I’ve completely lost interest in science during my PhD and now even science-adjacent careers make me feel a bit ill. Has anyone else experienced this?
I’m currently doing a PhD in biochemistry, and I’m increasingly convinced that I don’t want a career in science at all. I’m trying to work out whether this is a genuine change in what I want, or whether I’m just completely burnt out.
I used to be genuinely interested in science. I did well academically, enjoyed learning, and was interested enough in research to choose to do a PhD. But somewhere during my PhD, I seem to have completely lost that interest.
I really don’t enjoy the day-to-day research process. I don’t particularly enjoy planning experiments, doing experiments, troubleshooting them, analysing results, or writing about my own experiments. Even when something works, I often don’t get the satisfaction from it that I feel like I’m supposed to.
The strange thing is that I still love learning. I can happily spend hours reading about completely unrelated topics. I enjoy reading and trying to piece together information, writing/editing, and explaining complicated things to people. I think I like learning and thinking much more than I like doing research.
But I’ve also reached a point where it’s not even just academia that I’m put off by. The thought of jobs that are still fundamentally science/lifesciences-related makes me feel a bit… ill? 😭
For example, I’ve looked at things like pharma, biotech, science policy, scientific communications, etc., and logically I can see why they might be good options for someone with a PhD. But my immediate reaction is basically “oh god, I’d still have to think about science all day.” And that makes them feel incredibly unexciting to me.
Which makes me wonder if I actually need to leave science rather than just leave the lab.
At the same time, I’m very aware that this could absolutely be burnout. I’m exhausted, and I’ve spent years being surrounded by science, studying it, researching it and having to constantly think about my project. So perhaps my brain has simply had enough and is currently reacting to the entire concept of science with no thanks. I don’t know how much I should trust my current feelings when I’m this tired.
I’m also at a slightly awkward stage because I’m doing well enough in my PhD and I definitley will finish it, even just for myself, but I’m struggling to find motivation career-wise if I don’t want to use it in science afterwards.
So I’m wondering if anyone else has experienced something similar.
Did you completely lose interest in science during your PhD?
Did you eventually realise it was burnout and regain your interest, or did you leave and realise that you genuinely just didn’t want to do science anymore?
And if you did leave science completely, what did you end up doing? How did you figure out what you wanted to do instead when you had basically spent your entire education heading towards science?
I’d especially love to hear from people who moved into something completely unrelated to science, rather than just going from academia into industry/pharma/biotech.
I’m also interested in whether anyone had the same experience of being told “you have a PhD, you could go into pharma/policy/consulting/science communication!” and thinking “yes, but I don’t want to think about science anymore” 😂
I’m genuinely quite lost at the moment, so any experiences/advice would be really appreciated. I’m particularly interested in hearing what happened after people made the jump, rather than just which careers are theoretically available to PhDs.