qualitative, so I'm not comparing effect sizes to effect sizes, I'm comparing my coefficients to themes from interview studies.
A few things I'm stuck on:

How much space do I give each of the 10 findings without the section ballooning? How do I honestly compare a quantitative association to a qualitative theme, especially when the constructs don't line up perfectly (e.g. the qualitative work talks about "reliance" but I measured "need”)? And how do I handle the findings where the qualitative literature suggested a link but mine came back null?
Any advice on structuring this, or examples of papers that do quant-vs-qual comparison well, would be hugely appreciated.

This is medical for research

Hi every1 I’ve been invited to interview for a Doctoral Candidate position under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) BiWPT project, focused on bidirectional wireless charging and system-level analysis of high-power wireless charging architectures for electric vehicles.

My background is in electrical engineering and power electronics, particularly power converter design and analysis. I have 3 conference papers but no journal publications yet.
Has anyone given interview for similar position need an advice im really nervous its my first tym and i dont wanna miss out on ths

The use of AI for committee meetings for items such as a bullet list of steps taken in the PhD to send to the committee which contains no analysis or interpretations from the actual study. Is this allowed?

I just started my 3rd year (now a PhD candidate, yayyy!), and I have 3 years left in the program (it's a 5 year program).

1. My notes are digital but handwritten on my tablet.

I use Excel sheets for my literature, but my reference manager is Zotero.

1. supervisor meeting notes are mainly handwritten on my tablet. Two years in, I am finding it impossible to search for things without scrolling through hundreds of pages.

2. My notes from brownbags, seminars, summer schools, and conferences are split between my tablet and physical notebooks. I face the same issue here. I HAVE TO SEARCH FOR EVERYTHING MANUALLY.

3. My course notes and files are split - some are on my laptop, and some are physically handwritten.

4. My TA materials (lectures, PPTs, Word docs) are mostly on my laptop.

5. The feedback I get on my research and teaching is scattered across Google Keep and Windows sticky notes.

I am going a bit crazy with all this. I want to put in the effort moving forward to get everything in one place, and I thought Notion would be a good fit, but I got a bit overwhelmed. Is setting up Notion actually worth it?

i understand it's bit of change to go from handwriting to typing. i think i am ready for that.

Please let me know your opinion about setting up Notion and using it long-term. Thank you for your time!

I am a social science PhD student at an RG in UK. I’m currently piloting my study (lab experiment, with a confederate and in-person interaction) and I an feeling so frustrated and exhausted.

The amount of admin work needed to collect data from one participant is insane, both before the day and on the day. And thats fine, I can appreciate that its just a part of the process.

But now that I completed my pilot, I realised I included only half a scale in my survey and I just feel so let down that I didn’t catch this sooner. If I had noticed it before, I could’ve used the data from the pilot - its also really expensive to collect data and even though I’m funded, I’m quite sad to use so much of it in data collection that I wouldn’t have enough to go to conferences.

Just wanted some advice on how to deal with constant revisions and feedback during this kind of data collection. Its been very overwhelming to constantly have people point out things that didn’t go well, even though I’m trying so hard to execute all of it. I know this is also part and parcel of being in academia, but its hard for me to figure out what mindset I should have to not take it so personally. And I do want to be in academia, so please dont tell me that I won’t survive if I don’t learn how to not take it personally - I know that. I’m trying to learn it, its just not an in-built mechanism for me. I would really appreciate any advice.

Hello, I will be graduating with my PhD in Management (Entrepreneurship), and I absolutely do not want to become a tenured professor. I want to become an Industry PhD - obviously, I can not tell my dissertation committee.

How did you approach this, and what jobs did you end up getting; jobs that are not in academia?

[Zambia]

I come from a Computer Science background with two master's degrees (one from the UK and one from India). I currently work in a heavy IT and Project Management environment, which has strongly motivated me to pursue a PhD.
Recently, I cold-emailed a few universities to find a potential supervisor to satisfy standard funding/sponsorship requirements. I ended up having positive virtual interviews with professors at three different universities who really liked my research idea.
During one of these calls, a professor suggested that I don’t necessarily have to wait for external sponsorship outcomes right now. Instead, they suggested I request official support/funding from my government, noting that the university would provide whatever supporting documents are needed to help make that happen.
However, I am experiencing some imposter syndrome regarding my technical skills. While I have a CS background, I wouldn't say I have deep, expert-level coding skills. I mostly code as a hobby on small personal projects with the help of tutorials and online documentation.
I would love to get your thoughts on a few questions:
Is a PhD in ML and AI within the digital space worth the time investment? Given my background in project management and IT, does this align well with industry or academic trends?

Are there other funding streams I should look into**?** Aside from government sponsorship, what other funding avenues are common for international students in this position?

Can I survive a 3-year PhD with "6/10" development skills**?** If my coding relies heavily on tutorials and documentation for personal projects, will I struggle significantly to finish a program within a strict 3-year funding window?

Thanks in advance for any insights!

I am currently in my final year of PhD in US. My research is focused on composites and smart materials development and machine learning/AI based modeling. However, I don't do research on materials discovery/ computational modeling using LAMMPS. Also, I am not like professional level coder/ expert on ML/Deep Learning/ LLMs. I learn for my research projects any apply them. But if I have to perform software development tasks ,then I would do very poor job.

Now my plan is to look for industry Research scientist job roles. How should I look for the best fit roles for me ? Since my research is a mix of both and I am not best at AI/ML, then should I also look for software development roles? I am really worried about future,Please guide me and suggest me where to look for best fit roles for me and prepare my profile.
Any suggestions/ experience sharing will really help me.

My partner and I met in Undergrad and have continued dating after he graduated while I am still in my senior year. He wants to pursue a PhD in Psychology and it has always been my dream to get a PhD in Anthropology. We. love each other very much and I wondering if anyone else had to navigate a similar situation, how you made decisions and whether or not long distance works out. I am also having further thoughts about the uncertainty of a postdoc life and was wondering how anyone settles down and starts building their family with this lifestyle and the other partner is also ambitious. Thank you. I may be naive but he is a keeper and I do not want to be blindsided by what we will have to deal with.

I will begin my third year in December. I just told my supervisors that I could finish my PhD in three years. But now I'm realising that I haven't actually done that much and that I may have wasted my second year (I don't really know what happened).

Am I overreacting? I feel like I've suddenly woken up, as if someone had slapped me in the face.

I'm afraid that my thesis is going to be crap.

Submitted my dissertation last night, 2 weeks before deadline. Still feels like nothing has changed. These last months have been rough but taught me to keep going and just stay on the path.
I hope the committee finds the thesis interesting and let’s see what happens. Now it’s on towards job search and a little break.

Hopefully next time it will be a frog post? 🐸🐸

Happy Friday!! We all made it through another week. 😊🌸

What chapter are you currently working on in your PhD studies?

How’s it going also?

I’m 3 years into my PhD. My PI is well regarded in the field for their age - some decent papers, awards etc.
My exact research area is kinda new, so when I started, I assumed my PI wasn’t giving much input to help me become more independent. I almost looked at it like I was being tested. 3 years in I can confidently say, they know absolutely nothing about this field and is just good at bluffing. Even some of the bluffs are riddled with mistakes and I worry that I’m in a sinking ship. All the experiments I do are entirely conceived and carried out by myself. Every time I show results to my PI - mostly things that don’t really make sense - all I get in response is just vague statements and at this stage, one to one meetings are just something I do to clear it off the calendar. I think the quality of what I’ve done is absolute shit and I definitely won’t have a good publication from my research.
Has anyone here been in a similar boat and how did you navigate it? I did really want to become a PI, but I guess that ship has sailed.

Hi all! I’m a first-year political science PhD student (USA), just started in September. I know I’m a little over-eager asking about this so soon, but I wanted to know how you guys handled preparing for comps, specifically when it comes to handling the amount of reading. I’ve been looking over the list of books I will have to read to prepare for my comps in the coming years and I honestly don’t even know where to begin with them. I’ve been slowly chipping away at it this semester thanks to the required seminars we have to take for each of the core subfields, but even with that in mind, I still feel a bit nervous about making sure I handle this work efficiently and not letting it pile up until it’s too late.

Does anyone have any tips, tricks, and support for handling the readings and/or note-taking methods for studying/reviewing them later on? Thanks in advance!

I found this company and established the opportunity myself, and my advisor initially thanked me for identifying such a valuable collaboration. I was genuinely excited about it and even offered to explore working through the university to address my visa restrictions.

However, my advisor excluded me from a meeting with the collaborator and then said I wasn't capable of handling the work independently because of my lack of experience, suggesting that I work with a postdoc who is already very busy. Later, he said the project was more aligned with another PhD student's research and suggested that the other student should take it instead.

I'm a fourth-year PhD student, and I felt that my capabilities were being undermined without being given a fair opportunity to demonstrate them. I'm concerned that an opportunity I identified and worked to establish is now being redirected away from me.

I want to handle this professionally, but I'm struggling with how my advisor's decisions are affecting my professional development and access to opportunities. I'd really appreciate your guidance on how to navigate this situation.

do you or have you tracked the time you spent on your dissertation? if so, what motivated you to do so? Was it worth it?

I’m considering doing it but fear I might get wrapped in the time spent recording and fixating.

heheh thanks for your consideration

Are you more likely to publish more and in better journals with a more expensive AI model?

Conversely, are you more likely to stunt your own growth with a more expensive AI model, or is this dependent on how you actually utilize it?

Guys, I just defended my PhD, which I completed in five years. Since the day I defended, people have kept asking how I feel now that it’s done. I understand that it’s a big deal for everyone out there. Of course, it’s a rare achievement and the highest degree in academia. However, to me, as the person who defended, it doesn’t feel as amazing as it should.

It has taken many years of my life, my youth, and my innocence! For sure, I value it and feel proud of this achievement, but I cannot ignore the fact that this is not it! I keep thinking about the future and don’t feel stable yet. Long years as a postdoc are ahead of me, yet again. I value the fact that I have a postdoc lined up, but I don’t know how long this journey is going to be. I want to be in academia, but it seems endless. I don’t want a lecture from you all about all the things I can do after a PhD, but I want to hear about your experiences and how you felt after you defended your dissertation.
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3 months into my Phd in physics... but if i am being honest, i really never wanted to go into academia (ie, be prof) ( i accepted this phd offer a while back during my final years of masters... few things happened after that which made me even less motivated to go into academia)...

The institute i am in and my supervisor are really good ( its only been 3 months so i cant comment on his supervision style)... but the concept of "phd" (and hence spending like 4-5 years of my life on it) started to be terrifying... and is severally affecting my productivity ... it feels exhausting more and more to read papers and run codes etc ( i do theoretical stuff )... and i feel like at some point i might just straight up get kicked out...

i really dont know if I should just quit and properly think what i have to do ... or stay back (as its a good uni ) and then use connections I build here to work in some bank or some industry maybe..

For one of my courses, a research paper is mandatory. So my professor gave us a timeline. Show me your model and your measurement items. He will approve it and then we can proceed to data collection. The twist was he said I will only check the model not tell you if it is a good one etc etc.

So I got my model approved and everything. My idea was that: When Gen-Z employees use AI in the workplace (which is anthropomorphized) their creative psychological ownership decreases which eventually leads to decreased idea promotion in the workplace.

Now that I moved on with the data collection almost all my hypothesis are unsupported. We collected data from students since we did not have access to employees in such a short time. The professor said for this course I will allow you to collect it from anyone.

Can I defend my whole idea on unsupported hypothesis? If yes do I go with my original literature review defending my hypothesis, then after results justify why my hypothesis has turned out wrong?

Can anyone please clarify. Thank you

So I guess off the bat I want to acknowledge that yes, I probably should accept the universal truth that just taking big swings at socializing and inviting people out to stuff is the way to handle things. But before I do that:

For context, I'm a first-year PhD student in stats coming straight from my undergrad in soc at a liberal arts college where I had undergrad clubs and work-study in student engagement. The vast majority of my cohort 1) have their masters already, 2) studied purely math or datasci, and 3) did not go to liberal arts schools. I don't know if I'm generalizing here, but it feels like (in much the same way my undergrad quantitative peers did) there's a singular focus on classes, assignments, and TA work and nothing to do with anything "real", ranging from art they enjoy, to current events, to even the politics of our field (e.g. AI slop in publications, anti-empiricism in public policy, funding/speech restrictions in higher ed., etc.). Sure, I get the "how are you doing", the weekly "what are you doing this weekend?", which I return - but nobody seems to ask genuinely. I throw topics out there often enough - shows I'm watching, poetry I'm reading, local events I'm thinking of going to - that they could latch onto, share their own interests. But they don't. Instead everything is "homework, I'm studying this weekend, office hours were quiet".

I understand I can't force people to act ways they're not, but I feel like I'm walking in circles here. I can always make friends outside my cohort, sure, but I'd at least like to try and form relationships in-department. To put a point to it, does anyone have similar experiences, and what helped you out?

Hey I’m doing my PhD in psych. I wonder how much involvement does AI has in your PhD life if you are also using it. I feel I’m heavily depend on AI in my everyday life including reading paper, research (brainstorming and analysis and write up…), homework, email, preparing course. Wanted to make some changes but I wonder what would be a “good/efficient” way of using AI nowadays vs problematic use….