I am currently a 3rd year biochemistry PhD student. There are a lot of things that have not been working out lately (for the past few months) and I have been contemplating leaving grad school. First, I thought I would have some freedom as far as the direction of my thesis but my advisor more or less directed me to a topic and didn't let me decide. The work I am doing currently involves computational work, which I did not have significant experience with prior to grad school and was hoping to do more experimental work. I am doing some experimental work too, but much of my work involves simulations. Not only that, but when I try to figure out the coding to do what I want to do I often feel lost. I just feel so incompetent with what I am doing right now, and for that reason I am losing the motivation for completing the project. With the results I do have, the simulations clearly deviate from the experimental data and I tried submitting a paper, but it was rejected. I am just tired of not making progress and it is just leaving me frustrated day in and day out. Part of me wants to try and finish this because I have come so far and never was a quitter, but part of me thinks that life is too short to be doing something that is making me miserable.

You are very far along in your PhD. Instead of quitting, can you meet an experienced person (PhD student, post doc, sr researcher) to discuss computational work? Can you take up a course/workshop?

If you are in a 4 year PhD, you may wish to talk to ur supervisor to discuss how to frame your story (and its deviations) and decide the last lots experiments/simulations to complete to motivate you to finish. Good luck!

Hi Joe, good advice from Tru there. I can't offer any specific tips for biochemistry. What I would like to say though is if you take the specifics out of your post-biochemistry, simulations and computer coding and focus on other aspects-paper rejected, feeling miserable and lost, year 3, don't like your topic anymore-your post reads as if you are in a classic stage of the journey that many of us go through. (It feels like a very personal and isolating experience when going through it however).

Many of us experience these phenomena while doing a PhD and paper rejection is unfortunately common for both PhD students and experienced academics alike. Can you just dust it off and try some other journals? Or perhaps you can worry about publishing once you are close to or just about finishing. When you get close to the end, sometimes all you have energy for is to finish. Plenty of time to look at publishing at the end stages when you are just waiting on supervisors to sign you off or for examiner's reports.

Do you think that maybe following Tru's suggestion,to finalise experiments and write up so you are now working towards the end goal, would work for you? Can you make sure you are also doing some things in life you enjoy as well so life doesn't seem as if the only thing that matters is the PhD. See friends, go to movies or the pub sometimes, or play a sport or computer games or similar, so there are little things to look forward to?

PS: Very much understand how miserable you might be feeling, but you have come so far now and are so close to the finish, can you keep going?