Quarter Life Crisis

[fabcrab]

Hi everyone,

I recently started a 5 year PhD. program in Chemistry and I feel like I''m going through a huge quarter life crisis. As an undergrad, I graduated with a 4.0 GPA with a B.S. in the most rigorous chemistry degree that was offered. However, I find myself going through some panic attacks (sometimes just mini ones and sometimes pretty bad) ever since I started grad school. I''m taking 3 classes right now and enjoy 2 of them very much but the other class is for the lack of a better word, hell. The professor lacks empathy and seriously does not have a single ounce of talent when it comes to teaching. I have tried to make an effort to learn the material by going to her office hours but she just can''t wait to get rid of me. All she cares about is her research and she for some reason wouldn''t give the correct answers for problem sets provided so I can''t learn from my mistakes without knowing the right way of solving thing. I have mid-terms next week and I feel like I don''t know anything and I''ve never ever beein in this position before. I have never felt such fear of failure in my life and I often look around wondering what I''m doing in a place that I may not belong in. I start thinking of the worst-case scenario of being kicked out due to inadequate grades and causing irreversible damage on my science career. Of course moving to a different city doesn''t help.

If anyone has any advice/ words of wisdom, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks for letting me vent.

 

[AmberGretchen]

Oh sweetie - I totally feel your pain. I''m just starting my 4th year of an Immunology PhD program, and I have spent a lot of time over the last 3 years feeling as you''re describing, although my failures (or perceived failures, depending on who you ask), have occurred more once I got into the lab than they did when I was taking classes. I''ve just recently been talking more to other people in my program about these feelings, and they are SO COMMON. You seriously would not believe how many people are feeling or have felt just like you during a science PhD. There''s even a name for part of what you are feeling - its called the Imposter Syndrome. If you google it I''m sure a better explanation will come up, but basically, its feeling like you''re inadequate or shouldn''t be where you are and that soon everyone will discover you don''t have the necessary skills/talents/smarts. 99% of the time, its just not the case. Science PhD programs are very hard and very intensive, but I think the hardest part is that you are given so little guidance in what is expected because the goals are so poorly defined, just by the nature of the whole enterprise.

I wish I had time to write more to you now and will definitely try to come back and write more later, but please believe me you aren''t alone or unusual in these feelings, and there will be ways to work around them. Try checking out the forums under the career section at Science magazine''s website - there are pages and pages of grad students and post-docs posting with similar feelings and issues. Reading through them may help you feel less overwhelmed.

 

[fabcrab]

Thanks for your very sweet reply AmberGretchen. It''s just weird, I''ve only been in the program for 3 weeks and I feel like quitting (totally out of my character). I also feel like everyone else is a lot smarter/better than me. Everyone in my family are supportive but they just don''t understand it completely so they just keep telling me I''ll be fine". I know it''ll be worth it at the end but at what cost?

 

[Independent Gal]

Hi Fabcrab,

I''ve gone through a Ph.D. program, and have friends who are professors at big research institutions, so let''s see if I can shed some light on things for you.

1) Your grad school grades barely matter at all, so take a deeeep breath and don''t worry too much about that. What matters is the research you do for your thesis. Grades helped get you into grad school so you''re probably still focused on them, but they don''t matter much when you come out. So what you should worry about is learning the material. Do you have a TA? I had trouble with statistics at first in grad school, and I went to the TA for help. She was awesome. Another possibility: will your grad school cover some tutoring for you? Some will. And a third: Can a classmate or upperclassman help you?

2) In terms of understanding your professor''s position (and I''m not trying to excuse, just to explain), if you''re at a good institution that focuses on research, then your professor, unless she has tenure, is facing being fired imminently if she doesn''t produce a huge amount of research and publications. Being fired is hard on anyone, but being fired in academia means having to uproot your whole family and move across the country....if you''re lucky enough to find another lab that will take you. If your partner is an academic, this may mean living apart... and divorce often follows. I''ve seen this half a dozen times. It''s serious stuff. Big research schools explicitly tell professors NOT to spend time on their teaching and to concentrate on research. I have a friend who teaches at a top-five school, and he was taken aside and told that his care and time on teaching was seriously detrimental to his tenure chances. Seriously. So, you can see the kind of pressure she is probably under. It''s make-or-break. Not just for her career, but potentially for her personal life too.

If she IS tenured, she might just be used to that kind of lifestyle. And she should get a grip.

Are there many students in the class? Think about hte pressures of THAT in terms of office hours too!

I''d advise you to seek out help from a tutor, upper year graduate student, or TA and to stop worrying about your grades. Learn as much of the material as you can and move on! It''s going to be OK!

 

[Independent Gal]

One more thing: heading in to grad school is often like you describe. Feeling like everyone is smarter / better at what you do. That''s because you''re used to being just about the best... or you must have been to have got into the grad school in the first place. Probably, 85% of the students are feeling the same way. And the other 15% are jerks.

Trust me, everything you say you''re feeling is 100% normal! Been there! Done that! I felt the same way and learned late in grad shcool that most of my classmates did too. I had many classmates who had been to Harvard in undergrad, and they universally reported that this was the case there. They got to Harvard and immediately felt like they were dumb. All of them. Except the 15% jerks. Well, at Harvard probably closer to 25% (heehee!)

Stick to it. This class won''t last forever.

If you hate it after a year, leave with an M.Sc. if they''ll give you one, and do something else. That''s not failure, that''s learning more about what you enjoy doing in life.

 

[fabcrab]

Thanks so much IG!!! Your posts have seriously made me feel better and back to reality. The teacher for my class is not tenured so thanks for shedding some light into her point of view. Sometimes it''s really hard to see the other side of the story. I came from a smaller undergraduate school where teaching was emphasized so I''m completely culture-shocked at the lack of support in this class.

I heard something about grad school grades not mattering too much but it''s sooo difficult not to care so much. As an undergrad, I treated getting A''s as almost a hobby if that makes sense. Like collecting A''s. It has gone to a point where I got bored of getting A''s and the only thing that pushed me was a fear of getting a B. (Gosh I''m weird!).

Getting an M.S. is definitely my back up plan but I keep hearing from everyone to avoid it like a plague because it''s like a consolation prize for not finishing a PhD program. When you say do something else, does that mean nothing related to science at all? Someone said if I was going to get an M.S. that I should get it from a place that doesn''t offer a PhD. to avoid the whole consulation prize reason.

 

[Independent Gal]

I totally get the ''collecting A''s'' / ''fear of getting a B'' thing. I hope this doesn''t sound boastful, but when I was in college, I only got one mark which was not an A equivalent of some kind. I had that one glaring B+. I thought the sky had fallen and that my life was over. I thought I''d never get into grad school with that SMUDGE on my transcript. Haha. What a big goofy idiot I was! It made no difference OF COURSE! To anything!

In college, those A''s meant, to me, that I was ''good enough''. So not getting them was a judgment on me and my worthiness. Which is actually crazy. But the thing is, YOU ARE GOOD ENOUGH! You got into this great grad school. So grades are no longer needed, if you see what I mean. You already leapt that hurdle. Now the next hurdle is being a creative and rigorous researcher. Which is sort of a different skill, right?

And so I went through the same thing: trying to adjust to the idea that it just didn''t matter anymore WHAT my grade was. We were actually told by the faculty that if we got distinction on our comprehensive examinations, that meant we''d studied too hard and wasted research time!

As for the MS, I can''t say. But I''d spend some time thinking about your back-up plan, not because you''re likely to need it (you probably won''t) but because knowing what the back-up plan is and LIKING it, can make everything else less stressful. I had one in grad school, and every time things seemed iffy or I didn''t feel I was good enough or I got scared of the future, I said to myself ''Well, hey, I''ll do my best, and if it doesn''t work out, I''ll do X, and that will be ok too.'' That helped me chill out.

But everything you''re feeling is part of the normal transition to grad school. Take a deep breath and go have a beer with your new friends or something! Or explore your new town!

 

[neatfreak]

Welcome to graduate school.

I think the others covered it pretty well, but you should know it is NORMAL to feel this way. And it will get better with time. Keep your chin up!

 

[Fly Girl]

Date: 9/15/2007 4:25:26 PM
Author: fabcrab

Getting an M.S. is definitely my back up plan but I keep hearing from everyone to avoid it like a plague because it''s like a consolation prize for not finishing a PhD program. When you say do something else, does that mean nothing related to science at all? Someone said if I was going to get an M.S. that I should get it from a place that doesn''t offer a PhD. to avoid the whole consulation prize reason.

I have the M.S. Three years of Chemistry graduate school hell was all I could take. Sometimes it just doesn''t get better. And you know what? Out in the "real" world, people are pretty darn impressed with that Chemistry Masters degree. They don''t think I''m a failure at all. That business about getting a Masters from a place that doesn''t offer a PhD because then it won''t look like a consolation prize is a bunch of balony.

I did go on to do research in Chemistry for another 5 years, and people were more than happy to hire me. Then I switched careers, got the heck out of the Chemistry lab, and I couldn''t be happier.

Even after all these years, Chemistry graduate school was easily the most miserable time of my life, and I still get upset thinking of how people would be mean and cruel. I learned a lot, and the one of most important things was if I ever got into a job that I hated so much ever again, to be smart and leave.

But I gave it a go for three years. You may yet adjust and find a great lab to work in and interesting research and the lifestyle can be a lot of fun. Good luck!

 

[fabcrab]

Fly Girl, Do you mind saying which career you changed into?

Thank you so much for your kind words. It really helps me feel more level headed and not trapped. To tell you the truth I have met some amazing first year graduate student but I have a hard time talking to them about my worries and concerns about grad school even though theres a huge chance that they''re exactly on the same boat. Even though unintentional, there is definitely a sort of denial and "elitist" attidude in the air when I''m in school.

I don''t know to be honest. I just feel that if it doesn''t get any better, no amount of $ can get me out of bed in the morning if I hate my job.

I actually sent my resume for a lab technician job here around the area. It felt almost theraputic doing it, like I''m not trapped, and I do have the choice to drop out of the program. Even if they don''t contact me back, I''ll be fine.

 

[Independent Gal]

Yes! Yes! You''re not trapped. What you''re doing right now is exploring a possible career. If it turns out you don''t like this career, after you''ve given it a serious try, that''s not failure, that''s smart. Fly Girl is so right: there is absolutely NO reason one should ever stay on a path one hates, unless there really are no options. But there are so many options for a smart young woman with a couple of good degrees. Imagination is the limit. Everything in the world that is done needs someone to do it. It''s someone''s job to design rubber ducks! (my friend does this actually!) It''s someone else''s job to plan the logistics of when airplanes will land and take off and what route buses will take! Someone invents new flavours of ice cream! Sky''s the limit.

Think of the world as full of possibilities. Then do your best at what you''re doing now for a little longer. If you still hate it after a year or two, go do something else wonderful and exciting.

 

[fabcrab]

IG, this relates to something you said earlier abour mt professor. Yes I can understand the pressure that one faces without tenure, but why would someone go into academia without a single interest in teaching? And what is the reason for big universities to emphasize on research? Isn''t their whole business built on TEACHING students in classes.

 

[Independent Gal]

This is a complex question, but I'll do my best. The key thing is that the business of a university is NOT to teach. It's to learn new things about the world. The business of a school or a college is to teach.

I didn't know a single person in grad school who wanted to be a professor because they love teaching. People I knew who loved teaching became teachers. Most in the Ph.D program had never taught before grad school, and considered teaching a sort of distraction. Some grew to love teaching, but people become academics because they want to help find a cure for cancer, or they are driven to understand the roots of Chinese communism, or they are deeply curious about how human beings made it from Africa to Australia 30,000 years ago, or they want to understand what happened to the dinosaurs, or they want to further the development of artificial intelligence, or space travel, or whatnot. These people are intellectually curious. They want to expand the horizons of what we know about the world. Some of them, often the best, are insanely driven to find answers to certain questions. That's why they go into academia: because it offers them the resources and opportunity to try to find the answers to these questions. For most of these ones, teaching is just a drag along the way because it takes up half your time (and that's if you're doing a half-a$$ job... it takes ALL your time if you really try to do a good job) which could have been spent trying to find the answers to these questions.

The ones who like teaching, once they try it, are more likely to go to a liberal arts college. But once you're there, you're usually stuck because so much teaching is required of you that you can't publish much, because you have so little time to do research. And if you don't publish, no one else will hire you. The ones who like teaching less are more likely to go to a big research university. Some colleges, like, say, Dartmouth, have a light teaching load and their faculty do fine in the research department.

Now the second part: why don't big research universities encourage good teaching?

The simple answer is because it takes time away from good research. There are some people who manage to be excellent teachers and excellent researchers. True. But not many. The reputation of a university is based on the quality of the faculty, which is understood as the quality and quantity of their research. So, Yale isn't Yale because it has the best teachers. It's Yale because it has the smartest, most innovative faculty, who are discovering new things about the world, furthering our understanding of the kinds of questions I suggested above. It's reputation is based on THAT, right?

So, in order to KEEP it's reputation, it has to hire the very smartest researchers, and can only tenure the ones who are going to 'pull their weight' in terms of keeping the university's reputation going.

Why keep the reputation? Well, two reasons: 1) pride (I suppose) and 2) money. Where do those huge endowments come from? Donors who want to see Harvard stay Harvard... in the forefront of human inquiry. If Harvard drops to, say, 10th place in terms of reputation, alumni get cranky. If you can go to a donor and say 'This year, Harvard researchers made new strides in combatting breast cancer and invented a new supercomputer' (or whatever) that stirs up school pride and leads to

. The

is then used to attract smarter graduate students with bigger stipends, and to fund yet more research, so that the woman who desperately NEEDS to know how we got to Australia can pay for a new study.

See? It's all a little circular. But I guess we all benefit from having some really smart people focussing the bulk of their attention on hard questions that affect us all. If I ever have kids and we educate them in the US, we will encourage them to do undergrad at a small liberal arts college, and graduate work at a research university. Because undergrad is about being taught and grad work is about doing research.

Once you get going on your thesis, you'll be glad to be working in an innovative, well funded lab with creative scholars, right? That happens at the expense of teaching because there's only so many hours in a day. Does that make sense?

Well, none of it really makes sense, but that's the gist of it anyway.

 

[AmberGretchen]

Wow - IG, that was such a well-written explanation of the whole academic situation in the US I just had to chime in and complement you on it. Very concise but still fully explanatory.

I will add though, that in rare cases, you can find Universities who have managed to divide their research arms from their undergraduate arms with the result that there are still some professors who love teaching that work there. I don''t know of any examples of this being done with great success, but there are definitely examples of the gray area that can exist between being only a research university or only a teaching university. On a more philosophical note, I would also point out that in my opinion, having some research activity at even a teaching-centric, liberal-arts focused school does enrich the undergraduate experience. I know I had that experience at my undergraduate institution and I''m sure others have as well.

fabcrab - I think you''ve gotten some really good advice here, so I won''t add much more, except to say that I think focusing on choosing a good lab for you is the single most important thing you can do in graduate school, at least at this stage of it. Trust me - you''ll be glad you did.

 

[fabcrab]

Thanks IG and AmberGretchen. As you can tell, I''m very new to this and your insights are truly valuable. If there''s any hope in graduate school, yes there are a couple of people I''m very interested in working for. I just have to get through the hurdle of classes in the mean time.

 

[Independent Gal]

...and ''hurdles'' is exactly the way to think of classes in grad school. Keep your eyes on the prize at the end of the obstacle course! Doing research that will hopefully be exciting and interesting to you, and will make you feel like you''re contributing to the enterprise of furthering human knowledge. That''s pretty cool, right? So, jump those hurdles the best you can, and see if you like what''s on the other side. If you don''t, you''ll do something else. If you do, then that''s great!

I think we tend to think of life as linear: work hard in school to get into a good college. Work hard in college to get into a good grad school so you can have a specific job, buy a house, raise kids in the same way. That''s one way to do things. But the best lives, the ones that make you say ''WOW, that person had an AMAZING life!'' are almost never linear, right? They zig-zag. They try new things, they get lost in the forest, they find a new path. They get lost again. They stop to climb a tree to get at some fruit. Whatever, I''m getting wacky!

but you get the idea. Explore and have fun, and think of your life as a sort of quilt you''re making, not a path you''re following. You want it to be beautiful and varied and full of contrast.

 

[Independent Gal]

Oh, and AmberG is right that there are schools with grey area... and I had some EXCELLENT teachers in grad school. Mostly the tenured ones, though.

 

[Fly Girl]

Date: 9/15/2007 11:38:15 PM
Author: fabcrab
Fly Girl, Do you mind saying which career you changed into?

I fell back on my solid undergraduate math background and switched to actuarial science. I had completed all of the course work to get my PhD in Chemistry. I found that I loved learning and self-study, which becoming an actuary has in spades. I was having problems with the comprehensive exams. But, once you are in a lab, you are doing the research for your professor, and he/she is more interested in you and having you do well and complete the program. Usually, that is. Right when I could have used him, my major professor was nowhere to be found. He basically went AWOL. Turned out, he was having a torrid affair with another chemistry prof, and his students were not uppermost on his mind. He announced his divorce and his love for this other woman just when I finalizing my Masters, so at least I got that degree.

So, there is some luck involved in getting into a good lab, getting a good research project, and being able to complete the work in a timely manner. And, it also helps to have a major professor that isn''t hugely distracted when you need him.

Thank you, IG, for describing the whole university/graduate school scene very, very well. Sounds like not much has changed since I was there in the late 70s.

 

[fabcrab]

Wow flygirl that''s terrible about your professor having an affair! Thanks everyone for making me feel a lot better. I actually met up with a group of my friends to do homework and although we were all confused, it was comforting to know that we''re all in this together. Another nice thing is older graduate students often tell you the truth about professors about how they run their labs etc.

Thanks again

.