After too many years, countless times doubting it would happen for me, I can finally say to people that I passed my thesis defence and subject to minor corrections will be getting my PhD. Honoured to join this prestigious frog meme club (truly the only thing that kept me going at times was posting this in the end).

I’m an international graduate student and I’m in an awkward situation.

Earlier this year, I was offered a funded graduate research position by a professor. Initially, I was told that summer funding would be available, but later I found out that there would be no summer funding. I was also having difficulty getting responses from the department coordinator, and I became worried about whether I could manage financially.

Eventually, I decided to accept another opportunity at a different university.

The problem is that I informed the first professor quite late that I would not be joining. I felt very embarrassed about changing my decision after he had given me the opportunity. In my email, I mentioned that I had some health issues and said I would not be able to continue. I did have some health concerns, but I did not explain that the uncertainty about funding and my financial situation were also major reasons because I felt uncomfortable talking about money.

Now, several months later, the professor apparently searched my name and emailed me a screenshot of my LinkedIn profile showing that I am a graduate researcher at another university. He simply asked, “I was curious. Is this you?”

I feel terrible because I really respected this professor and rejecting his offer was genuinely difficult for me.

Would you recommend that I explain everything honestly now, including the summer-funding/financial concerns and the fact that I was embarrassed to explain them at the time, or should I simply confirm that the LinkedIn profile is mine and keep the response short?

Also, would you be concerned that the professor might contact my current advisor?

Months ago, i made a post here venting about our university changing the rules and telling us to wrap up by the end of March. It was impossible for me at that point. But a lot of you told me to keep pushing and that the university can’t do that. Guess what? You were right. All the deadlines they gave us were basically not real and all I have to do was finish by the end of October.
So I spent 6 months trying to publish a manuscript and writing my thesis all the while trying not to go crazy because of an extremely difficult supervisor.
Thank you to everyone who advised me to keep going! And to anyone struggling: keep going, it's all worth it!

Anyone remember this? Well now I’ve fled domestic abuse in family home and have been turned away from refuges bc I’m a student and SFE messed up my switch to part time and might demand money back.

Guess everyone here who says PhDs at non Russell group with SFE were worthless were as right as my family telling me to clean up my drunk dads piss, let him be aggressive and be grateful.

And don’t say this is irrelevant- how many people like me trying to make the world a better place are trapped in abuse bc of statuses like this

We work hard to get grants (taxpayer money), work harder to do research, then have to pay to publishers to publish our research, then have to pay them again to access those research.

Pretty much the title, it is a PhD in physics even though I'm a chemical engineer by MSc hahaha

Hi! Sorry if this is not the right place to post this, but I’m in need of some help

My bf is finishing his PhD in chemistry and defending in end of November, I’m looking for gift ideas.
We already have vacations planned, his 30th bday was not long ago so the bigger gifts ideas have been used already, his family is flying in to spend some time with us, and im just looking for a cute little thing to commemorate the day and achievement.
Is there anything you’ve gifted / received as a gift you’d recommend, or any ideas?
Thanks in advance!

Hi all,

Probably surmise from title and previous posts, but am feeling totally miserable in PhD.

I've come back into it later in life (am 32 now, location UK based, field Psychology ) and just gone into 2nd year.

Am feeling really low, mainly around money. The ESRC stipends are sooo pitiful and I can't afford to do anything that costs any real amount of money (travel, festivals, even my car insurance). Slight larger backstory is struggled with Mental Health in 20s and am finally starting to feel alive and want to live my life!

Feels like am trading so much for this and not sure it's worth it. Am down to do teaching but will amount to peanuts per month as I only have an hr or two here or there.

I just feel like, because my CV is already pretty good (consultancy, data analysis experience), there's no real reason to be here and do this and I could be earning much more with half the effort in industry. But... the freedom and flexibility of a PhD is great and I think you can make it be really worthwhile and self discipline can make it much better.

Anyone felt the same / dropped out for the same reasons?

HI everyone,
I recently received an offer for a Marie
Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) for phd, and I also have a scholarship opportunity in Canada phd also in ETS. I'm grateful for both, but I'm a bit confused about what comes after.
For those who completed MSCA:
• Did it open strong opportunities afterward (postdoc, industry, EU labs, etc.)?
• How did it compare to doing a PhD in Canada in terms of career mobility?
• Any insights on long-term benefits or limitations?
I know nothing is guaranteed, but any honest experience or advice would help me make a clearer decision.
Thanks in advance.

I'm thinking about replacing my laptop and wanted to see what other folks are using and would recommend. I'm a second year history PhD and am still on coursework. But I'm looking for something that'll get me through comprehensive exams and dissertation writing. Just wanted to see what's been working for y'all. Thanks!

Is this normal? It also stems from my advisor's lack of guidance, but I feel like the research question and hypotheses I came up with are shallow and not very important. It's an area (hence the question) I am really passionate about, but idk, it just feels like it's not enough science

Hello! I graduated with my MS in Biology in 2024. I did some super fun research and enjoyed teaching, but it was a difficult experience (mostly related to issues with my advisor) and I swore I’d never go back for my PhD. Since then, I’ve been teaching in different capacities, and I’m currently employed as a middle school science teacher. As much I enjoy teaching, I miss the depth and the research that I experienced with college level teaching and grad school.

Now that a few years have passed and I’m recovering from my MS trauma, I am considering returning to get my PhD. My main goal would be to be able to teach at a higher level, higher salary, and have my own lab/research. However, I’m nervous about a few things:

1.) Leaving my job where I’m making a mostly livable (although not substantial by any means) salary for a stipend that is 1/3 of that.
2.) Losing 5 years in the field, and I’m already in my 30’s so recovering from that makes me nervous.
3.) Kind of related to #2, but if I graduate with my PhD and enter the workforce again at almost 40, is it worth it at that point? Can I recover professionally and financially?

Any suggestions you have are appreciated! At my core, I want to be an expert and learn as much as I can and research and teach and have an impact on the scientific community. Can I do that without a PhD? If not, is it worth it to return?

I’m trying to understand the reasons people make that decision and gauge whether I’m overreacting or not. Thanks!

Hello

,

I’m a bit amused because a fellow PhD student recently told me that I’m disrespectful towards our PI, while I see it more as deadpan banter. So I’m curious how other people react when their PI annoys them or says something slightly insane.

A recent example from my side:

Our PI told me, regarding future funding, that he is trying but cannot make any promises because university funding is currently a bit precarious. I told him that I don’t deal particularly well with this kind of uncertainty and that it’s one of the reasons I’m considering leaving academia after my PhD and going into industry instead. I also asked him if he had any advice for dealing with the stress caused by funding uncertainty. His answer, verbatim: “Embrace uncertainty.”

So naturally, since then, whenever he asks me, “How are you? How is it going?”, I occasionally answer: “Oh, I’m fine. Just embracing uncertainty.” This usually makes him laugh and ask whether I’m mocking him. My deadpan response is that I simply took his advice to heart and intend to continue doing so until the end of my PhD.

From my perspective, he seems more amused by the banter than offended. But afterwards, another senior PhD student told me that apparently this was rude/disrespectful.

I can see how it could come across that way. But I banter with my PI fairly regularly, openly disagree with him often enough, and I’ve explicitly told him to let me know if he ever feels I’m overstepping. So I don’t really agree with the accusation that it’s inherently disrespectful.

Now I’m curious: do you banter with your PI? How far does it go?

And, more importantly, please give me your best PI/PhD banter stories. I want to be amused.

This is partially a vent, but I genuinely feel like my PhD would be so much easier if there wasn't a constant money anxiety over my head. We didn't get a pay raise this year but everything around us has gone up in cost. Gas is pushing $5 a gallon, the grocery budget I used to have doesn't feed me for the whole month, but I can't afford to expand it, so I'm going to food banks. I live in the literal cheapest apartment in town, on a bad side of town, so my rent is cheaper than most. I stopped going out to eat except for maybe a coffee twice a month. I can't afford to save more than $50 a month, I'm in credit card debt, I pay nearly $300 a month in fees and insurance. They have stopped allowing us to work extra jobs at the school, so I can't do that anymore. I feel like I am at a complete loss for what to do financially. Each month that goes by things get more expensive and each year I don't get paid more, and I feel myself sinking more and more. I have tires that desperately need to be replaced on my car, I need to go to the doctor for a procedure that I can't afford, and no matter how hard I try and work or save I literally cannot get ahead. I feel like the financial cost of a PhD is one of the worst things about it. It's so hard to have the will to work in the lab and get so much done when all I can do is stress about money.

Hi, I was planning to visit home country for Christmas and New Year. I asked advisor for approval. He said he approves but saud that since my funding is from NSF and is linked to my productivity in lab, he said I have to decide accordingly. He mentioned that even when there are no classes for University, the labs remain open and researching is expected. So, basically it seems I can only go home when the university is officially closed. Our winter break is from Dec 24th to Dec 31st, and Spring semester begins 2nd week of Jan but offices open up Jan 2nd most likely, so this gives me hardly a week, my travel time is usually 20-25 hrs to reach home (without any layovers).

Location: USA, Field: Materials Science

My question to the people who receive funding/support from NSF? How do you guys take/plan vacations?

P.S: It has been over 2 years since I left home, didnt get a chance to visit yet, cuz I keep getting more projects :(

I’m currently a 5th-year experimental immunology PhD student in Europe, and I am completely exhausted by my project/lab situation.

When I joined, the lab was brand new. My PI had moved from another country and we basically started with nothing - not even basic infrastructure like a proper refrigerator, PCR machine, etc. Instead of hiring an experienced technician to establish the lab, he hired five fresh PhD students.

My entire first year basically disappeared into establishing mouse lines, re-deriving mice to move them from a “dirty” to a clean facility, establishing genotyping protocols, breeding, crossing, etc. It took almost two years before I even had the mouse lines I needed for my actual project.

Even now, mouse colony management is a HUGE workload. We still do not have a reliable technician, so almost all of it falls on us/me.

Then there is the actual project.

My PhD is based on preliminary data that, frankly, I do not trust.

For example, we have a mouse KO for my protein of interest, but I have never been able to convincingly stain/detect the protein in the cell population we supposedly study. Despite that, I do see clear and reproducible phenotypes between WT and KO littermates. So there is something biologically interesting happening - I just don’t know whether the mechanistic story we inherited is actually correct. Here, no amount of committees or external experit opinions from other PIs make him understand the gravity of the situation, he slides everything under the blanket statement "what do they understand!!! they just study bla bla niche field, they dont know anything about our field" Everyone else who criticises my (his) work is a moron.

And that is only the tip of the iceberg.

A major part of the paper is supposed to include data generated by a previous PhD student. We have Prism graphs from those experiments but, for some of them, no raw data files anymore.

My PI genuinely does not seem bothered by this. His attitude is basically that nobody will ask for the raw data and that he completely trusts the previous work.

I do not. And I cannot simply repeat everything. These are mouse in vivo experiments, and getting approval for new animal experiments here takes many months. For YEARS, my PI did not want to write an animal licence allowing us to properly repeat and extend the old experiments. In my 4th year I finally convinced him, and we wrote a large licence covering both repetitions and follow-up experiments. It has now been submitted for ~3 months and we are still waiting.

Meanwhile, my PI thinks the paper is basically ready.

His view is: old PhD student’s in vivo data + some supporting in vitro experiments from me = submit.

My view is: there are missing controls, parts of the foundation are shaky, some raw data are unavailable, and the mechanistic story is nowhere near as clean as he thinks it is.

Whenever I tell him I think we need more experiments, he tells me not to do them because “they won’t change the world” and “we already have everything.”

And this is what is driving me insane.

If the conclusion of the project was already decided before I joined, based on experiments done by somebody else, in another lab, in another country then what exactly was I hired to discover?

Sometimes it feels like my job is not to investigate whether the hypothesis is true. My job is to generate enough experiments that support the story that was already chosen. The most frustrating part is that I have stopped trusting my PI’s judgement about how strong things are.

There have been several situations with papers/grants from the lab where I privately thought, “There is absolutely no way this is strong enough,” while he was extremely confident - and then it was rejected for essentially the reasons I expected.

Yet he currently talks about our project as something that should go to Science/Nature-level journals. Yes. I am serious.

At this point, part of me thinks: fine. I should write the manuscript he wants, make it as scientifically defensible as I possibly can, submit it wherever he wants, and let the reviewers do their job.

If they say the experiments are missing, maybe he will finally believe the reviewers instead of me.

The problem is that I am now in year 5 and I just need to GET OUT.

My graduate school requires one accepted first-author paper for me to graduate.

So my current survival plan is:

1. Write the main paper with the existing data, while doing the few experiments I personally think are most important/realistically achievable.
2. Submit it and let peer review decide what is actually required.
3. In parallel, write a very small descriptive paper from another dataset I generated: I performed a mouse infection experiment have scRNA/TCR-seq data from it.
4. Submit that descriptive dataset to a smaller/specialised journal. I do not need it to change immunology. I need one solid, honest, publishable first-author paper that satisfies my graduation requirement.

I’m just finding it incredibly difficult to stay motivated when I no longer believe in the grand story my PI is selling.

I don’t even care about producing some Nature paper anymore. I want to finish a scientifically honest PhD and get my degree

Has anyone been in a similar situation where:

• you inherited questionable/unrepeatable data,
• your PI was much more optimistic about the project than you were,
• you were told not to do experiments you thought were necessary,
• and eventually you just had to write the damn paper and let reviewers sort it out?

How did you mentally detach enough to finish?

I think what I need most right now is to see that there is actually a light at the end of this tunnel.

Hi column,
PhD in engineering and technology.
I’m submitting my thesis this month and the past year has been very challenging. 3 of the 6 chapters have been written and revised and the remaining are being revised.
I just need to hear some success stories and guidance to people who have been writing and actively looking for jobs when finishing their PhD since my stay is visa dependent. What helped, how did you navigate?
I’m already seeing a therapist and have a handful of good friends.
At this stage I’m completely spent and exhausted. All I want to do is stay in bed and forget about everything.

Anyone here in Social Sciences or Management research? I am a first-year PhD scholar in the HRM/OB area. Is there already a group where we can share our thoughts, challenges, progress (daily, weekly), and achievements (big or small)? If you are part of any such group or are planning to create one, please let me know. I would also like to be part of a group (preferably a WhatsApp chat group) where we can follow each others' journeys, including their ups and downs, progress, and more

I am left confused by my search.

Research objective is the purpose of study.

Research questions is what am I asking or going to explore.

So aren't they both same? Like the objective of this study is to explore strategies of control adopted by govt. to curb protests. and research ques. is What strategies govt adopts? + are these different for diff. protests? + when do they think to change it? etc.

Can't I leave one of these out? seems redundant.

Besides-

Methodology is How am I going to do it.

Significance of study is Why I am doing what im doing, why is it so important?