Leaving PhD program against Advisor's will - professional advice please 37

[ResearchEngineer987]

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

 

[capnhook]

Welcome to the Reality-Based Community, ResearchEngineer987.

Best of luck to you in your new endeavors.

Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community..

[green]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?[/green]

 

[Lomarandil]

1) No, but see below.
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?

 

[TheTick]

My dad was a Ph.D. chemist. In his own words, his degree work did little for him as a scientist but it did a lot to open doors (and borders). An unfinished "worthless" degree is not nearly as good an asset as a finished one.

 

[MikeHalloran]

I have a lot of experience resigning at the convenience of my employer.
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

 

[Maui]

Research Engineer,

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

 

[SNORGY]

ResearchEngineer987,

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.

 

[MortenA]

@OP, take a look at the post above by Maui, its excellent advice.

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

 

[MacGyverS2000]

LPS for Maui.

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

 

[moltenmetal]

Maui just proved the benefit of this forum on Eng-Tips. It's the very best advice anyone can give you in this regard.

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.

 

[TheTick]

Who is implying that a Ph.D. only opens doors? Unless my literacy skills fail me, no one is. Or am I deluded?

 

[aap2]

It does not kill your chance of a letter of recommendation, but you should give it some time before you contact them. From my understanding, take it with a grain of salt, universities are obligated to give good references.

You should stay as long as possible.

 

[FeX32]

It will close only the doors meant for the average engineer. These are always lesser than the doors opened.
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.

 

[jayrod12]

Wow a lot of people are PhD crazy. Does it help you? Maybe. Is it guaranteed to open doors? Definitely not. Is it guaranteed to close doors? also no. Some of the best designers I have worked with weren't even engineers but rather techs with college diplomas. And some of the worst designers I've seen have a PhD, specifically from a productivity and profitability standpoint.

I never pursued graduate studies. And I've never regretted it. This goes for many of a design engineer I've known.

 

[moltenmetal]

FeX32: just keep thinking that, if it makes you happy. I know people for whom a PhD basically closed all the local doors, and opened doors in places they didn't want to live. Was that a predictable outcome? Perhaps. Your mileage may of course vary.

 

[Lomarandil]

I'd just like to point out that in my experience, the discussion of doors opening or closing varied widely based on discipline.

 

[SNORGY]

I have posted before about the regrets that I, personally, have about making poor career choices and poor life choices that left me with an academic record that fell short of graduate studies. Right now, a graduate degree would open some doors for me that I, stupidly, closed decades ago. I believe that engineering as a career is in big, big trouble and it needs all of the smart people it can get - and yes, I include PhDs among those "smart people" that it needs. I will state again, I firmly believe that someone who *can* get a PhD, *should*.

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.

 

[moltenmetal]

Lomarandil: exactly what I meant by "your mileage may vary". The value of a PhD varies greatly by field.

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.

 

[KENAT]

I currently work with, or have recently worked with some excellent Phd folk - way smarter than me and in some cases more practical too.

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.

Posting guidelines faq731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

(probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: faq1088-1484​

 

[FeX32]

Here we go again.
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...