The people I know who made it all the way to the end of the doctorate and still think it was the right thing to do are the people for whom being a professor (complete with writing scholarly monographs, attending committee meetings, grading papers, the whole shebang) is the Number One First Choice Life. If life as a professor, complete with the somewhat less fun bits, is not the steady-state daily life you desire more than any specific other, then the sacrifices grad school constantly imposes aren't worth it.
My friend who has the spiffy tenure track gig at MIT, and is living the life he always dreamed of, and finds that it really is approximately as cool as he hoped it would be, is now of the opinion that, for him, the sacrifices were worthwhile. But even he still remembers that they were sacrifices.
If there is a different kind of life you would prefer to be living, then you can take your dissatisfaction with grad school as permission, and free yourself to go live that other thing. Even if the other thing is really difficult, and the odds aren't in your favor, it can't be that much harder or more unlikely than building a lifelong career as an academic.
If there isn't--if life as a professor is the thing you desire--then go for it. You can take a year or two, or more, to do something else, while you try to figure out where the program is that would not suck for you, and who the mentors are whom you could trust and respect. A year or two, or more, out of school, means less poverty at the dissertation stage. A break is not defeat, any more than setting down second-choice goals in favor of first-choice goals would be.
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Date: 2006-02-02 08:04 am (UTC)My friend who has the spiffy tenure track gig at MIT, and is living the life he always dreamed of, and finds that it really is approximately as cool as he hoped it would be, is now of the opinion that, for him, the sacrifices were worthwhile. But even he still remembers that they were sacrifices.
If there is a different kind of life you would prefer to be living, then you can take your dissatisfaction with grad school as permission, and free yourself to go live that other thing. Even if the other thing is really difficult, and the odds aren't in your favor, it can't be that much harder or more unlikely than building a lifelong career as an academic.
If there isn't--if life as a professor is the thing you desire--then go for it. You can take a year or two, or more, to do something else, while you try to figure out where the program is that would not suck for you, and who the mentors are whom you could trust and respect. A year or two, or more, out of school, means less poverty at the dissertation stage. A break is not defeat, any more than setting down second-choice goals in favor of first-choice goals would be.