>>14250215I was a physicsfag undergrad and had planned to stick around in academia and get a PhD. I noticed that most of my profs seemed kinda miserable, exceptions being the older ones who built their careers back when universities were more credible and less degenerate, as well as a couple of the genius-tier guys who were free to sit up on the top floor of the dept's building and think/write about whatever they wanted while, if they desired, teaching only a class or two to graduate students. The old guys were near retirement and the geniuses didn't need to spend much/any energy scrambling for grants. The norm seemed to be long hours and high stress for low pay (compared to industry), working on problems that aren't very interesting. Newton's work was amazing!... but does anybody find beauty in writing buggy software to sift through questionable data in the hope of nailing down another (in)significant figure in the accepted value of some property of some exotic meson?
I decided against going for the PhD due to the above combined with the fact that my heart wasn't really in it. I chose to study physics because it was my favorite subject in primary education, I had read too many popsci books about how beautiful it is (true, but only philosophically, not in practice, as it turns out), and I was good at it.
My friends who went on to get their PhDs almost universally claimed that research science is awful. One wants to use his credentials to get a job as a physics prof at a community college and smoke weed all day. Another got a JD in addition to the PhD in order to move out west and get super rich by being a patent lawyer for high-biophysics-tech companies. Nobody I knew from undergrad and stay in touch with is super stoked about academia after having gone through it.
