I decided to quit about a dozen times over the course of my doctoral program. Almost 30 years later I recall, at each instance, taking an evening to process my grievances and options before resolving to … give it another few months. Maybe I should have shared my angst with someone back then, but I didn’t — not with my friends, advisers, or parents (Ivy League professors who always expected me to follow them into “the family business”). I certainly never considered turning for solace to a public medium then in its infancy called “the internet.”
Today the number of online venues available for support and advice has increased exponentially, yet so has the level of anxiety expressed by first-semester Ph.D. students. The academic year is barely underway and posts like “one month in, I want to quit my doctoral program” are all over social media, wikis, blogs, X, TikTok, and especially on Reddit “subs.”
Likewise, I’ve talked this fall with graduate directors in myriad disciplines who say the stress and uncertainty seem to be worsening with each new doctoral cohort. The reasons are manifold:
- Decreased graduate funding
- Uncertainty about career outcomes for Ph.D.s at an all-time high
- Heightened mental-health concerns
- Class and culture issues
- More prevalent family obligations
- Instability facing the program, the institution, and academe in general
To quit or not to quit has become an increasingly widespread mantra since the tumult of 2020. And no amount of well-meant advice (“It’s too early to quit”), platitudes (“Things will get easier”) or musings (“In my day we toughed it out”) can mitigate the anguish and unhappiness of new graduate students, each with their own complicated mix of challenges.
The problems are real, and I respect that every student has the right to quit. Nevertheless, as an ex-dean and a former associate dean of graduate studies, and as someone who’s spent years writing about academic-career issues, I do have some counter arguments for any new doctoral students on the verge of giving up in their first semester.
It doesn’t necessarily get better, but it does get different. You don’t join a doctoral program without some inkling of the hurdles ahead. But maybe you’ve been surprised by the sheer amount of work involved.
A new Ph.D. student once told me that, while she had read scholarly articles and books as an undergraduate and master’s student, she was stunned in her research-methods courses by both the volume and complexity of the reading required and the speed at which she was expected to finish it. Likewise, a graduate director in the sciences said that many doctoral students newly assigned to a lab are stressed out by the long hours, compared with the limited time they had spent on research projects up to that point.
In the initial months of a Ph.D. program, the scale of the labor is indeed daunting and the expectation of ready comprehension, frazzling. When I was a master’s student, I thought I had learned some measure of statistics, yet three sequential stats courses in my doctoral program almost broke me. Inevitably, I was still trying to process in Week 5 what I should have learned in Week 2. And, unlike in my undergraduate days, I felt like an idiot if I asked too many questions or like an animal that dared not show weakness to the pack. Eventually I adjusted, and given a year, you very likely will too. If you don’t, perhaps that’s the point at which you choose to stay or go.
Early on when you don’t know many people in your department, you will feel isolated. You may face interpersonal and cultural situations in which you don’t find kinship with fellow students, lab associates, faculty members, or roommates. No surprise that one of the most recurring social-media posts I read is some variation of, “Wow, is all of academia this toxic?”
The answer is no. While the stereotype of a mean and malicious atmosphere in higher education is not wholly fictional, the only thing predictable about a doctoral program is that the circumstances will evolve over time. Month 1 will be different from Month 20. You may feel friendless one week, and the next, meet people on the local Friday night Arts Trail who share your interests. Again, don’t mistake first-semester adjustment issues for what graduate school will be like two semesters from now.
You will get better at coping. Not long ago, I met a doctoral student in a social-science field who observed that she had learned “how to manage professors better.” As a new doctoral student, she said her professors seemed almost like Olympian gods who made these arbitrary decisions that confused (and confounded) the mortal Ph.D. students. But eventually, she figured out how to navigate among her very human overlords. Late-night sessions with other doctoral students venting about faculty foibles (but also noting “who were the good ones”) helped take the fear and uncertainty out of the adventure.
Then, too, your technical abilities will simply improve day by day with repetition and practice. A chemistry professor told me that in his first year as a doctoral student, he felt like the single most-inept lab tech in history. In fact, the lab’s principal investigator regularly berated him for fumbling simple experimental protocols. Yet my colleague stuck it out, became quite adept at all lab functions, and proved this faculty member wrong. The learning curve was painful, but it was a fixable problem, given time.
No, it isn’t pleasant to be chided by a professor who should be guiding you (and if that already is happening to you, it’s early enough in your training to change advisers). But don’t discount your own skills at improvising and overcoming problems until you’ve put them to the test for more than a few months.
Help is available on your campus. Today’s doctoral students — no matter the field or the institution — have more access to support services than ever before. I worry that saying so will make me sound like a GenXer grumbling that “in my day we had to walk 10 miles in a snowstorm to get an article from the library.” (Aside: I got my Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, so that was partially true for me.)
But the fact is, in my lifetime, I’ve seen a remarkable change in faculty and administrative attitudes toward doctoral training. Universities once took considerable pride in severe attrition in their doctoral programs. The theory being that the higher your dropout rates, the more your program would be perceived as selective, elite, and, thus, prestigious. Today, most professors in your program want you to succeed. Organizationally, most universities see retention of doctoral students as a metric of success and a symbol of status.
That doesn’t mean that your adviser isn’t a jerk. Nor does it guarantee that another teaching assistant won’t jostle for position, undermine you, and gossip about you behind your back. But it does mean that — if you spend some time looking, listening, and exploring on your campus — you are going to find a surprising number of people who genuinely want to assist you. They may do so either out of the goodness of their hearts or to keep funding for their program, or both. But their intentions, virtuous or utilitarian, could spell a positive personal outcome for you. They don’t want you to drop out and will help you stay in.
Today, many student-support offices and resources have emerged that didn’t exist “in my day” — writing centers for international students; high-quality, mental-health counseling; supportive graduate directors who care about you even if you are not their personal research or teaching assistant. And yes, there’s human resources and the Title IX office, too, besides possible faculty and administrator allies.
You have a lot of online company in the struggle. Reach out. The 1993 me would find another support hub astonishing: social media. Every day, often under pseudonyms, I witness doctoral students asking, lamenting, venting … and being flooded with love, support, commiseration, and good advice from equally pseudonymous and sympathetic virtual friends. More delightfully, “disgruntledchemPhd23” and “complitdoctoraldoomsayer” can switch to direct messaging and, boom, secure a real confidant and lifelong pal on another campus, perhaps across the globe.
Academic communities have been redefined by social media, but an ancient principle still applies: One way to get help is to give it.
Find someone who has strengths that differ from your own and put your heads together. A social-sciences professor told me how he struggled with certain aspects of theory in his first year of graduate school. Naturally he was fixated on his own inadequacies, compared with his “quicker” cohort. But then he heard another first-year student beating himself up for being slow to grasp stats. That student excelled in discussing theory in class. So my acquaintance volunteered to help, and they ended up tutoring and encouraging each other to mutual success.
There is no way to be a successful doctoral student (or a successful professor) without a high quotient of self-direction. Few professions have as much autonomy as ours, and that’s part of its attraction to many people. The flip side to that freedom is that it can be difficult to ask for and find help, especially when you’re new to the entire opaque and complicated journey.
Make the effort. Of course you have the right to quit your doctoral program at any point. But don’t surrender hope in these early months until you’ve given yourself the chance to find all of the support that’s out there waiting to be consulted.
