blandvegetables

Given that they succeeded in completing the poisoning of my opinion of academia and scientific research there is no career there at all. I say complete because PhDs can feel unpleasant, but that's mostly a result of high stress, difficult work, no security, and complete lack of a social life and interaction with other people for 4 years, rather than science itself but it does set an emotional impression of what research is like that is somewhat difficult to overcome.

"waking up without an alarm refreshed and ready to face the world"

Does that actually happen outside of stories?

hahaha I had a PhD defence in 2018 in the UK. Criticisms included:

"I don't trust your maths" "I don't feel this analysis is right, but I can't describe in what way" "you are clearly not very knowledgeable" and many other similar things.

Asking me a question and then before I can open my mouth answering it yourself, and then insulting me for not answering it was the start of the viva defence and it set the tone for the rest.

I was also heavily criticised for not having cited a paper that came out in-between submitting my thesis and the defence, despite this being literally impossible to have done so, and, despite having already had gotten a job in that time, was given limited time to do additional experiments, write whole new chapters, new code, do new experiments, etc. Ended up adding 90 pages of material to the thesis.

In the end I had to quit the job I had just got, because It would have been impossible to not fail my PhD program and keep the job.

Afterword's, in behind closed doors discussions it was revealed that one guy had pushed for almost all of the required extra work deliberately to try to make me fail, because I had done something he could not.