decidedlyodd

I just got back from telling my advisor that I’m planning to leave UNC at the end of this semester or whenever I finish my MS. Originally, I thought I was just meeting with her, but a postdoc I’d been planning to work with was also there because the three of us were going to talk about the joint research we’ve been thinking about. That meant I had to cut straight to the chase and spill my guts. I don’t know exactly what I said, but it basically boiled down to “I feel like I’m not enjoying this as much as I should be” and “I don’t have the passion for research that I’d really need to stick this out and enjoy it”. Some words of David X. Cohen’s (of Futurama, Simpsons and apparently Beavis and Butthead fame) on Computer Science graduate school ring true with me here,

Finally, I decided I should go to graduate school before I forgot everything I knew, with the idea that I could try writing later if I wasn’t sure I had made the right choice. After three years of graduate school, I felt I wasn’t enjoying it as much as I should, and that there was no end in sight, so I took a leave of absence…

To that, both her and the postdoc said everybody goes through a phase like this around the point I am in graduate school. I responded by saying I’ve lacked passion in just about any research I’ve done, although the situation has been decidedly worse over the past year. Phases don’t last that long; something else is going on. In the end, a PhD just doesn’t seem like it’s for me.

Overall, I guess it went well. She asked me if I had started looking for a job yet and I told her about how the Microsoft interview for a job or internship next summer should be able to be turned into an interview for a job starting sooner. She also wants to meet with me some more this afternoon to (presumably) discuss things like what I’m going to do for the rest of the semester and possible job opportunities.

I’m just sort of sitting in my office dealing with what has happened. On one hand, I’m relieved. Over the past few weeks this idea of leaving has become more concrete and began to feel more and more inevitable (in a good way). Still, it’s frustrating to make difficult life decisions like this, because I rarely feel 100% certain about them. That said, it’s definitely time to try something different as my current modus operandi just isn’t working. Graduate school hasn’t been as intellectually satisfying as I had hoped. I always feel like I’m never getting anything done, even when I am in fact making progress. The fruits of my labor seem so fake and unimportant. I find the topics I’ve worked on interesting, but not to the extent many of the people around me are completely engulfed by theirs. To me, it feels very much more like a job I have to do rather than an opportunity where I can focus on an obscure personal passion.

Looking back, I first came to graduate school because I wanted to teach. Even at the time, I knew this wasn’t enough to get me through because I was acutely aware that research was the primary purpose of graduate school. Mostly, I had hoped interest in research would grow on me to form the perfect job opportunity of combining teaching and research: becoming an academic. It was not an unreasonable hope though, because at that point I had really no research experience to speak of. While research never really caught on for me like teaching did, I didn’t find that out until I spent a couple years trying it out. Consequently, I don’t regret the decisions I’ve made over the past couple of years that have taken me down this path. I’d do it all over again, frustration and pain included. I got to meet great people. I got to live in Europe. I got to learn lots of interesting things from different perspectives. Perhaps most importantly, I didn’t rack up a bunch of debt doing it–almost everything has been paid for by fellowships and assistantships.

When I was teaching, I felt like I could do that job for the rest of my life and be satisfied. I remember telling Turadg once that I wanted to become a lecturer in Computer Science. His response was that I should really consider becoming an actual professor since the career of a lecturer is often fairly crummy (low pay, little job security, low man on the totem pole, etc.). Looking back, that’s quite possibly the point where I decided to go down the academic path, which of course brought me to consider the PhD.

Research (at least not in Computer Science) has never come close to achieving that same status for me. The reality though is that a research degree (PhD) is required for most high level teaching jobs even ones not involving research. It saddens me to give up on my goal of finding a good teaching job. However, I’m tired of suffering through research I don’t really enjoy for a job that might not even be there when I graduate. Academic jobs are not easy to get and then there’s the whole tenuring process once you’re in. Perhaps I can integrate teaching others into future jobs or teach a night class at community college at some point in the future.

I also talked to my mother about all of this last night. When I first told her I was considering leaving (about two weeks ago), she was fairly taken aback (”You want to do what?!?”). However, after reasoning through it all with her over the phone, she seems to understand why I’m making this decision. More importantly, going over it all with her has solidified my own understanding about it, which is definitely a good thing.