Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
(OP)
BACKGROUND
I'm a funded PhD student at a good American university. My research is not progressing, and I'm finding the work involved in a PhD is useless to realistic engineering applications. I believe further pursuit of graduate work does nothing to advance my career - in fact it could be a step back.
CURRENT SITUATION
I decided that I should leave the PhD program (ie, drop out), the sooner the better. I am a funded Research Assistant, and my advisor/boss relies heavily on my work. I basically function as a Research Engineer and Assistant, and am involved in multiple funded research projects. I have not talked to my advisor/boss about this. He will be furious if I leave. However I do not believe I am in a situation where I can be successful, and it makes sense to leave.
Because of my leasing/living arrangement and personal situation, the best opportunity for me to leave is in the next 3 weeks. This would allow me to give him a "2 weeks notice" (and one of those weeks I'd be working free of charge because of the payment system). However, there was a conference that I originally committed to (before I decided to quit). Now that I am resigning, I would not be able to attend this of course. This further complicates my relationship with my advisor/boss. However, anyone is entitled to quit and I cannot be held against my will.
QUESTIONS
1). Is it unprofessional for me to resign with only 2 weeks notice?
2). Am I expected to keep working (for free) and attend the conference? Note that this would not be feasible as I plan to move.
3). Does this kill any chance of a letter of recommendation for my advisor/boss?
4). If I leave without a reference from my advisor, how damning is this to my job prospects? I personally think I do more damage staying on this dead-end academic path.
5). Do you have experience resigning at the inconvenience of your employer? How did you manage it?
Any advise would help
Thanks





RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
Best of luck to you in your new endeavors.
Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community..
To the Toolmaker, your nice little cartoon drawing of your glass looks cool, but your solid model sucks. Do you want me to fix it, or are you going to take all week to get it back to me so I can get some work done?
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
2) Yes. The question is, expected by whom? And to what end?
3) Yes. Almost certainly yes.
4) It depends how much your job prospects/resume rely on the PhD experience. Would you have been able to get a job easily before you even started the program? How insular is the area you've been researching? Is your advisor influential enough or the niche small enough to be effectively blacklisted? (No malice required, but in some specialties the lack of recommendation from certain august members is as bad as a blacklist).
5) Twice, actually. Be forthcoming, honest and apologetic. This isn't the time to air grievances. Offer to provide ongoing support (as practical) and training to your replacement, look for middle ground options (see below).
If you don't already have an MS (or even if you do), is there an option to convert to an MS program with less time commitment to leave more gracefully? Or is this a burn the ships moment?
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
It got less scary with repetition, but it's never been fun.
You basically have a job right now.
You would be an idiot to resign without having another job lined up, i.e., with a written offer and acceptance, and a known start date.
It appears that you are proposing to just pick up and leave, with no job lined up, and enter a remote job market where you don't even know the players.
Can you live for more than a year on your savings? Be prepared to do so.
Do not expect a recommendation with short notice.
Such letters carry weight mostly among academics anyway, so if you are leaving academia, it may not matter.
You can find a lot of discussion on this site on what constitutes being (a) professional.
You won't find much resolution.
The way I see your job as a PhD candidate is to pose and answer a question, as honestly, accurately, and unequivocally as possible, in such a way that your results can be repeated.
Whether the answer turns out to be true or false is irrelevant. The nature of the question is irrelevant.
What is relevant is that the question be explored thoroughly, so that if some future technological advance removes one of the current constraints, the truth and accuracy of your work can be relied upon in any re-evaluation of the question. The exploration is likely to be boring.
Whatever you find for your next job is also likely to boring, as is much of engineering. That is also a subject of some discussion here.
Is boring at the root of your dissatisfaction?
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
I found myself in a situation somewhat like yours when I was a graduate student in a Ph.D. program at a good USA university. I had a full fellowship, and when I joined my advisor's group he had a project that he was excited about. It was assigned to me. After working on it for about a year I came to the conclusion that it wouldn't work. For that reason I didn't see the point in continuing to do the research. Although I knew it would be somewhat painful, I decided to have a conversation with my thesis advisor where I laid all of my cards out on the table. In a very memorable office meeting I calmly told him that I was convinced the project would not succeed, and that I no longer wanted to be a part of it. He was very clearly upset, but accepted what I had told him. What we decided to do at that point was that each of us would separately write down on a sheet of paper the subject areas in which our research interests were, and then see where (or if) there was any overlap. That would allow me to determine what areas to focus on for a potential thesis topic. After we did it, it changed everything. I can't tell you how much I enjoyed the balance of my graduate career from that point forward. I selected a topic that interested me, and my advisor was happy to see the change in my outlook and demeanor. The experiments actually worked, and I successfully defended my thesis work. And I am friends with my former advisor to this day.
Don't leave under these circumstances. Don't hand in your resignation. Have a frank discussion with your advisor and let him know what you are going through. He has probably seen other students struggle with these same issues. You don't owe it to him, you owe it to yourself.
Maui
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
Hey man, please give your head a shake. Not everyone can go on to a doctorate, and there are plenty among us - me included - that would like to able to call a 'Mulligan" and have that chapter in our life back instead of stupidly bailing on graduate studies in pursuit of other things that ultimately amounted to nothing more than aimless nonsense. You have tremendous potential, don't up and turf it for no good reason.
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
Sometimes you got to grab the bull by the horns. Also, if you have made up your mind to leave you are now more eye-to-eye than in your current situation. As a student your adviser has a lot of power over your destiny, but that is not so now when you have decided to leave. I think Maui is absolutely right. Dont just hand in your resignation, but tell him whats bothering you, what you are about to do and what he thinks. As i understands it the major cause for his concerns will be his loss of funding associated with your leaving? Try to work with that.
Best regards, Morten
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
I watched a fellow grad student get removed from my advisor's team due to difference of opinion on what would/wouldn't work... but only after a few years of his life had been spent. I don't wish that on anyone. Having a clam but frank conversation can have a drastic effect on he outcome. Worst case scenario, you still end up leaving his employ... best case, you get to stay and work on something you both love.
Dan - Owner
http://www.Hi-TecDesigns.com
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
I'd add only one thing: you need to carefully, rationally, separate your emotional response to the failure of your selected project from your attitude toward continued graduate studies. You need to know, before you go into the meeting, whether or not you will be satisfied with being assigned a better project and starting over, or whether undertaking the PhD studies was a mistake.
I'll reinforce what others have said: you need a departure plan too. Don't be caught short.
Getting a PhD opens some doors and closes others. Those that are implying that it only opens doors are deluded. A PhD hasn't been a ticket to guaranteed employment for a long, long time.
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
You should stay as long as possible.
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
Talk to your Prof. stick it out if you can. You will always regret the PhD if you quit now, you will likely not if you continue.
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
I never pursued graduate studies. And I've never regretted it. This goes for many of a design engineer I've known.
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
It is true that there will be some people - and I was one of them years ago - that for a number of reasons might see a PhD as a drawback towards a candidate being "employable" in a run-of-the-mill engineering job. There is the perception that these people get intellectually bored easily. Some even state that PhDs "can't solve a real problem". I view that as nonsense - the fact that they are in a PhD program in the first place, by itself, demonstrates that they could solve a bunch of problems that the rest of us couldn't, back when we / they had to. I, on the other side of the hiring process with those one or two engineers that I did not land on, was the dummy, and the decisions I made may have been poor. It's not that the people I hired ended up being bad - they were all very good, in fact - but to judge an advanced degree as a minus rather than a plus was, frankly, stupid.
Maui has plotted the right course to navigate these waters. Me, I resort a bit to layman's terms or "grunty" ways of putting things, but throwing away a shot at getting a PhD is a life-altering decision that you don't want to get wrong.
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
SNORGY: your own regret is understandable, and not uncommon. The advice which you may wish to give to your past self a couple decades ago, may not be the best advice to give to current candidates. That is an error we engineers seem to make very often. Two decades ago, the capture rate of engineering Bachelors grads into engineering jobs was roughly double what it is today. It's a very different world.
As to hiring PhDs: I learned the hard way that the assumption SNORGY makes above is not universally correct. The mere possession of a PhD is no guarantee whatsoever that the person "...could solve a bunch of problems that the rest of us couldn't", or anything of the sort. I used to assume that passing a comprehensive examination was a mandatory requirement for a PhD, and hence a guarantee that a candidate with a PhD in engineering had a broad and fairly deep grasp of engineering fundamentals. Again, I learned the hard way that this is incorrect.
Screening out candidates from consideration entirely merely because they possess an advanced degree, or good marks for that matter, is a mistake- and one that is often made. That said, it actually IS possible to be overqualified for a position, and hiring clearly overqualified people for professional positions- especially in a smaller enterprise without an acreage of upward and lateral mobility potential, does represent a hire risk. In a buyers' labour market, it's puzzling why an employer would take that risk.
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
I currently work with, or have recently worked with some Phd folk that were no demonstrably better than typical Intern/Associates/Bachelors/Masters folks I've encountered in my career.
Some of this may have been mismatch of their skill set against the tasks they were given - having a Phd doing design of fairly basic sheet metal frames and plastic trims for example seems questionable to me.
Some of it may just be stuff that aint taught in school no matter how long you stay there, several years in uni lab may not equate to several years industry experience in some aspects.
Some of it may just be that they got their Phd's more because of their willingness/ability to hang around university longer than fundamentally because they are more intelligent.
I'm not going to tell you what to do as I've never been in your position, but then it doesn't sound like a lot of the people above have been.
Maui had some good advice I thought.
Snorgy, sorry but I can't agree with "I firmly believe that someone who *can* get a PhD, *should*" from both the individuals point of view and from society as a whole.
What is Engineering anyway: FAQ1088-1484: In layman terms, what is "engineering"?
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
Keep thinking whatever you like. I don't disagree entirely. But I also can see a "complex" from some here...
If you don't have a PhD you can't even comment...
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
I was in a PhD program. Had a research path, financial support, and the intellect (presumably) to complete it. But after about a year, I made the hard decision that I'd have a better career path by converting the PhD to an MS and getting some industry experience.
Anecdotes are dangerous, so here are a few factors in my personal decision:
- I entered the PhD considering academia. As I was exposed to the research and grant-writing side of being a tenure track professor, I decided that wasn't for me.
- I happened to enter the PhD program straight out of school. In my industry, there was a definite stigma against hiring a young PhD without prior work experience for non-research, non-academic jobs.
- In my industry, obtaining a PE/SE license has significant value (and was an important career goal for me). Gaining industry work experience was a more direct path toward obtaining the PE license.
- While my wife was very supportive, working on homework and research in the evenings wasn't conducive to building our marriage.
- I was able to transition my PhD work into a MS thesis and degree, so I wasn't left with an "unfinished" program.
- I was able to transition directly into a design job (part time as I finished the degree, then full time on graduation) in my industry.
In my case, abandoning the PhD worked out. I won't be so brash as to say that's the case for everyone, but I'll at least say that it is worth consideration.RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
"Because of my leasing/living arrangement and personal situation"
My recommendation is not to let a temporary circumstance influence a decision that could affect a lifetime.
I wish you well,
Mark
Thanks,
Mark
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
I just mean to say that it goes both ways.
Referring to your case; for others it may have very well worked out quite well if you stayed.
Everyone has their own personal preferences. The end result is what you make of it.
I have seen this much on this forum -> there is a large bias for most people that didn't go the PhD route to misguide others against it...
Of course, if it makes them feel better about themselves, so be it...
Everyone has their right to a say. In some cases it is good, in others it may not be, depends on many factors.
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
I see little if any evidence of that philosophy FeX32, or perhaps you're the one with the superiority complex as opposed to most of us having an inferiority complex?
What is Engineering anyway: FAQ1088-1484: In layman terms, what is "engineering"?
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
The fact that you responded to me shows me your complex.
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
My comment just after yours wasn't directed at you.
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
Another friend with a PhD told me, "SNORGY, you might not be very smart, but you are good help, and that's hard to find". I took it as a compliment.
My only point is that there had better be a very good reason to risk squandering one's talent or potential. I did exactly that. It was a bad move, and yes, it's life-altering.
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
I think what many folk often try to point out is just that in the industry side of Engineering the number of courses that really require a Phd Horse is a bit limited, and hence (depending what factors you take into account) the ROI might be a bit limited. Doesn't mean a phd can't do good work in many areas, just they may not get fully rewarded for having the phd.
I'm gonna say Sergei (The engineer whos sits one side of me) who spends much of his time coming up with complex algorithms related to signal analysis etc. probably does get his money worth some of the time. Not so much when he's stuck assembling customer orders because we don't' have an Engineering tech to do it and the design isn't stable enough for production to make it..
What is Engineering anyway: FAQ1088-1484: In layman terms, what is "engineering"?
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
I decided to give it a real push. I went "full blast" for a couple of weeks and could generate some first results which turned out to be ok. I negotiated an early date with my advisor to defend my work and then I was done. Now it's behind.
Looking backward, I think it added some value to my career. Lesson learned: Do not give up during the process.
I think you are possibly panicking because you think a PhD will be a set back. I think it could, yes! I myself don't like PhD's very much (but there are exceptions). Anyway this potential set back is not something to rely upon for such a critical decision, I think.
My opinion is:
- There is always the option to hide a post graduate degree / PhD in a resume, or say there is some range to maneuver and go low profile. Certainly it could be like a long gap in your resume but at the end it boils down to lining up your first job to get back on track.
- Try to network by your own and proactively with industry players in your area of research. Involve people, spam them. Maybe you have some grant from one industrial player but do the extra mile.
At some point, someone will respond positively and you could find some overlap and a certain direction of research / application with more connection with the real world. It could be sharing some results or findings with them. It will help you shape your research work and demonstrate - as a matter of fact, how your are a business /industry oriented person. It's good for the mood and it will also reflect well in your resume to have the name of some worldwide companies (J&J, GE, Westinghouse, ? you name it!) recalled instead of plain academic/PhD student keywords (articles and publications typically) .. It will demonstrate to your primary orientation/acumen is to do real business.
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
TTFN
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
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RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
Thanks for the honest post. Humility is a trait I have only seen in the best of human beings.
From reading your posts over some years; I think you underestimate yourself, you are top notch.
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
You are spot on with that comment. I feel more pressure is put on the PhDs; I certainly feel it.
At least where I work, we are the ones that are put on the spot when something no one understands comes up.
The OP hasn't responded in some time. There are many good comments in this thread.
Honestly, I know plenty of Engineers. Many higher and not so high in the education and skill levels.
It (success regardless of education) mostly comes down to passion in end (with some politics :P).
If all fails you can go work for Apple
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
As to "hiding" a PhD from hiring managers: it's very tough to do that and get away with it. Merely leaving it off your resume is ineffective.
As I've said before: excluding candidates from consideration merely because they have a PhD is just as stupid as excluding candidates because they have good marks- conversations here and elsewhere have taught me that some do so, for some bizarre reason. But if you think that the implied salary expectations etc. that a PhD brings with it, are going to be ignored by hiring managers as irrelevant to the potential long-term fit of a candidate for a position, you're kidding yourself.
I also pointed out that the mere possession of a PhD doesn't guarantee some of the attributes of a candidate that some people here think that it does, or should. That goes for both positive and negative attributes. I've worked with enough PhDs that it's clear that most of the stereotypes are really useless. The salary expectations, however, do exist in a meaningful way.
If acknowledging the fact that having a PhD does indeed close doors, and probably more doors than it opens in numeric rather than quality terms, means to you that I have a "complex", then I share that complex with a lot of hiring managers.
This tendency of course varies considerably depending on the discipline and specialty of the PhD.
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
I agree with your post.
Also, simply put I also think that someone who wants to pursue the PhD in engineering should be aware of what they are getting into. If they think that after their degree life will be easy and everything will be handed to them, they should think twice. Once you prove yourself (in academics and industry), your larger salary comes with more responsibility and harder competition for these more lucrative jobs.
But, in the end that's why you did the PhD, is it not? Anyone considering this career direction should not be the 'typical'. If you don't 'love' the engineering or research you do; don't even consider it. If you do, it's the best thing for your career. This is what I always tell those that ask me.
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
Research Engineer, what did you decide to do?
Maui
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
I wasn't thrilled with my thesis topic either. Unfortunately, one never gets to pick-and-chose their projects in industry. Maybe your topic isn't interesting or directly relevant to industry; however, you should consider the personal and technical skills learned in graduate school. These skills are very relevant to industry. Mark my words, every Ph.D. student wants to quit at some point-in-time- stick with it!
UconnMaterials
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
Dan - Owner
http://www.Hi-TecDesigns.com
RE: Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please
TTFN
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies forum1529: Translation Assistance for Engineers