If I quit my PhD, would it make my advisor look bad?

Question

I am considering quitting my PhD in computer science, because after doing a software engineering internship I realized I enjoy that kind of work much more.

My advisor has been very kind to me, on both a professional and a personal level, and if I quit it might make her look bad. She is an assistant professor and I was her first student. I do not want people to think she was the one who made me quit.

Are people going to wonder if she was the reason I quit?

How much of an effect would this have on her career?

Answer 1

You are a nice guy, but let me tell you this: no matter if it makes your advisor look bad, if you really like the job in the company and believe it's the best thing for you, then you should quit your PhD and take the job. Doing your PhD just because of your advisor will not do any good to either you or your advisor.

Because pursuing a PhD requires a lot of determination. No matter how your advisor is kind to you, making your advisor look good will not be enough as a sole motivation for your PhD. If you don't quit now, you will quit later and it may cause more damage to your advisor.

For a complete stranger like me, if a guy quits his PhD after 1st or 2nd year, there are many reasons beside a bad advisor: maybe the guy himself finds PhD too difficult, or he changes his mind etc and etc. But if someone quits his PhD after 5th or 6th year, I would think there must be something wrong with the supervision.

Answer 2

If I quit my PhD, would it make my advisor look bad?

Absolutely not -- at least, not in the eyes of anyone who wasn't born yesterday. Most of us realize that PhD students are autonomous creatures with their own lives, hopes, dreams and ambitions. Although certainly there are scenarios in which a bad advisor is the cause or catalyst for a graduate student's decision to quit their PhD, only a fool would jump to the completely unsubstantiated conclusion that this was the case here.

With that said, it is certainly true that if you finish your PhD, it would make your advisor look good.

And with that said, a PhD is such a huge undertaking that I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks anyone should ever do a PhD to please someone else. You shouldn't do a PhD to make your mother happy; you shouldn't do a PhD to make your girlfriend or boyfriend happy; and by the same token, you shouldn't do a PhD to make your advisor happy. If she was kind to you, go and buy her a present, or write her a poem, or dedicate your first software product at the engineering firm to her. But I strongly advise you to stick with your PhD if, and only if, this is truly what you, and only you, want to do for yourself.

Answer 3

I read your original post; allow me to respond to that first. In my opinion, based on the information you provide, you may want to examine your Ph.D. situation ignoring the internship for the moment. Do you enjoy what you're doing? Do you like working with your adviser? Is it a good learning experience? Do you value the prospect of holding a Ph.D.?

If the answer is Yes, I would caution you against jumping to conclusions based on an internship. Internships are good fun, in fact they are meant to be since the goal is for you to fall in love with the company as much as they are the other way (if not more). A Ph.D. is a bet on the long run (as is a college degree) and there are sacrifices involved.

If the answer is No, you have a tough decision to make and I can't really tell you what you should do, but in general it wouldn't seem wise to stick to something you dislike or not enjoy.

In general I would disregard what "people have been saying." You have not experienced the kind of jobs that you can access only with a Ph.D. Some of them are insanely fun. This is your decision, not theirs.

As for your adviser, yes your decision may hurt her career if she is an assistant professor on a tenure clock, and/or depending on many other factors. I doubt anyone would see this as a failure on her part, however.

All the best.

Answer 4

I feel that most of the other answers do not adequately address the question, as most of them focus on the question of what you should do, rather than the effect on your advisor.

If your advisor already had a track record of graduating students with good theses, then you dropping out would have no effect on her reputation. Since you are her first student, however, you dropping out will give her a dropout rate of 100%. Everybody knows that sometimes things just don't work out with a student, but it's a bad omen to lose one's first student, and it puts your professor in a much more vulnerable position with respect to the next students she hopes to graduate.

This will likely be compounded by the fact that your professor is a woman, and likely to be judged more harshly than male colleagues, due to the implicit sexism still rampant in the field.

Moreover, in some fields and departments, graduating a student is a hard requirement for tenure. If you are not just her first student but her only student, leaving may make it very difficult for her to obtain tenure.

That said, if you need to quit, you need to quit. But it will have an impact on your advisor because she is so early in her career.

Answer 5

Without knowing more about your situation, it is hard to estimate the magnitude the effect on your advisor's reputation. Under normal circumstances, however, this effect would be minimal. Everyone understands that students may choose not to complete a PhD for any number of reasons.

But what I can tell you is that (1) you have zero obligation to continue for the sake of your advisor, (2) you need to do what is right for you and (3) any harm to her career from you quitting will be vastly smaller than the harm to you and your career, where ever that may lie, from continuing if a pursuing PhD is not in your best interest.

Addendum: Based on information provided in a comment below, apparently the OP is the advisor's first student. This might be a bit different, perhaps, especially if the department has expectations that an advisor graduate students before tenure and there are not others in the queue. Hopefully this is not the case. It seems perhaps reasonable to expect an advisor to be able to recruit students before tenure, but it is in no one's best interest to demand that he or she graduate students before tenure. Still, I've seen that expected on rare occasion. Other examples of "not normal" circumstances would be cases in which an advisor already had a worrisome track record of driving students out of the lab or out of the program. In this case, it might be more reasonable for people to be concerned, particularly if supported by other sources of evidence that the advisor was failing to do right by his or her students.

Answer 6

If one student aborts a Ph.D. on a mentor, or even a few over the course of a career, that's par for the course.

If this sort of thing KEEPS HAPPENING to a mentor, it should raise some red flags for that person's colleagues and any committees involved with placing grad students in labs.

Answer 7

My mother quit her PhD program back in the 50's, because she wanted to have children and didn't feel that she could put the time into both. This was a disappointment to a number of people, because, in those less enlightened days, they wanted to make her an example of the ability of women to get a doctorate. She decided that the issue of women's equality wasn't as important to her as starting her family. My father said it was her decision and he would support her either way. A number of years later, she became an English professor anyway, spent 40 years at it, and raised seven children along the way.

To quote the old saw: be who you are, because those who matter don't mind and those who mind don't matter. The trick is finding out who you are.

One more thing. If this lady is good at what she does, you can't do anything to hurt her career. If she isn't, nothing that you can do will make her career. So, your decision isn't particularly important to her career one way or the other.

EDIT: Looking at other answers and reading comments, it's clear that there are considerations that I didn't think of. I guess in the end, we can all spend a great deal of time working out the effect that this will have on your professor, but the only person who really can tell you is the professor herself. You need to "fess up" and tell her you're thinking about quitting and why. Maybe she doesn't share your concerns, maybe she has concerns none of us have thought of. Maybe you can work something out that will benefit both of you. But you never will really know until you face her and tell her what's on your mind.

By the way, I have 30 years experience in the IT field. PhD's in computer science generally make better money than software engineers, and often find interesting work. If, for example, you want to write software programs to calibrate scientific equipment, that PhD will help. If you want to design websites or databases for health care companies, it probably won't.

Answer 8

Ask yourself this: If people knew you stayed on as a Ph.D. candidate because somehow you got to worry more about how this would reflect on your advisor, this in itself would reflect very poorly on him; and perhaps on you as well. So... don't let the how-it-would-reflect-on-him concern worry you.

H-O-W-E-V-E-R! There is the "Neighbor's grass is always greener" effect. It may be the case that leaving your Ph.D. track has detriments you might not be taking into account, and on the other hand, maybe you're stuck in your Ph.D. work and, arranged differently, it might be more interesting and rewarding. I'm not saying that's necessarily the case but sometime it is. Also, some people switch to working on the rest of their Ph.D.s part-time. Again, that doesn't work well for everyone, I'm just saying you need to carefully weigh your options etc. etc.

Answer 9

The only real effect your dropping your PhD program will have on your advisor, is that it might leave her short on her "stuff profs need to do in their jobs" list. i.e. most universities have a teaching requirement, a research requirement, and a service requirement. She's now lost an advisee, so she's a bit "thin" on her service requirement, and may have to scramble a bit to pick something else up to fulfil that. Other than that, though...no, it will not harm her career.