Ask HN: Should I quit graduate school to avoid a bad advisor?

Hard question. Additional issue: do you think this advisor would support you if you were to graduate?

Mine was in theoretical physics. I liked my advisor and the work. But she wasn't a go-getter on grant writing, or on paper writing.

Many of my friends left and went to medical physics. I thought of it, but decided against it.

This was 20+ years ago.

In hindsight, it was a mistake (for me) not to do this.

First off: There is no shortage of PhDs to fill tenure track ranks, and there are precious few tenure track ranks available. Unless you are at a top school, with a really special advisor, and your work is getting attention, you should assume that academe is not in your future.

Yes, I know this is harsh. I wish someone had said these words to me in 1992-1994.

Second: The magic of a PhD is that it is a union card for some jobs, and a good way to open other doors. But know that the time you spend doing it, is time you spend away from economic productive life.

Has my now 20+ year old PhD been a boon to my career? I don't know how to answer this. It conveys (via a mal-advised appeal to assumed authority) some intelligence. And maybe it gets me better bargaining ability. Or maybe not. Maybe it typecasts me. I don't have enough data to know.

What I do know is, given the benefit of hindsight, I would have done very different things.

Third: You always have options, and you always have choices. You need to ask, and answer, a very hard question for yourself. Specifically, what do you want to do with your life? And even if you don't have a hard answer, which is fine, a roughly general sense of what you want to do is a good thing.

I decided after seeing the FSU collapse, and the market flooded with fairly senior FSU physicists, that I would focus on learning to be an entrepreneur and business guy. I like working with, and building, supercomputers, and it turned out there was at least some demand there at the time.

You need to ask yourself these sorts of questions, and you know, its ok to answer "I don't know". But take the time to figure out what makes you happy. Because YOLO, and its better not to waste time doing something that you won't be happy doing and not making any living doing it.

I am a professor at a Ph.D.-granting mathematics department in the US, so I can speak for the "other side".

Please, please do NOT suck it up for three years just because you are afraid of pissing off your advisor. That isn't worth three years of your life. Hell, it isn't worth three days of it.

If you were seeking a postdoc then, yes, a rec letter from your advisor would be absolutely required. But I presume you intend to seek non-academic employment? In that case a letter from another faculty member who knows you (and who knows your work) would fit the bill.

If you have an alternative career path in mind, why not apply for jobs now (i.e., without quitting)? If you find one to your liking, then you shouldn't care whether or not your advisor gets angry. If you don't find a job, or don't yet know in which field you would like to work, you can bide your time while you do some research on the job market.

I don't know what options are available to you for psychotherapy, but whenever I tell myself things like you are telling yourself, that's what I need. There are many hurdles to getting a PhD and then there are more hurdles to becoming a professor; your professor has surmounted all these hurdles, you have have surmounted some of them; in all probability there is much you can learn from him. Psychotherapy helps you learn to manage your own feelings about it.

You like your field and you have progressed quite a bit further than most people ever do, you are a success so far. I'd like to see you not give up at this stage. Life includes dealing with people we don't like, you can learn to deal with this.

My advice, at least give it a try before you make such a momentous decision.