Thelma and Louise do a PhD

I found lots of good crunchy fibre in this piece by Tom Coates, What you should know before starting a doctorate. Having given up a PhD myself too, I empathised with a lot of the feelings of conflict, depression, failure, burning-out. I can’t speak too much for the argument that doctoral students consider their path into academia too exclusively, because I don’t think I ever thought of a PhD as a step up that particular ladder. Partly it was the chance to do something of my very own for a few years. Partly I felt I needed to prove something to myself about my intellectual abilities — and, ironically, ended up proving mostly what I’d intended to disprove.

Something that Tom doesn’t talk about much is the terrible battering that one’s self-esteem can take in the situation of giving up something into which one has invested not just significant amounts of time and money (and career potential), but also intellectual credibility. I suspect it’s unusual for someone to reach the point where they abandon a PhD without having spent quite some time before that point in faking it, whether to themselves, their friends, families and academic supervisors, or some combination of all of those. It’s a slow chipping away at one’s trust in one’s own abilities. In one’s trustworthiness, too. No matter what explanations and rationalisations might be provided afterwards for the giving up, and no matter that they be entirely sound ones, the sense of isolation and failure can be overwhelming.

There are plenty of books out there aimed at prospective PhD candidates, most chock full of good advice, and just the right sort of warnings and reality-checks. There’s not a great deal aimed at the student who shoots off the end of his PhD like Thelma and Louise off that cliff, though, and that’s a shame. If Tom’s figure of 50% PhD non-completion is even close to being accurate, that’s a lot of Thelmas and a lot of Louises.