Academia is Harsh........

Over the last two years, I have gone from being excited about pursuing a PhD to seriously questioning whether academia is a place where I belong.

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I came to the US as an international master's student in engineering in Fall 2023 with the goal of eventually pursuing a PhD. What I did not expect was how much of graduate school would be spent navigating uncertainty created not by research itself, but by people and institutions.

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In Spring 2024, I joined a thesis-based research project. Despite being a thesis student, I was not funded and had to rely on fellowships and eventually a TA position to support myself. Almost immediately, the project ran into problems. The senior PhD student helping transition me onto the project graduated, and then a major piece of experimental equipment failed for months.

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When I returned after a summer internship, I found myself balancing research, coursework, TA responsibilities, graduation requirements, and PhD applications all at once. The project still required extensive troubleshooting, and every week mattered.

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I expected research to be difficult. What bothered me was the way concerns were often dismissed. I remember describing a physically demanding and ineffective process as "difficult" and being told that research is supposed to be difficult and that's why not everyone does it. The problem was that I was not complaining about research. I was describing a process that literally was not working. Eventually I solved the problem myself.

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That pattern repeated itself. When I encountered technical issues and asked for guidance, the answer was often that my advisor did not know and that I should ask former students. Frequently, they did not know either. I ended up searching literature, contacting other faculty members, and experimenting until I found solutions myself.

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I have no issue with independent problem solving. Research requires it. It was feeling criticized for asking questions while simultaneously receiving little useful guidance. Over time, comments accumulated. Being ridiculed for not being able to use software that I just started learning. Being told money does not grow on trees when I raised concerns about reworking a component. Visible frustration when I could not immediately recall details from months earlier.

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None of these incidents alone would have made me leave. Together, however, they created an environment where I increasingly felt that mistakes were being interpreted as personal shortcomings rather than part of learning.

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Eventually, I left the thesis track and switched to the non-thesis option. I was told that research experience mattered more than having a thesis and that this should not hurt my chances for PhD admissions.

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By Spring 2025, despite extensive outreach and applications, I had no PhD offers. I repeatedly heard that applicants needed publications. But obtaining publications often requires opportunities that students are struggling to access in the first place!!!

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With no PhD position and no job offer, I eventually did something I probably should have thought through more carefully: I returned to the same advisor whose lab I had previously left. To my surprise, I was given another chance. Fall 2025 would essentially serve as a trial period before a decision was made about supporting me as a PhD student. Despite everything that had happened previously, I accepted because I genuinely wanted a PhD.

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This time I was working alone at a facility over an hour away from home. After about a month, my advisor seemed pleased with my progress and commented positively on my work. Encouraged, I cautiously raised questions about future funding, personnel, and projects.

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Shortly afterwards, despite being told that I had made significant progress in a short period of time, I was informed that I would not be supported as a PhD student after all. The explanation was that there was still "tremendous friction" between us and that the future could only be judged based on the past thesis experience. And I left that meeting confused because only weeks earlier the discussions had seemed positive. I later on came to know that the funding for the project never came through.

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Around the same time, another professor at a different university showed interest in my profile, encouraged me to apply, recommended me for funding, and later discussed the possibility of a research assistantship. Because of this, I agreed to move my application from one admission cycle to another.

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I waited for months, the communication gradually became less frequent, and I was eventually rejected.

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Other opportunities followed similar patterns. Professors expressed interest, encouraged applications, discussed projects, suggested funding possibilities, and then the opportunities ultimately went nowhere.

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What made all of this exhausting was not the rejections themselves. It was the amount of planning, uncertainty, and emotional energy invested in possibilities that never became realities.

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Over time, I realized that students often bear the overwhelming majority of the consequences created by uncertainty. A delayed funding decision is one item on a professor's calendar. For a student, it can determine graduation timing, housing, finances, immigration status, employment plans, and career direction.

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I used to assume that because faculty members were once students themselves, they automatically understood what prolonged uncertainty feels like from the student's side.

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After two years of trying to make academia work, I have become deeply sceptical of "maybes".

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Perhaps the hardest lesson I learnt is that effort alone does not guarantee opportunity. Sometimes you can do everything right, work hard, remain patient, and still find yourself caught in circumstances you have absolutely no control over.