PhD program question

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Hi,

I am in a PhD program and recently joined a lab. The problem is, I'm having serious doubts about my ability to keep motivated. Everyone says to do what you're interested in, yet I've come to the conclusion that no matter what I'll have to spend considerable time doing experiments that bore me to death, and require massive attention to mundane details.

I really should have seen this coming when I graduated from my undergrad--I should have switched fields entirely to something like computer science or whatever where I could actually get places without doing long experiments or waiting on people to do them. Instead I continued on with biochemistry.

I already left one PhD program, due to a number of mostly non-academic factors, but now I'm on my second one and REALLY don't want to burn out... I figure that whatever I want to do in life I will benefit from a PhD, even if the work is in an entirely different area.

So, does anyone here have an experience doing PhD work in something they really weren't excited about, and made it through anyway? I feel completely alone in this, even among aspies, so I wanted to see if there were any here who could reassure me. Particularly those with a mental skill bordering on the savant-like, yet are forced to do work that really doesn't use their strengths.

That's sad. I want to play music for a living. That is difficult, but not important. Problem is: At the moment I'm more into about music marketing than to actually sing and play the guitar..

What's your special interest(s)?

One current special interest is molecular structure. I find it very interesting how molecules recognize each other and move. Someday I'd love to be able to invent drug molecules in my head, or try and design an enzyme from scratch.

I also have interests in pretty much anything with intricate dynamics that comes from many parts wired together. The problem is that in most areas where you are attempting to discover the workings of such a thing, there are many measurements that have to be made before the "plan" is known. And if the systems are not worked out, it's almost always true that the measurements are hard.

As for your situation, I would have thought that the average person with an interest in music marketing would actually be more employable than the average person with an interest in making music. The bar to commercial success as a musician is set fairly high, and it takes a very special mix of talent to pull off a music career. On the other hand, marketing people are not trying to be the most popular, they just have to be willing to do what the bands themselves don't want to.

difficult. i wasn't excited with my topic and didn't have the exact skill set needed but made it through. the problem with you is that you will have 5-6 years of phd plus the postdoc 2-5 years (from what i heard for bio people) so that is an awful lot of time. and even after that employment is still a problem from what i heard.
i would say that your background suficciently overlaps with your interests and maybe you can find a theoretician in your dept that would be your co-adviser and than do a project that requires modeling of the enzyme and experimental proof that the enzyme works.

and also the bad side is that at the grad student level majority of people do not have the kind of liberty to do what interests them (mostly they work on PI's ideas) due to financial limits i.e. pi's have funded project that need worksforce so you really need to dig a good idea that would satisfy both profs and somehow fit into their interests and funding.
good luck/

one more thing, do not be afraid to try new things that you do not have learned in school mostly smart people would pick up required skills pretty fast. i am also fascinated with the precision and complexity of bio molecules and it is a topic that has a future which is very important for successful phd.

I just deferred my PhD about two weeks ago. It's a major commitment, reading the same arguments over and over again looking for the smallest technicality. There are certainly times when I enjoy it but that is mainly the putting things together stage. Admittedly, since I'm doing philosophy everything is basically connected to everything so it's always slightly at a putting things together stage but you've certainly got to wade through endless material that you are already familiar with and can't do it on autopilot since the error is always in the detail.

My major problem is my wandering mind. If I've not got something to focus me my mind will wander, usually onto topics that upset and I then become very depressed which then makes concentration impossible. Since there is so much dredging of texts my mind will wander very much. I'm deferring on the hope that next year external things might make life slightly less painful, hence when my mind wanders I will get less depressed and thus able to focus more.

AnotherOne: Yes, I'm aware that graduate students need to usually work on a project selected by their professor, by necessity. And while at least one professor said I should try designing molecules because I find it so interesting, I'm aware that will have to wait until I get some credentials. Especially since it would be a product of my unique mind, i.e. not by a method I could just explain to others, and one that I myself don't know if it will work until it's tried. To me, that's in fact part of the beauty of it, that I'd be one of the very few who could actually do it that way. And that professor who said I should do it, he's in a very different field.

The problem is actually making molecules isn't cheap, particularly drugs. Making a protein is easier, but still, if I just were to say I think a certain protein should be made, that would seem useless to anyone else. This is not like multiplying two 10-digit numbers in your head, where anyone can instantly verify it at no cost, though of course it would also be WAY more useful.

oppositedirection: I have that problem with my mind wandering a lot too. That's why I think it would be really hard for me to spend years on just a single tiny piece of a problem, like measuring a single variable, rather than being able to work on assembling the whole picture. Although, on the other hand, the good thing about doing lab work is that it would force me to focus, and maybe actually get more done than I would if I were doing theory, which is more conducive to scatterbrained-ness.

biostructure: yes, doing your own thing is a high-risk thing, you do not know that it will work so the way to do it is to have a good idea that can work partialy too. for exaple you do not need to sythesize the molecule right away but can look into particular activity mechanism and try to find why it works (find similar and oposite behavior in other proteins/enzymes). it won't be as disigning from sctratch but would lead to publishable results. also to minimize failure is to work on 2 projects, one being a straight-forward thing and other the high-risk one.

all sucesful people in my lab ttied 10 different things before one worked and they invented projects on their own. this is partialy an error of my boss. he is extremly sucessful by external parameters but alll these inventions are the due to students who tried something new and it worked. although if your boss is a truly inventive than it would pay out to listen to him/her but otherwise it is your job to invent new things. from what i saw most students in my field (phys, mat sci, nano) had to save themselves. basicaly adviser would tell them what he wants and than they would be left alone to produce the results however they want. bosses are too busy and very detached with their own grand picture so usualy they are pretty much useless.
i mean whatever you decide is probably going to be fine since you have time now but diversifing sooner that later (you do not waht to stat new rojects when you ar in 5th year, i've have seen it and these people are on a verge of a nervous breakdown) is a smart thing.

Hmmm, it was more like I became deeply disillusioned over time. I was in a field which fancies itself as a quantitative science. When I started I was very enthusiastic, but my enthusiasm declined dramatically in the last few of years of the program. The were two primary reasons for this decline. First, I started reading more things from other quantitative sciences, and in so doing I realised how methodologically deficient much of the research in my field was. Second, I started to figure out what a con-game academia really is. The goal is to reel in grant money and churn out publications. This does not necessarily involve performing good scientific research. If anything, the system encourages quantity over quality. Moreover, in academia, as in the rest of life, who you know is more important than what you know. (I have seen far too many awful research studies published in "major" journals because one or more of the authors is a big name in the field -- the peer-review system is a dismal failure.)



In general, the average income increases, and the unemployment rate decreases, as the level of completed education increases. But there is a lot of variation around those averages. On WP you will find some people with Ph.D.s who have good jobs in their field. You will also find people with Ph.D.s who are unemployed or under-employed (working a low level job in a different field).

If you decide to continue in graduate school, but find yourself thinking more and more about doing something else when you graduate, take a look at the book "So What Are You Going to Do with That?", written by Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius. It is basically a career advice book for people in that situation. Unfortunately, although it is an interesting book, I think that it is mostly useful for individuals who are adept at spinning straw into gold.

Anyway, best of luck with whatever you end up doing.
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Willard: "Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I never wanted another."
- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078788/quotes
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzM4D2_uOP0

I'm responding to the part of your post about having to do work that someone else is interested in. I found that to be the most problematic part about getting my master's degree. I had to do a final project, and the choices of professors who would work with me was limited, and then I had to work on their project whether I liked it or not. I ended up not liking the professor at all, and when I completed the project and wrote the paper, she didn't agree with what I wrote, which was very demoralizing. She was a typical NT and disagreed with me on principle, I felt. Then she alienated me from my master's advisor, who then wouldn't consider me for a teaching job there. So horrible experience all around.

The beauty of HAVING a PhD is that you get to be the boss, you get to apply for grants on what you want to do, and can be the Principal Investigator. It was that that made me originally want to get a PhD. But now I'm burned out on school PLUS having to teach, so doubt I'll ever go back. If I'd had a different experience with that one professor, I think my life would be completely different now.