Otdfbt

I am in my fifth year and I am about to submit my Applied Mechanics PhD thesis in. However, I always felt absolutely incompetent in the field. I tried improving my weak areas by self study, taking up challenging projects, but always ended up with either abandoning the idea or settling with a less rigorous work.

When I used to talk to my advisor, he used to say that I am doing fine and I shouldn't worry about impact factors and rigour of a work at PhD level as I will eventually learn more and get more opportunities as I advance in my career.

However, I feel that I wasted my PhD. I am searching for postdoc positions, but I feel incompetent for the openings. I feel that even if I do get response back, I will get rejected due to my poor knowledge.

I also feel that I should have worked harder and not have wasted time in my past. I also tried making connections during my conferences, but that did not anywhere.

I screwed up big time. I am 30 years old. No work experience. And a mediocre PhD. I messed up really badly.

Is there a way to redeem my career?

I think your situation is not unique. If you look around academia.SE (as user2768 suggested, search for "impostor syndrome"), you will find that many PhD students have the same feeling about their work or their career path. See How should I deal with discouragement as a graduate student? for example. I hope this gives you some comfort -- sometimes it helps to know that other people are in similar situations -- and you will find some advice in the answers which works out for you.

The advice of your advisor seems reasonable in the sense that often one looks for the perfect solution from scratch, which is a path that rarely brings the desired results. I found that research is done in an iterative way, where you steadily improve and refine the methods and thereby the results. Of course, academic rigor must not be neglected. The impact factor is in my opinion indeed overrated, but this may depend on your field.

Don't let that stop you from applying and attending job/PostDoc position interviews. If you do nothing, you may end up in a spiral downwards since naturally there will be no progress in your career. And even if you fail at an interview, at least you gain experience what is required to succeed.

Focus on what you can do going forward rather than on mistakes of the past.

Let me tell you about my own situation, which is quite a bit worse than yours and which I am happy with.

I was a top math student in a large school (yeargroup ~1000). I found maths easy and was looking forwards to study it at university. Unfortunately I did very little work at university. Not nothing but little enough to fall behind and drop out of the course. After this I found work as a home carer which I enjoyed and worked hard at but which offered very poor wages and working conditions. I sat in this job for four years before I managed to put enough effort into finding a better job and moved into hospital admin.

After landing a temporary admin role it has been up and up for years now. The turnaround in fortune has been slow but tangible. I started to feel good about myself and my prospects around six months after starting to put some effort into my future. I excelled and found a better role. I saved money, own a home, started a degree, found a wife and have a child on the way. I will graduate in June, aged 30.

Job prospects look pretty good thanks to some AI research I've done.

How does this relate to you?

Well, you haven't screwed up. In the grand scheme of things you've done a lot of things right and you will soon have a PhD in mechanics to prove it!

Lets examine the idea that you "wasted" the last five years. Even if this is true (and the academics here are suggesting that it is not) then it kind of doesn't matter because:

• you've identified some of the problems and how to do better


• you have 35+ years in which to do better. So what if you didn't produce an earth shattering result within your PhD. If you start producing high quality work then people will notice.

Where can you go from here?

Set aside some time (a day?) to think about what you want to do in life and how you might get there. You could spend some of this time talking to friends and family. Draw up a list of options and decide which appeals to you the most. Vigorously pursue this option. Your actual career might go off on a complete tangent to the plan but having a plan is a good way to get things started.

Something you might want to consider is doing a non-academic job for a year or two. Hopefully some of the academics on the site will be able to comment on whether or not this will be good for your academic career but from a non-academic perspective it would make you much more well rounded and hopefully expand your horizons.

See it the other way around: In the meantime you know at least that you do not know everything about the field. This is an interesting insight and more than many people know (also: "I know that I know nothing").

Your feeling is normal (see also above posts about "impostor syndrome"). A good example is the new group of fresh PhD students every year that think that they know everything and can conquer the world but the deeper they get into academia the more they realise how little they know. This is illustrated (in an ironic way) for example in the well known PhD comics here.

The main problem is not with your career, but with your psyche

I was in a position somewhat, though not quite, similar to yours: In a late year in my Ph.D., stuck on some dead-ends, exasperated and thinking I've essentially failed. Wasn't even sure I was going to finish.

I'm not going to tell you that things will pick up and it'll all be ok etc. Maybe it will, maybe it won't, or at least not as much as it might. The point I want to make is that I remember people telling me: "Oh, but you're not doing so bad, you're smarter and more accomplished than 99% of people, and lots of grad students have trouble with their PhD's etc." - this is all true but it wasn't helping me.

It wasn't helping, because I had pinned my sense of self-worth in life on having a certain experience or certain achievements with the PhD. When this did not occur, I felt like a failure - like my life, my identity as a person, was sort of falling apart. There was no me without stellar academic success - and I wasn't really prepared to think about my life otherwise. So whenever I thought about my situation I was subconsciously terrified, mortified.

The disaster - with our without quotes - you are facing is not in your career. I mean, sure, your PhD could have gone better, but it's certainly not a disaster. You need to be able to:

• Emotionally recognize and accept what you've done and what has happened to you


• Be able to set goals for yourself given your situation, rather than semi-consciously obsessing over not being in the situation you would rather have been.


• Have these goals be potentially attainable in terms of the world, and likely satisfying for you personally.


• Have other aspects of your life on which you can "bank" emotionally, regardless of whether your career/academic pursuits fare better or worse.

Consider reading my answer regarding a situation worse than yours, with more concrete advice:

How to deal with anxiety and depression after being kicked out of PhD program?

Now for a few concrete words about where to go from here.

Well, what is that you want(ed) to do, as a researcher? You talk about it as though it's some sort of game where you need to improve your points in weak areas, overcome challenges for some sort of metaphysical score of accomplishment... why did you enter a PhD program? What did you want to discover, or get to the bottom of, as a researcher?

• If the answer is "nothing in particular", then it might have been a mistake to enter the PhD program to begin with, and the outcome you ended up with is reasonable, though lackluster, given your motivation.


• If the answer is "I wanted to explore XYZ" - then who cares about the PhD's quality? Are you still interested in XYZ? If so, think of how to utilize what you've learned and accomplished, and what you know about other people's work, for different avenues into XYZ, in academia or in industry. If not, then think about how to get inspired again about something else. (Yes, I know that is a vague point.)

You mentioned two key words in your question, "..work experience..." Just block out the noise, finish up your degree, go out there and work; this will provide the experience and build your confidence and competence. Be honest with your prospective employer where you stand in terms of experience but express your willingness to learn. You'll likely start off lower in salary than your peers but take the offer and get your foot in the door. Moreover, never take the path of least resistance in terms of work challenges, it'll bite you later on when you finally get tasked with a huge project. I like that you do self study. Good luck with your career journey, congratulations on your prospective degree and may God bless you.

The nice thing about academia is, you most often have a fallback: You can go to industry. They love high trained, clever people. They don't care about papers, impact factors, rigorous PhD theses and so on.

I don't think you should leave academia. But relax, if everything goes wrong, you still have the chance to make a successful career outside of academia.