u/Substantial_Move_965

I am about to start my PhD in purely theoretical physics. Minimal computational work but I do have coding experience from the Masters courses.

With the declining opportunities and already competitive field I'm in, I'm not sure about continuing in Academia. I would want to earn some money and gain stability after PhD so I'm figuring out my options. With the advent of AI, I wanted to know if Quant jobs are still viable options after my PhD. If so, how do I prepare for it during doctoral period such that the transition is as smooth as possible?

I have been working with this professor for almost 2 years now. I present to him my progress and failures in our research weekly. I have been nothing but crystal clear about how I am approaching the problem and how my capability is limited given the time to complete thesis by strict deadline of my university.

That being said, I did the write up process for final thesis draft 1.5 months before the deadline and then shared it with my supervisor. He always gave me constructive feedback about anything I ask or do wrong, which I really appreciate. But this time, he was just dissapointed with my write up. He nitpicked everything I have written. From grammer, the way I have used names of scientists in the draft, how I have not read every citation of my draft (which is true, because I used small parts of it in my draft and I understood the paper's gist, there felt no need to fully read it), to the point he ended with calling my work fully artificial intelligence. This was disheartening to my core. I have been strict about its usage since day 1. And I have discussed with him before as well. I use it for grammar and punctuation check and for gathering literature relevant to my topics, which I read properly just to be sure. That's it.

It completely broke me that after working for 2 years during my master's degree with same professor and around same topics, my first draft is simply discarded by calling it artificial intelligence. Yet, I got up again and sent him another draft yesterday with all the corrections he mentioned. He sends me another similar list of smaller and smaller issues in my draft. He keeps expecting me to go perfect every time, this never happened before when we were just working and I was at fault, which was 90% of the time. Now 20 days remain before I have to submit my final thesis. I don't know how I will survive through this. I feel like 2 years of research experience and skills I have gained everything is in vain finally. Just because of his remarks. It is possible I'm taking this very personally than it really is. Maybe I should just focus on technical details after all?