So you want to go to grad school (in the academic humanities)?

That said, it is indeed an absurd length of time. A decade is a significant fraction of your life.

1. It’s almost always okay to quit. Quitting grad school is probably the smarter decision to make for the majority of grad students even if it’s two years before graduation. Your sanity and self worth are more important and surprisingly your career success follows.

2. You can have a work life balance if you are either extremely lucky with your project and advisors, or you’re off the books smart (like you can read an entire book overnight smart). Some fields (computer related) might be exempt.

3. Unless you’re trying to also use it as an immigration ticket to a 1st world country, if you can’t make it to a top school (top 20 for US, 5 elsewhere), don’t bother. A masters would end up taking your career to a higher place in the same time you spend on a mediocre phd.

4. Don’t marry another grad student! (This was unsolicited advice from a professor friend lol; mainly with regards to the difficulty of finding jobs in the same town for both people, one of you will be compromising).

5. As the article says, if you’re already an anxious person or having other issues in life (parents to take care, complicated family situations, if you have a spouse having a spouse who’s not there to take care of everything at home, significant money issues, etc) then grad school is that much harder. Unless you really want to prove yourself to someone it’s not gonna be fun in all likelihood. Note that the majority of the professors you see would typically have had a fairly privileged upbringing, if not in terms of wealth at least in terms of a stable supporting family.

6. If you’re not poor and are bored with things in life, and are certifiably smart and are generally stable up there in your head, then grad school is definitely a great experience. Especially in sciences. You learn a lot of life lessons and honestly the rest of your career would be a cakewalk no matter what you decide to do. While many many people around me absolutely struggled and suffered through grad school, I and a few of my friends absolutely loved it even though we went through one of the worst labs you can find in operation today. I will not advice it for anyone but at the same time I do not regret a single moment in that choice for myself.

7. Don’t get cancer, or MS, or have your lung collapsed. Your advisor won’t like it and 50% chance they will try to get you fired.

The sciences are also very much like this, particularly life sciences, physics and chemistry.

The article doesn’t go into it much, but another important question to ask oneself is why are you doing it. The answer, for most students and I daresay most tenured academics, is generally vanity. Putting aside the consequences of this vanity, which may of course include curing cancer and unravelling the nature of the universe, being motivated by vanity will almost always end badly for the individual. A lot of nonsensical academic behaviour (the perverse devotion to prestige, the viciousness, the obviously harmful publish or perish mentality, acquiescing to exploitative closed source publication models) can be explained if you accept academics are motivated mainly by vanity.

This, although it depends on if you're in a terminal graduate program or you're going for your PhD. If you only have a year left to get your MA, try to stick with it if you can.

> Unless you’re trying to also use it as an immigration ticket to a 1st world country, if you can’t make it to a top school (top 20 for US, 5 elsewhere), don’t bother. A masters would end up taking your career to a higher place in the same time you spend on a mediocre phd.

Not true. You're much better off doing a PhD under a respected advisor at a lower ranked institution than you are doing a PhD under a less capable advisor at a top ranked institution.