This tweet has motivated me to generate a thread in response. Should you get a PhD? Are all PhD students horribly unhappy? Of course, I can’t answer this for you; you need to answer it yourself. But I can maybe help you understand this decision. https://twitter.com/ReadMoreScience/status/1293581726300610560">https://twitter.com/ReadMoreS...

First: remember that people who post on Twitter aren’t necessarily typical. People post because they have something to say—often because they’re upset, or having a bad time. Disgruntled PhD students post more than happy ones.

Those disgruntled students aren& #39;t wrong! They& #39;re really unhappy, and they certainly deserve both respect and sympathy. But everyone& #39;s experience is different.

Of course, it’s not all wine and roses. The career prospects are difficult—there’s no guarantee that that PhD leads to the job you think you want. And there are a lot of bad advisors out there—although you’ll find plenty of bad bosses outside academia, too.

On the other hand: if you want a career actually doing scientific research, this is the way to get that career. There are good advisors out there, and they aren’t impossible to find—I had one myself, and I think I’m a good advisor to most of my students.

(A brief digression: choose the advisor and the lab, not the project. Talk to the students in the lab—are they happy? Find out where students go when they finish: are they working at Starbucks?)

One more thing to remember: the thing you are definitely signing up for, when you sign up for a PhD, is several years doing scientific research. Does that sound good, or not? If you think of those years as just something you need to get past, it’s maybe not for you.