Ok, I used my list of logical errors incorrectly, my bad.

Still, yes, for him, maybe he does in fact know more 'failed' physicists than junkies. However, there are many many many more junkies with much much worse lives than almost all PhDs.

I'm going into neurosci this fall, so I don't know yet personally. However, the attitude expressed in that sentence is so very toxic. If that's what the professor publishes, then I'd never want to hear what he gossips to the other professors. Maybe, just maybe, the professor is a jerk. And maybe, just maybe, the only people that are left near him are the ones not smart enough to avoid him in the first place. I don't remember what bias that is.

I'm finishing my 5th year of grad school now. My adviser constantly sets expectations so high that they literally cannot be met. I have had to skip holidays and neglect my family and I have still often had my work trivialized. My work is not appreciated, the fact that I have given up almost everything else in my life is not appreciated. Most people do not even make it to their 5th year in our group.

I spent a lot of time being really bitter about all this. But I have realized that you have to do this to be a good scientist. My adviser only wants to train good scientists. So I'm not even upset about it any more. I have to look beyond my adviser, and look at the actual science I am doing, and realize that he is irrelevant, but that I still have to behave in this way (i.e. giving up much else in my life) to make progress.

I don't know if you'll encounter this in neurosci. Perhaps good neurosci research can be done without this level of commitment. I'm sure it would depend on your exact specialty. But I'm telling you all this so that you don't end up being really bitter towards your adviser if you get into a situation like many aspiring scientists face. It's not his fault.

I'm not exactly sure what your problem was with the quotes you posted. I guess it was that he was calling his students weak? My point is: in school, what your adviser says is fundamentally irrelevant. Don't let it affect your self-esteem. But science itself has a way of absolutely kicking your butt. And that is why professors say things like that in the first place.

It takes massive virtue to be a good scientist. It also takes a particular set of life circumstances in order for it to be a rational choice. What I do would not have been a rational choice if I had considered it mandatory (for me) to have a girlfriend or start a family, for example (at this stage in life).

That said, I haven't left because what I do truly is rewarding. I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing. I am a purely selfish person. I don't do science for the greater good. So my point here is: it can be worth it.

Wow, thank you for the advice, I do appreciate it!

I'm going to push back on you though. Having to skip out on your life and family to satisfy an advisor who "sets expectations so high that they literally cannot be met" is NOT ok. I have done this to myself and family before as well, and am old enough now to know that it is WAY unhealthy and detrimental to the work over the long term of months.

Honestly, it sounds like you are kinda Munchhausen-syndroming here. I mean, bravo for sticking with it and having the hardihood, but... dude.... wake up. Your advisor seems to be an ass. If they ride you this hard and trivialize all the hard work it is not helping you be a scientist, it's helping them further their career. You are getting screwed here.

Also, you seem to be very confused as to why you are doing this. You claim to not have a life outside of grad school and yet your life in grad school is terrible. You claim to love what you are doing but only after years of struggle and browbeating. From what little data you have shared (and thank you for doing so, I do appreciate it) you seem resigned. You advisor is not going to give you a good letter of recommendation. You indicate your science is not good enough for your advisor and do not refute this. You claim to be selfish but care about missing out on family and friends. You state your advisor is trying to make you a better scientist, but only discovered so after 5 years of their bad treatment. What is your plan? What are you going to do with your life? If this is what science is doing to you, you might want to reconsider. You seem miserable.

Back to the quotes; my problem was that he is self selecting out the good students. You advisor is a person you should trust. Writing an article like this sends out big red flags to anyone maybe thinking of working with him. I'd never work with the guy because I know for a fact he is a bad investment. If he had any students at the time of the writing, he just threw them all under the bus, along with most of his co-professor's students. He tarnished the reputations of his lab, department, and school by saying those things. Mostly he tarnished his own reputation.

Thanks a lot for your comments. You are insanely good at reading between the lines.

I don't let it get me down that my adviser doesn't give me that much approval, because I'm not in it to get his approval. I also don't let it get me down that he doesn't think my work is that much of a contribution, because I genuinely do believe it is.

I did let that stuff get me down for a long time, so I have been miserable part of the time, but I have learned an important life lesson about not letting your own self-esteem come from other people's standards. You have to set your own standards and do your own thinking and evaluation. This is true in all areas of life, but it's super important for self-esteem.

I don't think my adviser is just using me to help his career. He's too established to need that. It's just not a factor. That is definitely something to look out for in academia but not all professors are that hardcore/machiavellian.

Your questions may have been purely rhetorical, but in case not, my plan is to finish my doctorate and then most likely go on to become a practicing (i.e. non-academic) computer scientist.

I do think all this is worth it in terms of not spending much time with my family (I mean my parents' generation, as I'm not married and have no kids) on holidays. It would have been a much larger tradeoff if I had had much social (friends/romantic) prospects, but I don't think I really would have done much better outside of grad school (my best years are still ahead of me in all that kind of stuff). And I do have some really good colleagues that basically are friends, AND I get to do real computer science full time, which is basically a dream come true.

" You have to set your own standards and do your own thinking and evaluation. This is true in all areas of life, but it's super important for self-esteem."

I agree and also struggle with this. Many times I put others opinions of me in front of my own. I need to work on it, but I don't have any clue where to start. If you know of any strategies, I'm all ears.

Do remember to watch out for recommendations though. Having an advisor that thinks little of you can and does hurt your chances at jobs. Especially for a PhD candidate, they will be looking to you as a senior role and likely will ask for recommendations. Make sure to have friends that can vouch for you that make sense to a hiring manager. You need to weave a good reason you are using some friend and not your advisor. I know it seems silly, considering what I just said about external self-esteem, but cover your bases.

I am envious of you a bit. I wish I could love programming as much as you seem to. I struggle a lot with the logic and basic concepts. I hate doing it, but since I am willing to, I get the job a lot. Also, the dyslexia makes bug finding an impossibly frustrating job. ';' and ':' look just the same to me.

Lastly, thank you for the compliment. "You are insanely good at reading between the lines." At least, I hope it was. Wait, I'll keep my self-esteem and think of it only as such.

I think when we are little children we learn that when our parents or other adults tell us we are good, we are good, and when they tell us we are bad, we are bad.

For the kinds of things that a child deals with, they were possibly or probably accurate most of the time (unless your parents were alcoholics or something---and one of mine was; then you get told or treated as "bad" all the time).

So your brain just learns to operate this way, until you retrain it.

And retrain it, you must. Because the kinds of things adults deal with are much more complicated, plus some adults take advantage of others, are dishonest, don't think things through thoroughly, make mistakes, etc. So if you don't retrain your brain in this regard, you will constantly get "punished" by other adults judging you negatively.

The question is, how to retrain it? In a nutshell, I think the answer is: it just happens automatically by consciously thinking about this issue every time it is relevant. e.g. when my adviser says something that threatens my self-esteem, I remember the principle that his judgement may not be correct, and that it should not affect my self-esteem, and then come up with my own honest, meticulous judgement, which should and does affect my self-esteem. (If you aren't "honest" and "meticulous", you won't really trust your own judgement, so it won't sink in and the whole technique won't work.)

Those are my thouhgts/strategies, hope it's helpful.

I appreciate your point about recommendations. My adviser's judgement does matter for that, just not for my self-esteem, and you have to separate the two, because they are different things. I think I'll probably be OK on the merit of eventually publishing the code I am working on (plus some more papers), which will mean more than anything my adviser could say for the kind of work I want to potentially do (though I might actually just totally change fields after I graduate [1]).

And don't worry, if you keep looking and refuse to give up, changes are very, very high that you will find something as fulfilling as programming could have been, had you actually enjoyed it more. I guess you've already figured this out though since you mentioned planning to study neurosci.

[1] Because the kind of programming I like doing is really cutitng edge and research-y. I like solving really challenging problems slowly and carefully and thoroughly. Not sure I'll find this in industry and not sure I could live with "just normal" programming.