Like if you had intended to solve the goldbach conjecture of mathematics?
Or you wanted to make a proof in epistemology?
Or wanted to prove how Chengho went furthest but later found it had already been done?
I honestly don’t know if I’m overreacting or if this situation is genuinely unfair, so I wanted outside opinions from other PhD students/researchers because right now I feel mentally exhausted and honestly very lost.
I just finished my second year of my PhD, and I recently received an below expectation research grade from my PI (who is a relatively new PI, if that matters). The scary part is that in my program, getting two below expectations research grades can essentially get you removed from the PhD program. This is my first one, but now I’m heading into qualifying exams already stressed, anxious, and honestly terrified about my future.
What makes this difficult for me is that I genuinely don’t feel like I deserved that evaluation. I was in the lab almost every day, regularly attending meetings, discussing experiments with my PI, and presenting progress every two weeks in group meetings. On top of that, I had one of the hardest TA assignments this semester, and despite the workload, I actually performed very well as a TA according to both students and faculty.
Research-wise, yes, not everything worked. I somewhat agree that I probably failed to communicate progress in the exact way my PI expects. But at the same time, I consistently showed data including failed experiments, troubleshooting attempts, and new directions. I was still working every day and trying to move the project forward. It’s not like I disappeared for days or stopped caring.
What hurts is that when I asked my PI why I received the unsatisfactory grade, the explanation was basically that I “haven’t done enough work” and that he expected more productivity. But from my perspective, I genuinely did put in significant effort this semester. He basically wants me to micromanage now, taking stamps of what I do every hour every day. During that discussion, I even mentioned that I felt like I had contributed more work and data than some other PhD students in the lab, but the response I got was something along the lines of “X is doing good work, they’re just not focused.” That honestly confused and hurt me because, objectively, I feel like I was putting in at least as much effort if not more than some of my colleagues.
On top of that, the lab environment itself has become really toxic for me mentally. We have a collaborative project involving three PhD students, but instead of feeling like teamwork, it often feels like everyone is competing to make themselves look the best in front of the PI. Communication is poor, people move ahead without coordinating properly, and I constantly feel pressured to prove myself rather than feeling supported. I often end up chasing people for updates, data, or information related to the project.
The worst part is how much this has affected me mentally. I genuinely feel depressed right now. I’ve been crying constantly for the past few days and questioning whether I even belong in academia anymore. I know PhDs are difficult, but right now it feels like no matter how much effort I put in, it is never enough. I’ve even started thinking about quitting because I feel emotionally burned out and defeated.
What also scares me is that this happened so early in my career without much warning or discussion beforehand. It’s making me question how supported I’ll actually be moving forward not just for qualifying exams, but also later for publications, recommendations, and career development.
Has anyone else dealt with a PI or lab culture like this? Did things improve in later stages of PhD? How do you recover mentally from something like this and move forward without constantly feeling like you’re failing? I genuinely need advice because right now I feel completely lost.
TL;DR: Received a below expectation research grade during my second year PhD despite being consistently present, working hard, TA’ing heavily, and regularly presenting data. PI says I “didn’t do enough,” but I feel I did good in this semester. Now I’m burned out, depressed, and questioning whether I should continue in academia.
I published a paper a couple months ago (my first lead author paper of my PhD) and after acceptance I found several mistakes in the code for the analysis. I managed to correct them but the paper did have to go out for review again. However, there are still some results that are suspicious to me, although my co-authors think everything looks okay. Because coding is so finicky I keep thinking I made some tiny mistake in the code that threw everything off and is a retraction-level error. I've gone back and checked many times and everything has turned out okay, but then I find other things to worry about that I didn't check. It's a torturous cycle. I have to use some of the same code for my next paper and I have panic attacks while working because I worry I'll find something wrong again. Has anyone experienced something similar? How do I let this go?
Edit: I also want to add that I haven't done my dissertation proposal yet and I will have to use the figures from my paper in my proposal. It's not until the fall but I'm freaking out about that too.
Hey uh. Im not sure how to say this, but i made the decision to keep going with my degree here and im just getting progressively more miserable and sad. And as much as I try to branch out and have community, i just feel like I keep hitting walls. And i’m sick of my lab. My stupid fucking lab. My office. My room. I’m so fucking depressed and im only like.. 2 years away from getting my degree but I don’t think I csn do it anymore. I mean, i’ve been isolated for so long. I dont like my advisor or my lab, i only like my work but not enough to keep me here. I dont know if I can do it anymore but I don’t know if its another “psuedo breaking point”. I hate this school, this town, this state. I want this whole place to be a wash. I hate it here. I dont want to make these decisions rashly, but it’s been maybe 6 months. And I can’t anymore. God, i just fucking cant.
Phd drop regrets..
My life was so messy the time I withdrew, now I regret.. but seems cannot do anything with the career I used to have
I don’t understand this thing. If a senior professor cannot make time to read your paper, thesis, reports of PhD students why the fuck do they take on huge labs with 3-4 students every year ?
And when they are reminded about it they say they’re busy and keep pushing it further away!
How is this okay for the students mental health having to be worried about deadlines all the time and keep up with their moods?
Sorry this is becoming a rant but has anyone gone through this before?
How to do PhD in English Literature abroad under full scholarship? Please help me.
I recently finished my PhD and I’m now in the usual post-PhD limbo: no stable position, living far away from my former university, trying to understand what comes next.
This year I had a small tutoring contract with my old department in Italy for an undergraduate Contemporary History course. The contract pays around 600 euros gross from November to September, so roughly 50 euros per month. Basically symbolic money.
I helped struggling students with weekly online remedial classes, individual meetings, exam preparation, emails, and all the small forms of support universities quietly depend on. Since I no longer live near the university, I did everything remotely.
At the end of May there’s a written exam, and obviously I’m not traveling across the country to supervise it for a contract like this. The depressing part is that one of the professors involved, someone very publicly progressive and left-wing, immediately complained that because I have a contract I am “obliged” to be there in person.
That reaction says a lot about academia. The moment even a small amount of power becomes available, many people immediately reproduce the same forms of exploitation they criticize in theory. A symbolic contract suddenly turns into a moral obligation to always be available, flexible, grateful, and compliant.
Nobody openly says: “we are underpaying precarious workers and expecting unpaid loyalty.” Instead it gets framed as professionalism, collegiality, or responsibility toward students.
Sometimes I think that if precarious academic and cultural workers simply started saying “I would prefer not to,” like Bartleby, universities would quickly run into crisis. The system survives because so many people accept invisible and underpaid work in the hope of remaining part of academia.
Anyway, I’m still not going.
My stipend is insufficient, so I'm looking for additional income. Otherwise, I'll have to return to my country. What are the legal ways for a PhD student in the USA to earn extra income?
2nd year PhD here (social sciences). My ADHD has been brutal this semester and I've been testing tools to keep myself afloat. Already paying for ChatGPT but it's too general for actual research work. Wanted to share what's working and hear what others swear by.
What I've tried so far:
Zotero: non-negotiable at this point. Free, browser connector saves me hours, group libraries are great for advisor collab. UI is dated but I've made peace with it.
Elicit: best for early scoping. Pulls relevant papers and extracts methods/findings into a table so I can triage fast. Leans life sciences though, so YMMV.
Consensus: solid for quick "what does the literature actually say about X" checks. Good for sanity testing claims before I go deeper.
BeFreed: recent find. Turns PDFs, YouTube, articles into podcast-style lessons where you control length, depth, voice, and narration style. Makes dense material digestible on a commute. If you upload your own sources it builds a personalized learning plan across them, which has helped me organize scattered readings into something coherent. Wouldn't use it for papers I need to cite closely.
Obsidian: where my literature notes live. Backlinks genuinely change how I connect ideas. Easy to spend more time configuring than writing though.
Has anyone tried Research Rabbit or Scite? Keep hearing about them but haven't pulled the trigger. Also open to any writing-stage recs, that's where I'm still drowning.
I don’t know what to do anymore
Initially, I really loved the idea of doing a PhD. About a year ago (maybe even longer, since I am at the end of my second year of PhD in genetics), I slowly lost all motivation to go to the lab. It’s not that I suddenly stopped caring about science — I think I just lost my courage and confidence somewhere along the way.
What makes it harder is that I work as a research assistant at the research institute where I’m supposed to conduct my PhD experiments. The environment is extremely toxic. People are mean, jealous, constantly mocking me. For five years, I spent so much energy trying to understand why some colleagues disliked me, why they mocked me, what I had done wrong, even though I was always proactive, hardworking, and ready to help everyone no matter what.
Whenever someone needed help with an experiment, PhD research, writing a paper, organizing a scientific event, or literally anything else, I was there and have a 100000% of myself. Yet somehow, my efforts and contributions were minimized or erased so many times.
I kept pouring my energy into surviving the environment and into people who probably never deserved that energy in the first place. And now, when I finally need that energy for myself, for my PhD, for my future — I feel completely drained and lost. I can barely make myself start anything in the lab anymore.
Sometimes I wonder how different my journey in academia would have been if I had spent these years growing instead of just surviving.
I am desperate and I don't know what to do anymore.
My phd is finished. Thank God. I still however need to defend in June. I don't really know how to express this except being completely honest and letting it pour out. I feel extremely burned out and depleted. Like my divine spark and drive has been sucked out of me. My family say my supervisors drained everything out of me that I had to give. Like a parasite. I know they are right. I am a different person on the flip side of this. I just can't seem to regenerate energy? I am not overweight - go to the gym, eat relatively healthy, don't drink or smoke, work outside part time. What is the source of this depletion? Is it the burning hatred I feel for my supervisor? Is it that you're never really finished because you still have to jump through the hoops and bend to the will of the reviewers to get my thesis chapters published? Is it the bitterness at my past self's naivety and lack of prospects for us? I sleep and bedrot and travel and golf - anything to rejuvenate and inspire but I feel like I'm trying to draw water from an empty well. I'm starting a postdoc soon (different lab obvs lol) so will just be stuck in the same paradigm except with more responsibilities. I meet with friends from the PhD and they are stressed and looking for jobs. I see pics on LinkedIn of others from my cohort with their supervisors smiling and feel jealousy that they had such a supportive and immersive experience. I don't know why anyone would want to do a phd and subject themselves to pure torture. No amount of talk therapy or ssris would right the wrongs my supervisors inflicted. No quantity of citations or LinkedIn followers would make me feel less dead inside or that academia is a worthwhile pursuit. What a waste of my time and energy. Only small win is not letting my supervisor bully me out of the project like he did with several others and everyone in the department and country even knows what he's like now - I made sure of it. How such truly deplorable and evil pieces of sh1t wind up in positions of authority over vulnerable young adults is definitely not an accident.
Guys I'm using reddit for the first time I just need some help I want to pursue PhD abroad in english literature most probably from Europe . I want to do it in interdisciplinary fields like trauma studies, gender studies, women studies. Could anyone help me on what's the process to apply there and what are the requirements as I'm from India
Thank you
Looking to hear from people who started a PhD after spending years in the workforce.
I’m now considering doing a PhD after working for almost 13–14 years. I completed my Master’s over a decade ago, and since then I’ve had a rewarding career.
I’m from a developing country and have spent most of my career in the development sector, working with well-known multilateral and bilateral international development organizations, including the United Nations. I’m currently in a good role at a good organization.
But I still really want to do a PhD.
I’ve mostly been looking at programs in Germany, though I’m also exploring options across the EU. This was something I wanted to pursue years ago, but then COVID happened, and life moved on. For a while, I felt I was already in a good position professionally without a PhD, but I’ve realized this is still something I genuinely want for myself. I’ve now started actively searching and have come across some really promising opportunities.
At the same time, my overactive mind keeps making me question everything.
For those who pursued a PhD after working for several years, how was the transition? Especially if you were already in a mid career professional role before starting - was it difficult adjusting to being a student again? And how did you manage the shift to living on a stipend?
For me, wanting to do a PhD is about becoming an expert in my field, while strengthening my problem-solving and critical thinking skills through independent, in-depth research.
Still, the idea of becoming a student again feels really daunting.
Hi guys,
My home defense will be at 21st of May and I must say that I am lower than low mentally.
I wrote my thesis in 3 months because last year I was sure I will just let it go and not finish it. But I did, my paper got published and my way cleared to defend it in front of the committee. However, you can imagine that writing it in 3 months while working a full time job resulted in a rather catastrophic dissertation. And rather hurting reviews from the committee.
Not only that but I need to clean it up, revise it, rewrite it (I did that mostly, but I still have much work to do and no energy) and I will have only two weeks after the defense to print it out and deposit it at the university.
I am stressed, every single time I try to work on that thing, or make my ppt I got a rush on my chest from stress. I tried to initiate it - as any good researcher would - because at first I thought it was from some kind of food, but not. It's from this idiotic dissertation. My throat feels like a stone is sitting there but at least I didn't have a panic attack yet.
I need some advice on how to calm down because this is ridiculous. I don't even care anymore how I will go through it, or if they will let me go to the real defense, I just want to survive, because it sure as hell feels like I won't be able to.
Thanks for anyone who could help with this. Walking helps but just until I sit back down to write, then it starts again.