Why I Left Grad School

by Niels Hoven

I dropped out of Berkeley on a Wednesday. I remember, because the electrical engineering graduate social hour is on a Wednesday, and I figured that as long as I was going to go through the unpleasantness of formally withdrawing, I may as well get some free food out of it.

I've always excelled academically. I completed algebra in third grade, passed the AP calculus test in eighth grade, and graduated from college in four years with both a bachelor's degree and a master's degree. I arrived at Berkeley excited and anticipating an extraordinary academic experience.

However, my first year at Berkeley was more than I bargained for. I felt overwhelmed by the work, intimidated by brilliant classmates, and suspected none of the professors cared whether I was there or not. I wasn’t alone though. According to the mental health survey that year*, 67% of Berkeley grad students felt hopeless at some point in the past twelve months. 10% of Berkeley grad students had seriously contemplated suicide. In other words, look around your classroom of 30 students. 3 of them are thinking about killing themselves. About 1 in 200 will actually attempt it.

So it blew my mind on visit day when the prospectives arrived and all my friends started telling them how great Berkeley was. Who are you people? Weren’t you telling me yesterday about how your fever just dropped below a hundred after you went four days without sleep to make a conference deadline that probably didn’t even matter? Didn’t we talk last week about how incredible it was that I was the only person in our class who managed to maintain any outside hobbies besides research and classwork? And wasn’t I failing because of it?

It didn’t make any sense. Prospective students arrive and all of a sudden everyone loves their advisor, the research is fascinating, and you can’t beat the weather.

And then I read a study on cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance theory states that people are troubled by inconsistency between their beliefs and actions, which motivates behavior to restore consistency. In 1959, Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith had participants engage in a mind-numbingly boring “experiment” for an hour, turning pegs on a board around and around. They then told the participants that they needed them to brief the next subject, and to please tell the subject that the experiment was interesting. Half the participants were given $20 for this, the other half were given $1.

Afterwards, the original participants were interviewed and asked how much they enjoyed the experiment. The participants given $20 said the experiment was boring, as expected. But the participants given $1 said it was kinda fun! One measly dollar was not enough to justify the lie they told and the time they wasted. Instead, they reduced their dissonance by rationalizing that they really enjoyed the experiment.

Festinger and Carlsmith would have a field day with graduate school. A bunch of grad students are miserable for a year. They’re paid a pittance. But they stay anyway. It makes no sense for them to stay. Forced to explain themselves to a prospective student, cognitive dissonance sets in. “Oh, I guess I actually love it here!” they think. Oh, cognitive dissonance, you keep academia in business.

But it's more than just cognitive dissonance. Before arriving at Berkeley, I breezed through every academic venture set in front of me. I saw any uncompleted task as a personal failure and bundled academic success into my identity. Leaving a degree before finishing it would force me to reconsider how I valued myself as a person.

But is dropping out really failing? Bill Gates dropped out of college. So did Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein. Ted Turner was expelled. And Richard Branson, now worth about eight billion dollars, didn't even finish high school.

Perhaps the question isn't "Should I drop out?"
but rather, "Why didn't I do it years earlier?"

Admittedly, these are exceptional cases. But anyone who has been accepted to grad school at Berkeley is inherently an exceptional case as well. And as a good friend pointed out to me, if you expect to distinguish yourself in this world, at some point you'll have to make a choice that no one else would have made.

Leaving a degree program isn't failure. It's simply another path which too often is ignored.

Why is that? Why does graduate school create such tunnel vision in students?

In research, there's no finish line. No matter how much work you've done, there's always another question to be answered or another proof to be written. Professors are at work at 11 PM on a Friday night because they love their research and there's nowhere else they'd rather be. Sometimes they forget that not everyone shares those same values.

Working 90+ hours in a week was not unusual for me. To make my first conference deadline I stopped sleeping more than three hours at a stretch in order to throw my body clock out of whack and work more hours in a day. Constant stress was the norm. My blood pressure jumped twenty points and my daily routine was gritting my teeth, tucking my head, and forcing myself to focus on only my most imminent deadline. Between classes, research, and teaching I couldn't allow myself to look more than a few days into the future for fear of losing hope.

In that environment, considering other options was a luxury I couldn't afford. The possibility of a better option out there when I was putting myself through all this pain would make it impossible to go on.

I sometimes wonder if that's why my friends from graduate school have drifted away from me since my departure.

It's a terrible Catch-22. Grad school makes people depressed because they feel like they don't have any options, and they can't consider any other options because it makes them too depressed. What to do?

My solution came in an appropriately unexpected form, as solutions tend to do. From a pool of 25,000 applicants, I was chosen as one of the 8 nerdiest guys in the United States of America and given a place on the cast of the reality TV show “Beauty and the Geek”. Interestingly, one of my classmates had been cast on the show the year before. Apparently there's something about the Berkeley EECS graduate program that really appeals to “Beauty and the Geek’s” producers.

Disclaimer: Ask your doctor if reality TV appearances are right for you. Individual results may vary.

I arrived for the filming with a pile of textbooks in my bag. Missing a single day of class at Berkeley sometimes left me trying to catch up for weeks; I couldn't imagine what my life would be like if I didn't work for a month.

As it turned out, it wasn't my choice. The producers imposed a blanket ban on phone, internet, TV – and books. It was like I had been plucked out of my normal existence for an entire month. I was being filmed twenty-four hours a day, but all of a sudden I was able to relax. And I was happy! I can say without exaggerating that, after three years of graduate school, I'd forgotten what those emotions felt like.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and I needed that month of forced vacation to be able to step back from my life and reexamine it from the outside. A real vacation, not just a winter break spent frantically cramming for prelims or a family reunion spent feeling guilty for not reading the textbook in my suitcase. That vacation allowed me to distance myself from my work and consider whether I was still on the right track.

A forced vacation was the first contribution to the perfect storm that led to my leaving Berkeley. The second piece of the puzzle arrived with my internship.

Once the show wrapped, I headed straight to New York for an internship with Philips Research. I'd had plenty of internships before, every summer from tenth grade onward. None of them had been completely satisfying, but each time I assumed, "Well, I just don't have enough education yet. Once I reach the next degree level I'll get more interesting work."

The internship at Philips was essentially the job I would have taken once I finished my Ph.D. I can't imagine a more supportive, flexible environment, with nearly complete freedom for whatever topics of research I wanted to pursue. The position paid well, there was plenty of academic freedom, my boss was supportive, and my coworkers were friendly. But for some reason, I still dreaded coming to work every day.

I struggled with this for a while and finally called my college roommate to talk. We talked about all the time and effort I'd put toward my Ph.D. We talked about pain and sacrifice, and then he asked me the best question of all time: "Is there anyone in your office that you can look at and say, 'Wow, I hope I end up like him'?"

And there wasn't. I looked around at my coworkers, and no one I’ve met in that world or academia really has the sort of lifestyle that I envy. If I don’t have any role models in my line of work, perhaps I’m in the wrong line of work?

For me, that was an enormous red flag. This was the job I would have after graduating, and it led straight to a lifestyle I didn't want.

And so, three years into my program, I decided to leave my Ph.D.

I didn't know what I would do next, but that's not a bad thing at all. Leaving graduate school to pursue a particular job or a specific business idea would have left me second guessing my decision in the likely event that the job turned out to be unfulfilling or the idea went under.

Instead, I left because I knew I was on the wrong path, and that knowledge kept me going during the search for the right one.

The most difficult part of the process was breaking the news to my advisor and to my mom. I talked to my advisor first. I'm not sure what that says about my priorities.

My advisor was incredibly supportive and agreed that taking a break from grad school is a good option for me now. He told me that life was too short to finish a Ph.D. just for the sake of finishing a Ph.D. Plus, I’m still young. Life doesn’t have to follow a linear path.

Having such a compassionate advisor actually made me want to stay longer.

The conversation with my mom was equally nerve wracking. As the son of an Asian mother who had come to this country for her own education, I knew my mom had been looking forward to telling her friends about "my son, the doctor."

I didn't want to make the call. I remember feeling nervous as I stood alone in the courtyard of Cory Hall, waiting for my mom to pick up her phone. I rushed through the words as I told her I was leaving Berkeley, and then I was quiet. My mom understood, though.

"I've been watching you for a while," she said, "and it looks like you've been floundering. I think this really is the best thing for you right now."

I exhaled and a sense of relief washed over me. It was an amazing feeling to know that my mom understood so much more about me than I expected.

And with a newfound lightness lingering in my shoulders, I walked to my last social hour as an electrical engineering graduate student