The Third-Year Slump
Life as a G3
When I first started grad school, I heard about something called “the third-year slump”. In the first two years, students find a lab to join, take (and teach) classes, and at the end of the second year take their Qualifying Exam.
Although quals are hard, what’s next can be harder.
For me, the third year is uncharted territory. I’ve finished the first steps of my project, and it turns out the next steps are harder than I thought. Every time an experiment doesn’t work, I think “well, that’s another two weeks wasted”. I feel like I’m working my dupa off and getting nowhere. I don’t even know if I can finish things before getting completely scooped.
I had a minor breakdown last Friday, when I got my F31 score. It wasn’t bad, but based on the funding thresholds (“paylines”) it isn’t quite good enough. What really bothers me is that one of my friends, an “underrepresented minority”, applied to the Diversity F31 and apparently scored well enough to be funded. I compared the Diversity F31 payline to the normal F31 payline1, and realized I likely would have gotten funded too, if I were “diverse”.
I was looking forward to going to a party with MIT people that night, but I was too tired and stayed home.
A day in the life
A typical day for me looks like this:
Wake up 6 am. Cuddle for a few minutes with my girlfriend.
Eat breakfast (cereal with yogurt and sliced apple, and green tea) while doing Polish Duolingo.
Bike to lab, arriving shortly before 7 am.
Do cell culture work until 11:30 am.
Eat lunch (cheese, turkey, and arugula sandwich with baby carrots).
Do other various lab work (plasmid preps, genotyping PCRs, planning experiments, immunofluorescence staining, etc.) from 12 – 4 pm.
Bike home, shower, cook dinner with my girlfriend, eat it, clean up.
Prepare my breakfast and lunch for tomorrow.
Bike back to lab around 7 pm, to change cell culture medium for a 12-hour differentiation step. I need to let the medium warm up a bit, which gives me time to catch up on emails.
Bike back home. Do tutoring from 9 – 10 pm, teaching a California high school student (with rich Silicon Valley parents) about CRISPR and gene editing.2
Get ready for bed, go to sleep ~10:30 pm.
On weekends I’ll do lab work in the morning, and usually come home around noon. I will often write up results, or do laundry and clean the apartment. Sometimes I do fun things; a few weeks ago I designed a Kerbal Space Program fighter jet for a competition. Yesterday I took a nice walk with my girlfriend around Olmstead Park. Weekends are also the time I use for blogging3.
Overall I estimate I work between 60 and 70 hours in a typical week.
For what?
Will my research actually go anywhere? I don’t know.
What I do know is that the world needs in vitro gametogenesis, and if my research accelerates it by even one year, then it will be worth it.
But I am seriously tempted to sell all my investments4, drop out, buy land in Montana, and live the rest of my days as a hermit. Maybe I should do that.
When I was in high school, my Science Bowl team would always lose to kids like him. We could beat everyone in Minnesota, but when we went to nationals, California kids curbstomped us. That’s what privilege is: rich parents paying for tutors, and an expensive house near a community lab. Skin color matters little in comparison.
Which explains why I don’t blog that much.
Due to good decisions in early 2020, a considerable amount.
Thank you for writing this. You started with precisely this observation, but I think it bears repeating: this is such a common phenomenon that it has a name and a relevant PhD comic. I don't know which percentage of PhD students go through it, but I'm guessing it's high. And even though many people quit their PhDs, many people don't. Even though this isn't a formal argument, I am pretty confident that going through the third year slump is not good evidence that finishing will be impossible, or even harder than average.
The thing about the middle years is that there is no clear path, the research you're doing could easily fail, and everything is uncharted territory. At least later on the tasks become clear again (mostly "write the thesis") and you start seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.
It helps me to manufacture intermediate and shorter-term goals, but ultimately I don't have a good solution to this problem, and sometimes wonder about the hermit plan as well.
As someone who works on their own schedule (broadly), I find keeping weekends sacred to be essential.
Also, quick reminder: There are companies out there that pay 6 figures to work with smart and adaptable people (that can signal this well), same applies to countries.
I know some people prefer academia's rails and I can't complain, but I think it's worth keeping in mind it's probably an option for you, and sunk cost fallacy is a bitch.