I was kind of a dick in high school. I was obsessed with grades and being perceived as smart. I remember causing drama because I was needling people to find out if Sophie (class-rank 2 at the time) got an A in calculus or not. Later that year I interviewed for a leadership camp and hit the whip in the face of my bummed-out friends cause I got the position and they didn't. It was this well-adjusted young man who decided to aim for a PhD program once I started college.
When asked why I'm dropping out, I like to frame it in the opposite light: why did I decide to do one in the first place? I think when I was 17 and started thinking about this, I just felt like school was the one thing I'm good at and receive a lot of praise for, so I better keep doing it. Obviously the neurotic focus on being the best at school got thoroughly beaten out of me within three weeks of being at Stanford and eating Wilbur Loco Moco next to real gigabrains. But I still kept the PhD plan.
High-level life-plans are just pretty sticky. It was already too hard to decide what I was going to do on a nightly basis living on my own for the first time, so keeping my current life plan was just the easiest. This got affirmed by having a CS PhD student as my FLI mentor who really wanted to help me get into a PhD program. And despite college nominally being a time to "figure out what you want to do with your life," I think that's really hard to do in those four years. As such a high-stimulus environment, it's easy for your whole college career to just happen. Days are long, years are short type vibe.
At Stanford everyone's encouraged to be the best at what they do and change the world. This really incentivizes picking a lane and ripping max speed. And since I had so much fun on a daily basis there was really no reason to change anything about the formula. Maybe those gap year people were onto something (shoutout Will Shan).
But this very-same inertia argument might have indicated I would just keep hacking away at PhD life until I found myself Dr. Bernado. Being at Michigan was similarly high-stimulus, so what was different?
Why do people do PhDs anyway?
I think it's fair to bisect the reasons people go to PhD school (as my advisor Ben dubs it). These two aren't so easily decoupled, but I'd say you can go for internal or external reasons. On the external side it gives you a piece of paper that can be leveraged for certain jobs. On the internal side you get to study some topic deeply for many years. Let's talk external first.
I started questioning whether I'd stick out the PhD in the Summer following my first year. And when I began questioning, the most immediate question was "how does this affect my career prospects?" As I see it, a PhD gives you exclusive access to certain jobs and increases your likelihood of getting other jobs. "Professor" is definitely an exclusive job, some government statistician roles are exclusive, and while not technically exclusive, some big-tech-research PI-type-roles basically require them. Beyond exclusivity, it boosts your profile and substitutes for years of experience in pretty much all other roles. So the right question was "can I get the job I want without a PhD?" My experience in the PhD program shed some light on this.
One of the things I was thus far unhappy with as a student in the PhD program was how it felt like work/school bled into every aspect of life. I wasn't pulling insane work-hours every week, but it always felt like there's more to be doing. It's hard to turn school off. It's my sense that being a professor or a PI in a big lab might feel like this. If you're the guy at whom the buck stops, you're probably not closing your laptop at 5PM on Fridays then doing your own thing till Monday. That shit's stressful and I don't really think it's how I want to spend my life.
I don't really know what kind of job I want to do. But it's probably not locked behind a PhD. Now internals:
In my brief moments of life-planning-lucidity at Stanford, I felt like one of the best reasons to do a PhD would be that I get to spend 5 years in this academic bohemia where I uncover the nature of cause-and-effect via statistics. This is obviously not what an actual PhD program is like. I think the most surprising and demotivating realizations was that everybody is constantly stressed and negative. Maybe coming out of the improv cocoon the whole world is just too negative for my taste, but the connective tissue between PhD students is way more "let's complain about our work" than "let's have spirited conversation about regression." Shared joy was typically from escapism rather than deep curiosity around our subject. Not everybody is like this, but the miserable air around "work" is so thick it colors most interactions.
It's definitely possible on an individual level to live out your own brainy bohemia in a PhD. But 80% of my intellectual euphoria at Michigan came from research meetings with my advisor. It was so fun for a 1-hour scheduled meeting to turn into 4-hours because we're just ironing out every detail in an approach. But that can only take up a small fraction of your week. For every hour of discussion you're spending 10 hours reading papers, thinking through ideas, and writing code. I felt coming into the PhD that the appeal was "iron sharpens iron" for substantive curiosity and inquiry of stats. By being in the program I hoped to have no choice but to fall more deeply into love with my subject because of a passionate and curious student culture. Like how dinner with the SImps always turned into doing some improv in the dining hall. Those batteries are not included though. That has to be fostered on your own by coming in early to ask questions in seminar, reading extraneous papers for reading groups, and shooting your shot over email to chat with professors. But if I have to self-start all of this, why am I doing it for $38,000/yr in freezing weather thousands of miles from my family and friends? Can't I just foster my own intellectual curiosity at home?
Despite the naive conceptions borne in my 17-year-old brain, a PhD is not a place to fall deeply and madly in love with a subject. It's a place to learn how to do academic research. That's pretty much it. If you're sure that's what you want to do for your career, then it's probably the best way to set you up for success in the future. But if you're doing it for personal reasons, I'd beg you to see that a PhD does not make you smart. It makes you think a lot which might help. I think of "smart" as an intellectual version of how someone might be physically strong. Doing a PhD's like if you only worked out your left shoulder for a year. You demonstrably can do some lifts that other people can't, but they're super specific. People will notice, especially if you present yourself in a way that highlights it. But in the same way that people talk about a "farmer build" versus a "gym build," I don't think the "smartness" you develop is fundamental to the important intellectual lifts we have to make on a daily basis. It makes your brain hot though!
Did you like it there though?
Eh. It was fine. Too cold. Hopefully I've convinced you that I didn't really have a good reason to go do it in the first place. So it mainly came down to location. If I was doing my PhD somewhere in NorCal I'd probably still be doing it. I made some great friends that kept me from succumbing to madness.
I got a little crazy toward the end after making the decision to drop out, but before that Michigan wasn't a negative place to be. Keeping up with the department politics and drama was exciting. Being in a big office where you can yak with your buddies was awesome. Being in a college town where you can walk five minutes to a restaurant for lunch was extremely convenient. I'm not leaving because there was some massive issue with that life; if I did the whole thing it would have been fine and given me a lot of great memories. But year 2 is really the pivotal point at which it makes sense to either keep doing it or Master out. For the reasons above, I chose the latter.
So what now?
Now I'm starting a research job back at Stanford. I'm really happy with it. Applying for jobs was its own toil that I'm glad is not necessary for the foreseeable future. Going into the job search I sort of assumed an industry tech job was the main thing I should be going up for, but I think staying in research is great for a few reasons. I'll have more ownership over my work, I get to keep building the skills I've been working on these past seven years, and I get to feel like I'm doing something important.
It feels good to have my feet placed somewhere. It was always a nagging negative in my head that at the end of the PhD I was going to have to let go of most of the connections I had built over the five years. But I plan to remain in the Bay Area for the foreseeable future: that alone makes me excited to start really planting roots in the people and the places. My professional and creative passions have always felt somewhat at odds, but I have more clarity than ever on how I can try to go all in on both directions this year. Also! I'm pretty bad at maintaining long distance friendships, so I'm excited to reconnect with anybody on this list who's still out in the Bay. If you've texted me to no avail in the past two years let me buy you a coffee and we'll catch up.