I am currently in the first few months of a PhD course in a subject I am now not greatly enamored of. It sounded much better when the uni offerered me the place.
My problem is my supervisor has got me doing a literature review, which i understand is fairly standard practice. I’m three months in and the list of paper I’m required to read just keeps going. How do I cope with it? Has anyone got any good suggestions?
I’m bored with reading the same stuff over and over, just by different authors. I’m even beginning to suffer from narcolepsy, the second I pick up a paper, my eyes start to feel tired.
OK, probably not the advice you were looking for. I made it through a year and a half and past the qualifiers before I completely burned out and left.
From this vantage point, one thing I would suggest would be to learn to have “work time” and “off time.” I never got the hang of it and constantly felt guilty when I wasn’t working. Maybe it means you need to spend a regular work day on campus 5 days a week. (I didn’t try that so I don’t know if that would be successful and every person’s different anyway.) Or set aside certain hours during which to do work at home or the library or wherever. And then allow yourself to enjoy the free time the rest of the time.
Don’t skip sleeping or eating at least relatively well. You need your health to get through, and a tired student isn’t a good student. You’ll have even more trouble getting through the reading without falling asleep if you aren’t getting good sleep at night.
When you get stressed/burned out, take a day off. (Assuming your advisor will let you.) Get out of town. Go to the spa or the lake or wherever you relax. It’s better to take a day than to end up leaving for good.
Make sure you’re really doing what you love. I didn’t love my subject area and it killed me. The time, effort, and hard work needed to get a Ph.D. absolutely require passion for your subject/topic. If you don’t have it, find a new subject.
The lit review sucks. I never got passed it, but from what I understand, it gets better after that. Oh, but don’t brush it off. I knew a student who spent a whole summer on a research project that was really promising only to find out in late August that someone had published the same topic the year before. That sucked big time.
Sorry if I’ve been a downer. I didn’t have the best experience. It can and should be a rewarding experience and once you’re through, you’re part of the academic elite. Just keep thinking about that Ph.D. after your name. And the very cool, colorful cap and gown (or whatever the Ph.D. version is called) with the 3 velvet arm bands that Ph.D.s get to wear.
This works well for me. When I’m working, I’m working (mostly) … and when I’m not, I’m not (and don’t feel guilty about it). There’s probably some difference with field - I’m in science and thus have less endless reading to do, though there’s no shortage of papers I should know. I work very standard hours and treat is much more like a job than like school.
The other essential thing for me has been to find and maintain a hobby. This is almost as high a priority as school. Sure, there are weeks that there just isn’t time for anything else. But those are rare. I tell all of our new grad students that their main assignment during orientation is to pick a hobby and figure out how / where they’ll be involved with it. Make those plans BEFORE the semester starts.
Another thing that surprised me about grad school is how many people are here for their second time. They burnt out the first time around, did something for a couple years and then came back. They have a much firmer idea of why they’re here (I envy that - I’m suck in a ‘here because I am’ phase). I’m still chugging along in my program but watching all of these people has made me feel a lot more comfortable about the possibility of calling it quits for some time, if needed.
When I did mine, there wasn’t that much literature. I even got something out of mine by publishing a survey paper on my area from the literature review I did (actually I got two out of it) which was very heavily referenced. But that is not always feasible.
You might try skimming the papers. Most papers start with background material, which you can usually skip. Check out the conclusions. And yeah, have a life - the lit review is the easy part.
Take notes, of course. It is worth it - the worst moment I had while doing my dissertation was coming across a paper that had a solution to a problem much like mine. It took me a day of sweating to see that it wasn’t so similar after all. You don’t want that to happen to you.
Oh, and it is also cool if you can, while in coversation or giving a talk, spout off half a dozen references on anything remotely like your subject. Makes people think you’re smart.
So hang in there. It is a useful thing to do. And ask your advisor for a cutoff date.
And don’t be afraid to pushback if the stuff he is giving you to read isn’t relevant. That what abstracts are for - don’t be afraid to skip a paper based on the abstract. Knowing what not to read is a good talent too.
Count me as another grad school burnout. I hope I can tell you what I think I might have done differently, without dragging you down too far. Here’s what I think went wrong for me:
Wrong school: my first choice was offering no aid to first-year students, and my second choice couldn’t guarantee that I’d be offered enough stipend money to live on; my third and fourth choices either turned me down or wait-listed me. So I ended up at my fifth choice, which I still was enthusiastic about, since I would have the chance to work with one of the world’s leading scholars in one of my areas of interest. Unfortunately, the week after I accepted their offer, he was diagnosed with ALS while teaching overseas and never taught another class at my institution, dying at the end of my first semester of coursework. There was no one else on the faculty at that school that I wanted to work with; I seriously considered transferring (which would basically have meant starting over), and probably should have, but I didn’t. The other faculty in my areas of interest were raving assholes, and the few really sharp faculty were in areas I couldn’t muster enough interest in to sustain me through the five years of effort in front of me.
Too soon: I should never have started grad school three months after graduating from college. I was, however, desperate to get out of Arkansas, and grad school was (or so it seemed) my only ticket out. And staying out a year would have forced me to start paying back student loans (or defaulting on them sooner than I did), which didn’t seem like a viable option at the time. I’d had an emotionally grueling senior year of college, however, and was almost burned out before I even started. I think even a year off would have made a big difference.
Culture shock: I knew all about the reputation of English departments, and English grad programs, as being filled with brilliant but difficult individuals. I found myself in a program where the faculty, and most of the other students, were as difficult as advertised but nowhere close to being brilliant – a lot of them, frankly, weren’t very smart at all. I’d been in fairly idyllic position as an undergraduate, in a department where the faculty all liked and respected one another, and where they all were very smart but also very human. I quickly realized upon starting grad school that if I stayed the course, these people (or others just like them) were going to be my colleagues the rest of my life, and I decided I couldn’t deal with that.
Messy emotional life: As I said, my senior year of college was a bit tumultuous, and I started graduate school as a fairly emotionally immature 22-year-old. I allowed issues with a romantic relatationship that wasn’t going where I wanted to assume far more importance and occupy far more of my energy than they deserved, to the detriment of everything else in my life, probably at least in part because allowing that to dominate masked all the other stuff I was avoiding dealing with, like the fact that I hated grad school. My advice to other graduate students is that you should expect to come out of grad school with the same relationships you went in with, and no more – if you’re in a stable, secure relationship when you start, cherish it and rely on it for strength. If you’re not, dump the notion of romantic relationships entirely for the duration – most relationships end badly, and the last thing you need during grad school is a procession of emotional upheavals.
All that being said, I do think that if you don’ have any real passion for your subject, you’re probably better off bailing early rather than late, or than carrying all the way through and investing all the blood, sweat and tears required in earning a Ph.D. only to go do something completely unrelated. An undergraduate degree ought to be about getting a broad general education; a graduate degree is about specialized professional training and credentialization. And in my opinion, there’s no shame in deciding you don’t need credentials if you aren’t going to puruse a related career.
Sorry, but my advice to you is also to seriously consider whether quitting now (or at the end of the semester) is a better idea than waiting and hoping things get better, which means that the longer you stay in the harder it is to quit because of all the effort that would have gone to waste.
Talk to other people in your program, or in your field, be as sure as you can that the job you will theoretically be able to get afterwords is the job that you want.
If you are not having fun, get out. My graduate school days were a lot of fun. I’d get up at 0500 to get to the lab to run samples before someone came and bothered me. Granted, there are unpleasant aspects, but if you don’t enjoy the field (as a whole) as a graduate student, you are highly unlikely to enjoy it more when you become a professor or when you move out of academia.
I’ve loved every minute of grad school, but I’m going to join the chorus, here. Carry out any responsibilities you’re contractually obligated to finish, then bail. Getting a PhD in a field you hate is more time and trouble than it’s worth, and you’ll just end up resentful and bitter about the years you spent on it.
For what it’s worth, here’s my “me too” vote for get out now.
The mindset you’re describing is going to make completing your degree impossible. Save yourself the heart/head ache and abandon ship now. Like just about everyone else, I had to put up with a lot of shit while earning my Ph.D.; fortunately, I was always so passionate about my subject that I was able to just swallow it and ask for more.
A few people upthread suggested treating it like a job. It can’t be that, though. It has to be more. It has to be a calling. Like a priest, you have to be willing to pay the price for that calling. Without passion to carry you through, you’ll never make it.
I’ll throw a dissenting voice in. I got a PhD in physics. When I was starting out, I thought I wanted to be an experimentalist. Turns out experimental physics is boring as shit and I suck at it. If I’d taken the advice in this thread I’d have quit at that point, which would have been a huge mistake. Instead, I ended up switching advisors and eventually really loving my research. Even then, the early literature reviews were boring as shit. Reading papers is (to me) fundamentally boring, at least until you already know the specific area well and have your own research experience in it.
Once you get past the first lit review you may find you enjoy the actual research. Or you may not – look into working on something else and/or with someone else. Grad school may not be for you, but don’t use boredom at reading papers as the guide. Reading papers is boring.
Stryfe, being on the edge of catatonia looking at the 100th paper does not mean you are not fit to be a PhD. There ain’t no one in the world who loves reading that much stuff so quickly. Your prof probably read them (did he read them? Or is he getting you to do it?) over a period of years. You may or may not like grad school, but this isn’t a good indicator.
A few years ago I was reading a book by a friend of mine, very smart, about something I was interested in pursuing. Despite the fact I like the subject, I’d fall asleep after a page. You are
probably finding out what horrible writers most people are right about now.
And as a former conference program chair, I hate people like Loopydude. We need more people from industry to not be ivory tower.
Do not quit grad school because reading papers for three months bores you. I doubt that you pursued the degree so that you could read; you want to do the work that you aren’t doing yet.
As I see it you have two options (ignoring the “quit school” option"): change advisors or talk to your current advisor. You may end up doing both.
Advisors aren’t totally unapproachable. In my experience they’re usually just clueless. Your boss may not really realize that he’s had you reading for three months. Tell him that you appreciate the lit review process but you feel like you’ve reached a point where you can’t get any more out of literature alone. If he balks at dropping the lit review, ask if you can start a small part of your project, just enough to break up your day a little. Tell him that you work better when your workload is more varied than reading all day, every day. At the very least, you should be able to get some idea of how much longer this phase will last.
If he’s completely unresponsive to your concerns, I’d say look into a different advisor. Academics are notoriously bad bosses, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t someone that you could work with more effectively.
You might want to consider talking to your department chair. It’s in his best interest for you to stay and be productively happy, so he should help you fix this situation. But you will have to have talked to your advisor first.
In order to decide if it’s worth getting through all that reading, consider what you will be doing after the lit review is done. Will you be researching? Will you be doing experiments? Analyzing data? Writing a massive document? Whichever you end up doing, do you find it fun enough to do it every day for (possibly) years?
I absolutely loved the first several years of my PhD, absorbing new ideas throught course work and personal research. Even the qualifying exams were slightly amusing (trying to see how much info I could retain in my brain and then regurgitate over 4 days of exams). Then I hit the dissertation. What began as a slight antipathy toward writing papers has now mushroomed into a deep and abiding hatred for the process of writing, day in and day out, chapter after chapter. Gaaaaaahhhhhh!
Ahem. Anyway, pretty much everything you do will require some drudge work and will involve some boredom. The point is that if you love it enough, wading through crap and jumping through hoops will ultimately be worth it.
You have to ask yourself whether you’re really bored with the subject or if it’s just a phase. How long have you had an interest in the subject? If you’ve been into it for five years and you’re just now getting bored, it’s probably a reaction to the stresses of starting a program. If your supervisor picked the subject for you and you only entered the program because that was where the money was available, you may want to think about whether this is what you really want to do.
Personally, I loved doing my Ph.D. I can’t recall my advisor ever giving me a direct order. I do not wish to sound immodest, but I was one of the better students the department had seen in a few years and I believe this gave me a certain latitude to do things my own way. I also saw people who were sort of struggling, and they did tend to get bossed around, because they needed it. You may need to honestly assess whether this is happening to you.
I quit as well after my 1st year. I was at a v. important U., and amazed at the incompetence of some of the supervisors and the insane infighting. I had intended to teach and I am so happy I quit and went into business. With the complete coup of political correctness and knee-bending to feminist-obsessions, I would have been fired from any university anyway.
My first degree is in Physics, but I wanted to move into renewable energy, unfortunately I was unable to get a course doing what I wanted so I took a related subject - Electrical Engineering and the ageing of insulators.
There are litterally thousands of papers to read, the majority of which seem to say the same thing and are very badly written.
I think an additional problem is the fact that I work away from home during the week (at Uni) and only see my wife and kids at the weekend.
This combined with the fact that I do not have a passion for the subject means that I’m really not enjoying it.
Having read the opinions here it seems that I will have to give my future here some serious consideration. I have to say I’m suprised by the amount of people who have been in the same boat and walked away, glad I’m not the only one.
Nobody has better hindsight than one who has successfully completed a PhD!
It is so, so difficult to keep sight of the ultimate goal: a bound volume having one chapter introduction, one chapter background and previous research, one chapter preliminary results or theory, two or three chapters of results and interpretation proper, a final chapter of conclusions and suggested further research, and a literature list.
Of course, this is years away for you. Indeed, mine only really came into shape literally in the last 6 months before my 4 year deadline - before that I had only maybe half a chapter of any results worth writing about.
Your supervisor is everything. Be honest and pushy - many are quite happy to let you drift along and only intervene in a crisis. They’ve got lectures to write and research grants to manage, and might fob you off with placatory language and tell you to keep chipping away. If you’re bored, say so. If your supervisor’s field of expertise has nothing in it to inspire you, discuss the possibility of transferring to a colleague in a field which has (making sure you make it clear that it’s nothing personal, of course!).
However, the first year of a PhD is always difficult. It really is all about doing your degree again, but properly! Academic papers can be really rather dense. I’d suggest going back to basics whenever you are the slightest bit uncertain about a particular phrase - Wikipedia can be a Godsend in this way. Most of all, read the PhD theses of past students. They give the background in manageable bites and suggest future research for you.
And don’t worry if you feel it’s not for you - many of my friends did, and their current lives and jobs are no less fulfilling or well-paid than mine. But I can tell you that that final handshake at your PhD viva is quite a feeling, as is seeing your name on a research paper in a journal which graces the library shelves of every university department of note in your field in the world.
I have spoken to my supervisor and he has suggested some related lab work to maintain my interest while doing the lit review. It remains to be seen whether he will keep his word and set this up (I’m still waiting from before easter).