(The original version by the author is in Chinese without using any LLM, but for English version, the author use Claude to do the translation and then manually edited and rewrite some of them that she thought inaccurate.)

Lately a lot of younger students have been asking me whether they should do a PhD, and what research area they should work in. I can’t give anyone advice, and I don’t want to meddle in any one person’s life. So I’ll just share some fairly general thoughts.

Some people are lucky through the entire PhD journey. They go to a great school for undergrad, start research early, and meet nothing but kind senior students and good professors along the way. When they apply to PhD programs, every school extends an olive branch. During the PhD they once again land great advisors and collaborators, intern somewhere new every year, maybe even graduate early, and when they finish, just as when they applied their PhD four or five years earlier, they collect top offers of every kind from both industry and academia. Meanwhile, other PhD might switch advisors many times, switch topics many times, finally meet a good advisor (or not), and barely scrape through graduation, only to discover on the job market that apart from the PhD title and a higher volume of mass emails from recruiters, nothing distinguishes them from others with only bachelor’s or master’s degrees. Life may even be worse off. By the age at which you finish a PhD, whether or not you went through the kind of mental and physical trauma during the PhD that leaves you with ‘permanent head damage,’ your memory and your test-taking ability will be far below what they were in undergrad.

When, after enormous struggle and one rejection letter after another, Lady Luck finally smiles on you and you get an offer from some company, the salary HR quotes makes you question your past. What you’ll earn is about the same as a bachelor’s or master’s graduate. Compared with your peers, it may be a third of what an above-average PhD graduating that year makes, and a fifth or a tenth of what the top PhDs make (the gap with the very top outliers is much larger). And even this offer you only got because of luck.

To be honest, the not-finding-a-job scenario above happens to PhDs, master’s students, and undergrads alike. But when you’ve already invested so much time in a PhD, facing the same outcome (i.e., landing a job you’re not very happy with), you as a PhD may need more mental effort to talk yourself into accepting reality. What makes regret so powerful is that it doesn’t show up when your life is smooth. But when you’re at a low point, some decision from your past, however long ago, constantly resurfaces, making you ask yourself over and over, “If I had chosen to xxx back then, would things be better?”

But this is not a “don’t do a PhD” post. Most decision making in life has many dimensions, yet most decisions don’t matter that much, because whenever you gain something, you lose others along the way. This is also why I can’t give anyone advice: everyone’s personality is different, the way they handle things is different, and what they hold precious is different. So even if two people make the same decision, the trajectory afterwards is hard to predict. Some random event may affect the trajectory of your life more than all the time you spend weighing pros and cons to make a “good” decision.

Whether it comes after a bachelor’s, a master’s, or a PhD, the transition from student at school to adult at society is hard. You discover that life contains many things to learn besides textbooks (intimate relationships, for example). You gradually want to stop depending on your parents financially, and to discover and shape an independent self, both financially and in character. You start meeting all sorts of people with different agendas, and you start seeing conflicts of interest you never saw in school, along with the diversity of human behavior when interests collide. In a purely exam-oriented high school, where everyone just keeps their head down and studies, you don’t really see conflicts of interest (at a high school with a more well-rounded education, perhaps students get exposed early to something closer to the real world). In college, if you don’t do research, you’ll also rarely run into them (maybe the occasional small friction with a teammate on a course assignment). Of course, at universities in China there are various scholarships, the grad school application, and so on, where all those outstanding, seemingly “well-rounded” students will take every means to show that they are better than you. (As there is not enough resources but too many people who want them).

If you start doing research as an undergrad, you may also have conflicts of interest with your advisor or your project collaborators. At universities in China, the faculty evaluation system is very poorly designed (in my view, a well-designed mechanism should incentivize cooperation, rather than incentivize the stronger party in the game to hurt the weaker one). Professors in China are evaluated by papers where they are first author, which gives them plenty of motivation to grab first authorship from their students. Why do I use the word “grab”? Because in this setting the two sides are unequal in many respects: experience, connections, social reputation, and skill at PUA. (PUA originally stood for “pickup artist,” but in Chinese internet usage it has come to mean something closer to gaslighting: the systematic psychological manipulation of someone by a person with power over them, whether an advisor, a boss, or a partner. That’s the sense I’ll use throughout.) On top of that, students who are just started to learn to do research may hold an unrealistic fantasy about academia, believing that all the researchers are noble and great. Or maybe it was only me who thought so. After all, before college I spent most of my time immersed in my own world, and my only ways of interacting with the outside were what my Chinese teacher said in class and reading top-scoring college entrance exam essays. A flower in a greenhouse, if it doesn’t want to stay inside its whole life, has to go through the wind, rain, and scorching heat outside before it knows how to survive in a new environment.

Under the kind of unequal student–advisor relationship described above, it’s hard to evaluate ourselves fairly, or to see others clearly. I remember the first semester of my junior year, lying awake night after night over something that was not my fault, and writing a long apology letter to a professor at my undergrad school. Even though I was quite certain that the person who should be apologizing was not me, the inequality of the relationship meant all I could do was apologize and hope he would forgive me for the word I said before (Curious what I said? I just said that I feel that my paper is trash. Somehow he is super offended because he took so much pride in getting papers into some “top” conferences such as AAAI/IJCAI. And everyone who work with him has to hold the believe that he had. ). I thought: if a long page of self-reflection and apology could buy back four or five months of my hard work, it would be worth it. Whether it was my fault, whether I should be the one apologizing , none of these matters? (Junior year is a crucial period for applying PhD, because applications begin very soon and I need to have some research project to talk about and also a recommendation letter.) In the end, that professor did not accept my apology. From then on, I knew that to most people in the world, my dignity and self-esteem worth nothing. And through round after round of reflection (I might reflect too much but I really like to chewing on things), I came to understand that, compared to “four or five months of effort and time get wasted,” what I feared more in losing was my own dignity. Since then, I have not ever again traded my dignity for anything. If I apologize, it is because I believe I truly did something wrong, not because I need to please someone.

Half a year later, I started to work with professors outside my undergrad university, and my research started making good progress, though I would still feel tense and anxious whenever an email I get email from that professor that I initially worked with. Two more years after that, I had completely left the small circle of my undergrad and seen a bigger world. I had almost forgotten these traumas, and seeing that person’s name no longer triggered any PTSD. I don’t talk about these things with others anymore. Before, I would talk about these stuff over and over to walk myself out through. But once I truly walked out, these people, and the shadow they cast on me, disappeared completely from my memory, my life, and my thoughts. Driving them out of my life entirely, to the point of never thinking of them at all — that is probably the best form of “hatred” I would give. Although most of the professors I worked with at my undergrad were terrible, I also met one very, very kind mentor. He showed me that we can keep some innocence and kindness and still adapt well in our society, provided that we understand the rules of the world’s game rather than deceiving ourselves by living inside an imagined rainbow bubble. (I used to wonder how much bad luck I had to spend in exchange for such good luck to meet and learn from such a wonderful person. Getting the chance of knowing and learning from him (by accident) affected my life trajectory far more than all my deliberate decision making.)

During my undergrad, I would very naively sort people into “nice” and “not nice,” and decide on that basis whether to be friends with them. Later, when I become a bit more mature, I found that humans are super complex in nature and can’t be simply classified like this, so there is no absolute “good person.” When I see a “flawless” “good person,” either they’ve only blind me with their good side, or we haven’t known each other long enough that I actually don’t know them as much. So I stopped trying to be a “good person” that I thought the outside would want me to be, because the concept itself no longer exists in my dictionary. This may be one of the changes from my PhD years that makes me happiest. Until the end of my first year, I was trying hard to be a “good person” in other people’s eyes: I smiled at everyone, never refused any request from anyone, and constantly self-reflecting (those masters of gaslighting didn’t even need to make the effort; I would just voluntarily do that to myself). These “creed of how to be a good person,” built into my education from my family, were to a large extent responsible for the discomfort and pain I felt when I first entered society. In a simulated world, if no player deviates from these rules, the total utility of all players is high. But some players will always discover that by deviating from the above principle, they can gain more. And the current rules of the game implement almost no penalty for deviation. Hence the phenomenon we all know so well: manipulation and gaslighting, or what the Chinese internet calls “PUA.”

Sometimes we get manipulated because we love being a “good person” in other people’s eyes a little too much. Once we can see ourselves more objectively and have the courage to be disliked, it becomes much harder to manipulate us. Of course, everything goes wrong at the extreme: being “good” to the extreme can get you exploited by other players. “Reflecting appropriately and admitting your mistakes” is humility, but humility overdone, taken to the other extreme, makes you easier to manipulate. Since the readers my writing attracts are mostly the over-reflecting type, my no-brainer advice is: look for other people’s faults more (of course, see your own too, but don’t take all the blame on yourself). A typical example: when a project fails, some advisors will put the blame entirely on the student. But if the student can look at it objectively, they’ll find that there are many other factors in the pipeline, such as the advisor’s idea simply not working, or collaborators not pulling their weight or even making things worse. A project’s failure is more or less partly the student’s doing, but if it is “entirely” the student’s fault, that definitely doesn’t make sense.

Last of all, I want to talk about some reasons to do a PhD. Many people will tell you how much they grew during their PhD: they got to witness the full biodiversity of the human species, they learned to take setbacks more lightly, and so on. But you can get these from either a PhD or a job. The difference is that in a PhD you may be manipulated by your professor, and at work you may be manipulated by your boss (either way, someone will be there to teach you lessons you pay dearly for).

The reasons I can think of for doing a PhD are:

(1) Practically speaking, a PhD may give you five more years of buffer before the job hunt, and in those five years you accumulate connections, resources, and abilities, so you can look for a job with more composure. Of course, it may also look like you wasted five years and have nothing to prove that you have really lived through them. But that’s life: even with the same starting point and the same initial choice, people end up in very different places. So from this angle, compared with luck, choices are not that important.

(2) “If you want to be a professor someday, you would need a PhD.” This is one of the main reasons people consider doing a PhD. And there are also people with a real talent for research, or those who choose to do a PhD out of love.

(3) However hard I try to think about the meaning of life, the only answer I ever arrive at is “my life has no meaning.” I can’t set myself a goal the way others do, because all I can see is the death at the end of life. Many people work hard to locally optimize every decision in their lives, hoping to reach their “life goals” sooner and faster, to fight against fate. But no matter how many times they win against fate, one day they will be dragged by time and fate toward the same destination. So even if not doing a PhD looks like the path better suited to this local optimization (financially and career-wise, it may be much better than doing one), if your life is not aimed at that optimization, but rather at “experiencing life” on this journey where we are born heading toward death, a PhD may be a pretty good choice. Whether or not you do a PhD, you will work afterwards; a PhD just means you start working five years later. Seen this way, your life will always include the experience of “working,” but if you don’t do a PhD, you may never have the experience of “doing a PhD.” I think people are willing to pay for experiences, whether it’s visiting an exhibition or traveling somewhere. These experiences all carry some cost in time and money. A PhD is the same. If your life is not about optimizing some concrete real-world goal, then doing a PhD could be just for “knowing how is it like to be a PhD”. And choosing to do one is choosing to pay five years’ worth of “time and salary gap” as an “experience fee” in exchange for the experience of “doing a PhD.”