Rallying the Troops

Or something like that.

I've been having trouble getting myself into the thesis "state-of-mind", as it were, and over the past few months have been examining why that should be. The biggest reason seems to be that I have already decided that full time research is not the path I want to take – I don't like it, and I would probably end up in a padded room if I forced myself to do it day-in and day-out.

Why then, I ask myself, am I bothering to get the PhD?

That question has been nagging at the back of my mind, tugging away any momentum I'd been able to muster. After a while, I just felt stuck – my desire to finish the PhD (which is relatively close now) pulling as hard on my motivation as the doubt that I should do it.

I finally decided that I needed to do something about it – I needed a push in one direction or another to get out of the neat, torturous little rut I'd found myself in. So, last week, while I was pulling an all-nighter for my non-grad job, I e-mailed my advisors to let them know that I was having trouble. That may not have been the ideal time for me to send such an e-mail; afterall, I'd been singing the "I hate my job" song every morning into work, so I may have been a bit...um...shall we say...dissatisfied. However, I was fairly careful about how I worded the e-mail, and read it over several times trying to keep a bit of a sense of humor about the whole thing. Here's what I ended up saying:

I've also been doing some soul-searching in the past couple months. I think it's become obvious to all of us that I don't like research, and will not be continuing this sort of work when I finish my thesis. During the last few months, when I had realized that I wouldn't continue in research, I found that I started losing all motivation to finish. Maybe this happens to everyone in their last year or so. Maybe it's just the latest setbacks in my data that's bringing this on. I don't know. Maybe I just need a pep-talk, or perhaps a swift kick in the pants. Any thoughts? Insights? Advice?

This little paragraph apparently started a flurry of conversation between my two advisors. They pulled in one of their spouses, who also has a PhD in astronomy but doesn't do research. I had lunch with one of my advisors Wednesday, and we talked about whether or not I was deciding to finish or if I'd already decided, but just need to figure out what to do afterwards. I think I know that I need to finish – I'd be very mad at myself if I didn't, and would probably be very hard to live with. The next step, we decided, was dinner with "everyone".

So, last night, Andrew came up to Greenbelt, and we had dinner with both of my advisors and Anita. We eneded up chatting for about 3 hours (!), giving me a bit of perspective on getting a PhD but not doing reasearch. Apparently, in the UK (and Europe?), its more common for people to get PhD and go on to other types of positions. However, here in the US, it's generally expected that you'll apply for a postdoc position and try to work your way into academia or full time research. There was some disagreement between Kim and Chris as to whether or not the stigma of not going into research is still strong in the US.

In the end, I have decided that I need to finish (I suppose that's not news), but to find some motivation, I'm going to check out some of the science job websites (and monster) to see if I can find my ideal job. Hopefully this will give me the incentive to finish quickly, and I may find that I need a PhD to get that job (or, at least, it would help).

The job search will commence soon.