#phd problems

Oct 2025 🪫

I think I’ve finally hit that point in the PhD where I understand just how easy it is for your mental health to tank and how sneakily burnout and anxiety creep upon you while you keep telling yourself “you just have to grind this one out.” Of course, it’s relative and perhaps I’m also extremely exhausted from being across an ocean from my partner and family, I miss my friends from home, and the holidays are coming up.

So I did something kinda scary, and I told my supervisor exactly how I was feeling- I even cried lol. And even though I was not looking for a solution other than her to listen to me, she immediately delivered. I feel so supported and like genuinely cared for and I’m so thankful i am working where I am. Moral of the story, tell someone if you’re struggling. I had told my coworker buddy before this and they encouraged me to speak up to my supervisor and they were so right to encourage me.

From the fact that PhD’s and PhD students make the most of the actual research, while their supervisors deal mostly with knowing the right topics and the right people and trying to get to be chairs on conferences and inviting their friends to be chairs on their own conferences.

To how that research is treated, in that it has to be possible to shuffle into a particular box, so that it’s easy to promote to like-minded researches and the reviewers "get it".

It makes me think how as a kid I really wanted to be a writer and write books, and pursuing a PhD seemed to me a similar kind of a goal - putting my tendency to overthink and need constant stimulation and dig into rabbit holes to good use. How I thought that the work going into a PhD could feel to me more inherently meaningful that writing. And how as much I still enjoy the act of doing research, I can now see how little it can have with your actual success.

My friend’s awesome research was rejected multiple times. A shitty paper that implemented the wheel again, but worse, got accepted into a prestigious journal. My friend had to submit to my supervisor’s conference to get recognition. My supervisor then tried to manipulate me emotionally into putting even more work than I do, shaming me publicly and comparing to my friend. Last year I worked on our big research projects with crunches lasting for months, having to do comparably more engineering work than my friend (which for some reason did not get noticed). My supervisors knew about that work. They never gave me positive feedback for it. They have, however, complimented the fact that I present confidently, something I find as easy as breathing.