TheBredditor

Not to jack the OP's time and thread, but the more advice you get, the better, so I'll chime in here as well. PhD is hard. It's not hard as in the work is particularly difficult (although it's definitely not easy), it's hard as in extremely frustrating. You will work long hours. You will fail, repeatedly. You will be poor while in grad school. You will have little social life. You will regularly feel stupid.

The good thing is it's rewarding in the end. You will learn to be self-reliant. You will learn amazing time-management skills. Hard work will come naturally. You will meet incredibly intelligent people. And in the end, you will have really accomplished something.

My advice is join a program with an option to master out, and a program with rotations in your first year. You wouldn't believe how many people think they want a PhD. and realize quickly that it's not for them. Likewise with people who think they want to study neuroscience or cancer or whatever. Your interests will change and you definitely want to have multiple labs to choose from. Hope that is helpful and OP can agree/disagree with me. Good luck!

EDIT: I forgot one really important thing: YOU WILL NOT HAVE WEEKENDS. They don't exist. Forget about them.

Completely agree. I'll be defending soon, it's been so incredibly hard watching my friends have "real" jobs and lives while I toil away at the bench. Something I really never thought about when I was applying for grad school, but I ended up thinking about mastering out and going to Law School or something almost every day.

Read what I wrote above. Also, don't call yourself a candidate until you've passed your prelims. Some people will politely remind you that you haven't qualified yet, but others might get a little testy. I learned that the hard way.

Thanks! I'm almost done, so I'm definitely over the hump and through most of the bullshit. Glad someone else out there recognizes that getting a PhD isn't all that glamorous and the trade-offs are pretty tough.

That sounds exactly like what I did when I was studying for my prelims. It felt amazing. Then I passed and had to go back to the lab. Life resumed sucking.