Advice for struggling PhD student Let me begin by saying my Ph.D. program has been a disaster. I'm 26 and I'm finishing up year 4 in a physics Ph.D. program. I have no publications and I'm completely burnt out. I have no idea what to do.
I went into a physics Ph.D. straight out of undergrad. My advisor told me to focus on coursework to get a master's first so I did. Right around year 2 I got my masters and was ready to start research, but my advisor's wife suddenly died and he was gone for almost a year and a half. Money ran out and I had to get a teaching position to make ends meet. I tried my best to do what I could, but it's very hard to be an experimental physicist with no money. I actually got a small grant on my own that helped, but it wasn't enough. Additionally, our university grad student union went on strike for a month or two that slowed everything down.
About a year ago another professor joined the department and hired me on. It was ok for a while, he had money and I was finally getting paid to do research. Since he was building up a new lab I was helping put together all the equipment.
Now there are a few more students, all at least 2-3 years behind me, who are in the lab. I'm still expected to put the machinery together while they are getting data from experiments and actually contributing to research. They aren't collecting data, they've been given older unpublished data to analyze. Every time I bring this up I'm just told to be patient.
As of right now, I'm going into year 5 with my name on absolutely nothing. I don't see a light at the end of the tunnel anymore. My department claims 5-7 years is average but there are a lot of 7,8,9 year students here. If this would only take 2 or 3 more years I'd consider staying, but it feels like I basically had to start over halfway through.
I have one patent application in progress, one fifth or sixth author paper in progress, and a completely written review paper that I was told to not publish. My advisors won't even let me propose a thesis, saying it's &quot;too early&quot;. I guess I just want to hear what other people would do in this situation. I was recently offered a job in industry by an old friend that pays pretty well (~$85K) which seems so tempting right now. I feel like such a failure and I think I've wasted the past four years of my life. Does anyone have any thoughts on my situation? I'm very lost in life right now.
Update: thanks for all the responses. It helps to hear other perspectives. I talked to my advisor and he keeps telling me I can graduate in two more years if I focus. I don't think I believe him. I have until Monday evening to take this job offer and I think I need to.
Update 2: I think I just quit. I spent 80 hours in the lab this week (again) only to be told I'm still not doing enough. Every day I got more and more projects piled on my plate and they all involved putting equipment together for other people. I was told by my advisor that he doesn't believe my project will even work anymore. It's just not worth it
I have found this graphic really helpful for staying motivated in the PhD and reminding me that many, many people go through this. Sounds like you have hit the trough :)
The most concrete advice I've gotten is that the PhD is an endurance sport rather than a sprint. So if you want to finish it sounds like you might need to just persist and stick it out. But I know how you're feeling and it is awful.
Concretely, I can see a few things that might help:

Ask your advisors to help you work out a timeline for graduating in 6 years (or whatever number of years -- just make it fixed). That way you will have clear milestones and deadlines to work towards. It can change later, but write something down now.

Try to take concrete action towards developing a proposal. I find it strange that they don't let you propose by the end of the fourth year; we actually can't advance past it without proposing. It does take some time to pick a topic and build related experience, but in theory, a proposal is what you will do. Is there something intermediate -- like a 1 page outline of the proposal, or a list of three proposal pitches, or a plan for preliminary experiments -- that you can work with them on? (the equipment you're building ostensibly has a purpose). Particularly now, that you can't fully run your experiments, it seems like a good time to take stock and figure out a direction of what will happen, so that you can run with it as soon as things normalize.

Why can't you publish your review paper? Try to understand if this is just a recommendation or a firm no. Is there something you can improve? Is there something you can salvage from it (e.g. an intro chapter of the thesis?) If you're not working on anything else, you might as well be trying to get this out. It's possible that they think it's not good enough for a top publication, but it might help motivate you to have one publication through the pipeline, even if not the most competitive.

Try to find a support community. I have found that meeting other students through summer schools or conferences has helped me a lot. You might be able to undertake some related collaborations to help motivate you, and as a bonus publish that way. For experimental work, maybe you could try to find a lab that you could visit or intern with (CERN? DOE? I am not a physicist) -- joining existing experiments might enable you to publish without setting up from scratch.

Take some time off. If you are burnt out and experiments aren't running, maybe just block off a week or two for complete rest and no physics.


It sounds like your advisor might be thinking longer-term than you are -- for him the priority is probably setting up the lab, rather than graduating you. Hopefully, once the equipment is set up, you'll be first in the queue (and get credited on the publications of the other younger students), but I can see that it would be hard to guarantee this in advance and you risk being taken advantage of. For now, I'd try to be clear that you're having a hard time and need some sort of framework or plan for moving forward. Hopefully that will take the focus back to what you want -- an end goal.
I haven't commented on your outside offer because I think that's really a personal choice. But it sounds like you want to take it because you are having trouble with the PhD, so I tried to think of ideas to solve that. The fact that you're asking this question suggests that you're not quite ready to give up on PhD...?