Close to finishing my PhD but I feel so awful
LONG RANT AHEAD:
I am a sixth year PhD candidate about to defend next week if all goes well, but all I can think about is how everything has gone so wrong during my time in my program. I consider myself a below average candidate for many reasons and these are not just the imposter syndrome talking.
To summarize the issues that transpired over the years:
I was the only student that had to repeat a stats course within my cohort. My stats professor behaved like a sweetheart when interacting with students but graded exams like he had a personal vendetta. A third of his exams consisted of two full essays and if you forgot a detail about a particular statistical method you would lose points even if the argument or comparison provided in the prose was accurate. Nonetheless this was a pretty traumatic experience and my peers and I still refer to this professor acknowledging how bad it all was.
I only have a coauthorship with a few first author manuscripts close to being finished. Now here I will admit I could have been more proactive, but whenever I would share drafts to my advisors they would take a long time to give feedback or they simply wouldn’t. I know for a fact that my advisor only gave me feedback once on a paper that was part of my dissertation proposal and by the time I defended this paper, I almost didn’t pass.
Speaking of advisors, I chose my main advisor because I had worked with him previously as an undergraduate and I liked his mentoring style. I remember him being supportive, understanding, helpful and would advocate for me and other students so much. However, ever since day one it felt like I was left to figure out and learn everything on my own. I understand this is part of the experience to become an independent researcher, but when you ask an explicit question about something someone should know given their expertise and you don’t get a clear answer then something is not right. For example, my work implements longitudinal analysis because it focuses on neurocognitive development. Whenever I asked about the proper implementation of methods while presenting analysis updates I usually wouldn’t get clear answers and he is supposed to have a strong background using these methods or with developing populations. In a different example, I spent a large amount of time working with large neuroimaging datasets that were processed with more unique and sophisticated parcellations of gray and white matter and I could never be referred to a paper, codebook, guideline, or even a person that could clearly answer what the thousands of variables I had on the spreadsheet I downloaded were referring to. This issue became a daunting problem recently while I drafted the last chapter of my dissertation.
I also originally had a co-advisor that left around my third year because he got a job offer at a different institution in a different country, but promised he would remain responsive and provide feedback an my quals. Well, this advisor did a no-show during my advancement and caused growing tensions with my other committee members and almost delayed my advancement. He also never responded to give me feedback on my quals and he had the most relevant experience with the methods and area of my dissertation proposal. This one really stung because whenever my main advisor would take longer to get back to me my co-advisor would pick up the slack or give me more detailed and practical guidance.
I’m at the point where I don’t even know what to do. I struggled at every step of my PhD journey while my peers seemed to just breeze through, publish at least a first authored paper, or seemed to have received more structured guidance from their advisors that allowed them to complete milestones by required deadlines. While my advisor would seem to wait until the last minute to give me detailed feedback that required major revisions and editing. I just shared my dissertation with my committee earlier today after I had to ask for an extension when some aspects of my last chapter raised eyebrows and while I’m trying to reframe and fix this chapter, he went back to previous chapters to nit pick them, even though he spent the last several weeks praising my excellent writing on these previous chapters. He goes on to say that not having significant results in some areas of the dissertation is not the problem as long as I can properly account for this, but then goes on to say that maybe I should consider adding more analyses. He went from praising my writing to comparing it to the writing of one the students he hardly has anything good to say about in the span of a few days.
My overall experience was very isolating too, until I TA’d and met other students and faculty from different departments and I began to mentor my undergraduate research assistants. If I managed to stay this long it was largely because of them to be honest.
So I’m a few days away from defending, I don’t have a postdoc lined up or any job. I have a good amount of teaching experience, but I haven’t even heard back from the lecturer positions I applied for. I’m also afraid my advisor will simply disappear after I defend and won’t work with me to publish my pending manuscripts just like he has so far. I do want to continue doing research and mentoring/ teaching, but I’m afraid there isn’t much I can do at this point to improve my situation to continue down this path. I constantly search reddit for stories similar to mine, but I don’t find them relatable, or thanks to the fact that they had publications and a record of awarded funding they were able to land a postdoc or job offer even before defending or without much trouble.
If anyone has a story about how they pulled through a similar situation it would be really helpful. I’m at the point where it feels like I have nothing else to lose and don’t know what think anymore. Thank you for reading.