Lex DeVille
Sweeping Shadows From Dreams
FASTLANE INSIDER
EPIC CONTRIBUTOR
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Speedway Pass
Recently I've been re-reading The Unscripted and I resonate with the pain and struggle of slowlane dead life described on every page. I am pretty much stuck right now in last year of PhD. Here is my intro earlier: INTRO - My story: SCRIPTED living in education/academia
A couple things happened between now and then: I started an internship in a big pharma company in another city (while trying to finish dissertation remotely), and I am going to divorce soon. I was just trying to get out of school to see what industry is like but this job quickly went stale, as I never felt that I fit in the "organizational culture" of companies or schools etc. It just feels fake to act like I'm content and trying to be a "model employee" or to see any meaning in jobs. The thing is, I am an international student, and I'm thinking about moving back to my home country (seriously after all these years, although I've been living abroad for almost a decade), since there is very little hope for me to start my own business here in America because of international status.
I feel pretty uncertain about the future, but getting into PhD and giving it a go in academia felt like a colossal waste of time. It's not been easy this year since I am new in this city, and I lost funding from school because I gave up graduate assistantship for the industrial internship. To be honest, I don't enjoy living in a big city and having landlords again. I want to quit the internship, school and even this country every minute.
Can anyone reason with me if I should give up, go back and start over again, or endure staying in school for the last few months?
Thank you.
If you're in the final year of a PhD you should find a way to finish it. I don't know what your PhD is in, but I do know that ALL PhDs are useful credibility markers that grant you the magic super power of authority. This is why I'm enrolled in a Master's program right now and will earn a Doctoral degree afterward.
A PhD won't magically make you a great business person. It won't hand you a successful business. But it will open doors that are locked tight for others who never took their training as far. So while I don't have any specific suggestions about business for you, it would be a total waste to throw away a PhD in your final year even if you had to pay out of pocket.