on quitting (long)

I've been collecting posts about how quitting can be a good thing lately. I don't really want to quit, and yet these posts make me feel uneasy so I'm trying to think seriously about why I want to keep going and at what point it wouldn't be worth it.

From Sarahliz:

In some sense I “failed” but really only in the sense that I failed to force myself to continue doing something that was making me miserable just because I could continue doing it. I have no doubt in my mind that I could have successfully finished my dissertation had I wanted to. But ultimately it came down to the fact that I didn’t want to. And I couldn’t come up with a single good reason why I should put myself through something that was making me miserable in those circumstances.

This is close enough to how I feel that it scares me, because if that's really how I feel, then maybe I should quit. And yet, I don't want to give up. I'm worried that the only reason for finishing is to prove to myself that I can do it and so that the people I've gone through grad school with won't look down on me. I still have some lingering hope that I would enjoy research more in a different lab with a different project, too.

I said in my last post that I was originally excited about my project, and that's true, but even so, I've never been as passionate as the people who've really thrived in grad school. I was never excited to get up in the morning and go to lab, even at the best of times and I could easily leave all thoughts of research behind on weekends and holidays.

When I first decided I wanted to do research, back in high school, it wasn't because I was curious about particular questions (I actually thought I might like to do astrophysics until I took first year physics). It was more that I couldn't think of anything else that would be at all interesting. They gave us all a big book that listed careers and what study or training was required for each. Most of them sounded like they'd get boring very quickly, but I thought research would at least involve a variety of things. Figuring out something new would have to be interesting, right?

That sounds so naive, but I did have a decent amount of lab experience when I applied to grad school. I did work experience in high school and was lucky enough to be there at an exciting moment in a project. I did three semi-independent research projects in undergrad, and then honours, which is an extra academic year of full-time research after undergrad. My honours project started out very cool with potential for exciting publications and then ran into technical problems that meant nothing useful ever came of it, so I even had experience with failed research. I still enjoyed all that well enough that I thought I'd enjoy it as a career, so what went wrong?

I think one problem is that I was really motivated by feeling smart, rather than anything intrinsic to research. I was good at school and enjoyed it and this is as far as school goes. Unfortunately, it's not really school anymore. The periodic rewards of good grades and awards ran out after I finished taking classes. The research itself should be the reward now. And it might be, if I were getting results.

From DamnGoodTechnician:

I honestly believe this is an offshoot of the Impostor Syndrome, where you believe that you have failed because you just didn't try hard enough, and that if you were just a better scientist, you'd be happy at what you're doing. These people slog through, believing that that next piece of data, that next paper, is just the thing that will make them fall in love with science again.

Again, I worry that this is true for me. I definitely feel that if I tried harder and were a better scientist (meaning my experiments would work), I would be happier doing research. Every time I've expressed any doubts about whether research is for me, people have urged me to keep trying, because I've come too far to give up and everyone gets sick of grad school. People familiar with my advisor, especially, have tried to convince me I should try working in a lab where people actually publish before deciding to quit. It's easy to say I could do a post-doc and then quit if I'm still not enjoying it, but is it even worth getting to that point?

I haven't mentioned my struggles with depression and anxiety yet in this post. I guess my real hope is that I could get those under control, which would let me be more productive, which would lead to actual results and publications, which would make me excited about research again. I'm not quite convinced I can make an informed decision about whether I enjoy research enough without ever experiencing the satisfying part. Unfortunately, if doing something I don't enjoy is contributing to my depression, maybe I won't ever get to be productive enough to enjoy it.

In the comments to DamnGoodTechnician's post, Drugmonkey said "The key is to be very clear with oneself about what one likes/doesn't like about the current training stage and what one will like about being a PI." What I don't like is feeling stupid (which reminds me, I never posted my rant about that article on why feeling stupid is a good thing (the shorter version: the author is confusing ignorant for stupid; they are very different things)), the lack of obvious progress and the fact that a lot of my benchwork and cell culture is boring and mindless enough that a trained monkey could do it. Of course, I also have the problem that I'm bored enough to zone out and make stupid, but critical errors, which further reduce my progress.

So, what would be different if I were a PI? I'd have my own trained monkeys technicians and grad students to palm the benchwork off on, so that would be good. Maybe I'd be able to see the progress more, if I were looking at the combined output of a whole lab. There's always the hope that I'd be a better manager than my advisor and my lab would actually be making more progress, too, but I don't have any evidence for that. I'm pretty sure writing grants would make me feel stupid, but then, most things do and maybe I'd manage to improve my self-esteem by then.

Maybe I should be wondering what would be different about being a post-doc, since I'd have to get through that first. I don't think much would be different, aside from the pressure to get publications faster (theoretically with less guidance, but I think I already get little enough). So, that's not promising.

From Alisa Bowman:

When you run the right race, you feel drawn to the finish line. Yes, the race might be hard. ... But if you are running the right race, you will keep putting one foot in front of the other because doing anything less results in just one sensation: despair.
When you are running the wrong race, however, you might not have a single hardship, but you’ll still think about quitting. And when you do quit, you’ll experience one sensation: relief.

When my advisor recommended at the last minute that I not present at the conference I went to recently, I was frustrated and annoyed, but also overwhelmingly relieved. A post-doc in my lab has told me several times I should've presented, despited my conflicting data, in order to get feedback and be more visible in the field, but really the only time I even slightly wish I'd presented is when thinking of the line I could've had on my C.V.

Maybe work should not be so hard. Maybe I shouldn't have to force myself to show up to work every day, and I could do something that I would actually want to spend time thinking about, or that would give me some sense of satisfaction after a day's work. Although, I think my anxiety would get in the way of that in any career.

I feel like I've been convincing myself to quit as I write, which was not my intention. I'm left feeling that a big part of my motivation for finishing is to be able to point to the PhD as proof that I really am smart. And that seems pretty stupid.

The more reasonable part is that I'm still holding out hope that if I weren't so depressed or anxious and if I were making more progress, I'd enjoy it. Those are big ifs, though. I'd certainly be happier if both those things were the case, even if I did find out I still didn't like research. Hopefully some of my ideas from the previous post will help me test that.

If I do quit, I'm totally getting this shirt.