Posting from the end of my rope: I don't think I'm ever going to get a PhD.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I apologize for the length here, I’m at a very low point, and I’m just about to lose it.

I’ve been working on this degree for four years, and I’ve never been more convinced that it’s never going to happen. I was fine until this past Thursday, when I ran an experiment that was the culmination of two years of work.

It failed completely.

I have only myself to blame.

  1. I don’t know why I decided to switch from straight ecology and field work, which has been my forte for nigh on 20 years. I wanted to develop my molecular biology skills. I thought it would make me far more marketable in the long run, and now it looks like it might torpedo my career altogether.

  2. I don’t know why I decided to pursue this project here, of all places, since we have no one but me on campus working on molecular genetics of plants. As a result, even though I was admitted, I’ve had to exist on the goodwill of various other professors who do molecular work, but not on plants. They’ve been helpful and generous, but technical issues dealing with the molecular biology of plants, which can be VERY difficult, are beyond them, or simply not of that great an interest. As a result, I’ve had to do everything myself. It’s almost as if I am doing a post-doc for my PhD, except that I’m flying altogether solo, instead of having lab support.

  3. My own scientific self-confidence is killing me. I’ve had to raise all my own money. I’ve been moderately successful at it, but molecular biology, especially when you have to try several different procedures and protocols before stumbling upon success, is very expensive. I’ve also been forcing myself to learn several completely unfamiliar biological disciplines at a professional level (population ecology, molecular genetics, population genetics, evolutionary genetics, etc.) I have always been of the opinion that I can learn anything. I may have bitten off more than I can chew.

I was counting on making some very significant progress this summer, since I really MUST be out of here by the end of the next academic year. All that is now shot to hell, and I’m currently sitting in the ruins, trying not to despair. I’ve spent all afternoon, after a long, heart-rending meeting with my committee chair, trying to keep from bursting into tears, breaking things in my office, and just giving up altogether.

I constantly wonder why the hell I did this. I had a good job. I was making money. But I just had to come back and try to fulfill a lifelong dream of earning my doctorate. It’s currently killing my will to get up in the morning, and it’s destroying our family finances.

I want to be done with this so fucking badly. I hate this place. I hate coming here. I hate day after day of my inability to make it work. I hate being constantly faced with failure. I hate being poor. I hate all this academic bullshit, and being surrounded by young, fresh-faced graduate students who have just come out of their Master’s programs in their early to mid 20’s. And here I am a hoary, balding, cynical 38 year old with a new baby who has nothing in common with them, and who would just like to MOVE. THE FUCK. ON.

But I can’t. What am I going to do? I’ve invested 4 years of my life in this.

Job interviewer: “I see your resume is pretty blank for the past 4 years. What have you been doing?”
Me: “Failing at earning my doctoral degree.”
JI: “Don’t call us. We’ll call you.”

What the fuck am I going to do? I’m just about out of energy, but if I could just get one single glimmer of hope from my experiments, it would help. But nothing. I am faced with day after day after day of bad results and no data. I’m running out of money, will, and desire.

2

First: Can you submit your Dissertation with a “shit - it don’t work - null hypothesis” write up? Not the greatest, but not all research (as you know) ends up working.

Second: is there anyone you can get to give your work a quick glance over? A professor at another university who you could talk into giving you an hour or so of time to see how far off you are?

After that, all got is a hug and a wish for good luck.

3

Welcome to the field of experimental science. No really, most of science is failure. The trick is how you treat the failure and what you learn from it. Unfortunately it sounds like you are missing a good advisor to properly put things in perspective, and I am not a molecular biologist so I am not sure I can be much help there. About all I can tell you is that my Ph.D. thesis in Chemistry was about 90% dedicated to some of the failures I had. The failures ended up being more interesting then the successes. It is pretty much expected in these type of fields there is going to be a whole lot of failure before you get something to work, and in some cases you may never get it to work. There is still a lot of inherent value in the research and if you truly feel you have come to the point where you won’t get it to work, you need to start thinking about why it didn’t work and start working your thesis around that concept (and design some experiments to prove it). I am not sure about Molecular Bioligist, but in Chemistry getting out within 5 years would only happen if you had a lot of things going right for you which is very rare. Not to be harsh, but you may be somewhat naive in your expectations there.

Finally I will tell you what I did when I hit the block you are experiencing (I think a lot of grad student do right around year four). I too felt I couldn’t go in for another day, so I didn’t. I literally left for two weeks and went and did a road trip. Spent some time on some sunny beaches. Came back completely refreshed and ready to tackle the grind again.

Hang in there and Good Luck!

4

Thats what I was thinking.

Plenty of research is a null result. Everybody wants the fancy theory and data to back it up. But most research doesnt end up that way.

You’ve taken the fancy courses. You’ve done real research. Hell, apparently you’ve drummed up your OWN funding on your own (which most people dont do). And you have done so without much of an academic support system. You’ve put in the hard time. I suppose you have passed the quals type thingys. Seems to me with a little damage control you could extract (and deservedly so) a PHD from all this.

5

You absolutely need an external adviser if your university does not have a supervisor for you with the requisite expertise. Find one yourself if you have to. Seek advice wherever you can. Have you been to any conferences where you met anyone who is in your particular field? At the worst, you can email those who you’re simply familiar with through the literature. You’d be surprised at how people would be willing to help. You need to connect with fellow students in a lab SOMEWHERE in the world who are working on similar things (and probably suffering similar “failures”. A Ph.D. is generally not something you can bootstrap yourself into with no mentorship or help.

Have you completed your candidacies yet?

6

I am a molecular biologist, but not in plants. First of all, it’s is very normal, almost expected, to feel this way around year four. It’s kind of like you are a scientific teenager: you know enough to have your own ideas, but lack the judgement to carry them out efficiently. That’s perfectly okay, but it is very frustrating even when you are in your advisor’s field.

Second, don’t worry about one experiment failing, even if it’s a big one. That’s a lot of molecular biology work. You may just be missing some little tweak that will make it run correctly. As I was reminded many times during my doctorate, you do 90% of the work in 10% of the time and it’s usually the last 10%.

Third, you should find someone doing good plant molecular biology and go work in their lab for a month or so. It’s amazing what you can pick up in that short of a time that can totally turn your project around. It doesn’t have to be a collaborator. Pick someone working in your organism or someone working with the same technique. Your advisor should be willing to pay for this trip. Perhaps even trade a conference trip for this sabbatical-lite. It will be worth it.

Finally, for those folks suggesting a “null hypothesis” dissertation, I have never seen one come out of a molecular project. A good molecular experiment will give you an answer. It sounds like his experiment flat didn’t work. He got no answer, not just the null answer.

ETA: I see you are in Alabama, correct? There are great plant people at Auburn and UGA. You could easily visit one of their labs for a week or two. Hell, I’m in Atlanta at Emory. I’d be willing to help you out in any way I can (I do molecular micro, BTW.)

7

Well, it hasn’t been “null hypothesis”. It’s been “no data”. The process failed. I didn’t think of something. I have no idea what.

Yeah, I’ve been trying this. Unfortunately, my “off-campus advisor”, who hadn’t published in 10 years, mysteriously up and published a paper last year which used processes I had proposed for my own project, without even letting me know that she was working on it. Different species, so she wasn’t exactly scooping my project, but you’d think, being my advisor and all, that she’d let me know she was doing something similar to my own stuff. :rolleyes:

Thank you.

Well, in our department, PhD appointments are for 5 years, unless you’re doing bang-up work and just need some extra time before you publish in Nature or something.

Thanks. I haven’t had a vacation since all this started, and it’s starting to wear on me. I just don’t think I can take one.

No, I haven’t taken my quals yet. That will be done before the end of the Summer. They’re pretty lax about the specific timetable for quals, and I’ve been putting them off, always having something much more important to do than spend weeks studying for an exam.

Yeah, I spent a good portion of the day emailing and calling folks in Washington, Arizona, Florida, Texas, and Tennessee for some help. I hope it comes to fruition.

8

Thanks so much. I may just take you up on that. I have actually contacted UGA to see if I could take a “sabbatical-lite” as you suggested in their lab. They politely turned me down, but threw a few protocols at me. No blame to them. They’re busy. But I’d indeed love to spend some time watching and participating in some of this stuff, especially in plants. Those damned polysaccharides and polyphenols are giving me fits.

9

One small point. Lets say you need to boil lots of eggs to get your data. But everytime you do a batch it doesnt work.

Can you at least try the process ONE egg at a time till you get it to work? If you know what I mean. Still lots of process repetition, but much less work per batch overall.

And perhaps you need to try something closely related to what you are trying to do that is SUPPOSED to work. If you CANT get that to work, then you know you’ve got something seriously wrong. And perhaps playing with that can help you figure it out?

I guess I am basically saying maybe you need to go back to baby steps and figure out if you can get the little stuff right before before you can get it all to work in “one big experiment”.

10

If it helps, there were some guys at Stanford that never finished their PhDs. They started Yahoo instead. And there were some guys that thought that seemed so great, tehy dropped their PhD programs at Stanford in order to start Google.

The world is full of ABDs. Hiring managers don’t care. Find the right job and it will be a plus over the alternatives to the hiring manager.

That being said, my gf took more than 7 years - including a break - to earn her PhD, and only completed it when the department told her she needed to free up the space one way or the other (and I happened along to help with the math bits). Her field requires licensing, which requires a PhD to even think about a job, so…

11

I don’t know anything about polyphenols, but if polysaccharides are being problematic, perhaps you could find some help from a glycobiologist? Maybe they have some tricks that could work for your project.

12

Yep. That’s exactly what I’m contemplating at this point. I’ll pretty much have to go back to Square One, DNA Extraction, after I’d thought I’d put it behind me for good. And yes, this will require going back and running all those little steps again, with just a few of my samples at a time, to troubleshoot the process. There’s absolutely no way around it. if I want my PhD, it will have to be done. But it’s just so fucking discouraging, after I worked for two years to perfect the process. I tried multiple extraction protocols, with no success, until I finally modified one to the point of unrecognizability, but was getting good DNA concentrations. Unfortunately, my 260/230 data (a measure of potential contamination) have been abysmal…thus my suspicion that I have polysaccharide/polyphenol problems.

I’d just run a bunch of cleanup gels (and will, to eliminate other possibilities), but now I suspect my extended digestion time has chewed up my DNA into tiny fragments. And, of course, I need high molecular-weight DNA to carry out the work…

God forbid my samples are actually bad and I’ll have to resample all my sites in four states. That would be back-breaking.

13

I don’t know anything about your field, alas. I do have one story which might make you feel better. A friend of mine was doing a PhD in Physics at MIT, and his research depending on a finding which everyone knew was correct. It wasn’t. Even worse, disproving this result wasn’t enough for a dissertation. He had to switch topics, it took another year or so, but he got through.

It sounds to me like you have to debug your process. Coming from a software background, I’m used to things crashing and burning nearly every week. Maybe with a bit of sleep and some time to let your subconscious work you’ll figure out what you were doing wrong.

BTW, it sounds like you have done things that will help you succeed in doing research far more than someone who breezed through a dissertation on an adviser’s grant. Once you get through this, you will be far ahead of them.

14

I feel for you. It took me a whopping 12 years to earn my Ph.D. in physics. I had many false starts and red herrings, changed thesis ideas a bunch of times, even changed grad schools once. Finally finished writing the thesis when I had been out of school and working for a couple of years. But I did it!

15

DONT troubleshoot with YOUR samples. Troublshoot with reasonable easy to obtain stand ins (or actuall standards ) that you “know” are good.

If your samples are bad and your process is good, you’ll just waste time trying to fix something that isnt wrong. If your samples are good and your process is bad, you’ll just use up your samples! And if both are bad you’ll just go crazy before you figure it out.

Of course I could be talking out of my ass here…

16

Occam’s Razor: throw out all of your reagents and buffers. It’s not worth the risk of having a nuclease contaminant. Your samples are too precious to risk this.

Also, 260/230? I’m used to looking at 260/280s. Does 230 pick up polysaccharides and polyphenols?

17

I know nothing about molecular biology. Do know something about obtaining a graduate degree. Sounds to me like you’ve hit the wall. Happens to everybody. You don’t think you can do this, and even if you could do it, you don’t know how. Remember that you can do this. Just like thousands of other people that came before you, and thousands more that will come after you. If you’ve got what it takes to get this far, you’ve got what it takes to finish the deal.

Stop breaking things. Get drunk or otherwise chemically altered if you’re so inclined. Let the school stuff sit for a day or so. This too shall pass.

18

Yes and no maybe?

Don’t throw em out. Make all new stuff and try the process on a stand in sample. If THAT works, then try the stand in sample with the old stuff. That may let you find out if the old stuff was bad. Every bit you know could help.

Again, just talking out my ass here…

19

I don’t know nuthin’ bout no doctorates or dna stuff, but I can offer you a, “there, there, it’ll all be okay some day.” How’s that? :slight_smile:

20

I appreciate the sentiment, but ABD isn’t good enough for me. It seems like a huge waste of my time and the university’s money to come out without a PhD. I feel like they’ve invested a bunch of money in me (not to mention the kind folks who have given me grants), and I’d feel like a heel just taking their money and skating.

Yes. The debugging will be in spades. Again. I know you have to keep plugging at it, but Lord… I just feel like I’m running out of time, and they’re going to show me the door.

I think my loving, long-suffering wife would divorce me. :slight_smile:

You’re not talking out of your ass. You’re talking about using control DNA to test the reagents/buffers/process. This is a vital step, for sure, and one I have been trying to use as often as possible. Unfortunately, when I contacted the one other person in the country who has done molecular work on plants of this genus, she promised to send me control DNA, and then never did. And now she’s not answering emails.

I sort of have a built-in control on this one. There are other samples (animal) that are being extracted with the same stock (separated before use, of course), and they’re extracting just fine.

It picks up a lot of contaminants that may be absorbing at 230 nm. It’s a secondary measure, but important to plant work. See this PDF for a brief discussion.

I appreciate it. FTR, I haven’t actually broken anything in my office. I just felt like it.

Thanks. :slight_smile: BTW, you reminded me: my poor Porkchop kitty is in surgery today. The vet said that, in 40 years of veterinary practice, not only has he never seen a female cat with a bilateral perianal hernia, he’s never even heard of one or read a case study of such a case. :frowning: I’d feel special, except that it’s costing us $1,500 to get her fixed up.