This article resonates quite strongly with me. I also did a PhD in physics which I grew more and more disillusioned with as it progressed.

I did physics in undergrad, then worked for a few years as an engineer. I was the only one on my team who didn’t have a PhD, and saw the limits of my own knowledge, so I went back to school to get my
PhD in experimental condensed matter physics.

Originally I thought I’d struggle through the classes, then do some kickass research, and come back to being a full-time engineer.

Turned out to be quite the opposite. My first semester transitioning back to being a full-time student was rough, but after that I really enjoyed the classes, and for the next couple years I wanted to do tenure track research in academia.

I then signed on with a faculty member athe department hired as my advisor, to study nanoscale physics (eg superconducting nanowires). Fast forward a few more years and I started to hate the daily grind.

Firstly, my advisor was hired in my third year, so we had to build up the lab from scratch. Every little bit of cryogenic equipment, data measuring apparatus, data acquisition and analysis code. Took a couple years before we could do “real” research of interest.

Also we had no senior grad students or post docs to learn from. I felt way behind all my colleagues who were in functioning labs and could start taking publication-quality data after just a few weeks of joining their group.

Most of my day-to-day wasn’t even physics but annoying laboratory maintenance. Eg finding cold leaks in the cryogenic equipment (these only leak at temperatures of 4K or less, so it took lot of trial and error to find). Or tracking down ground loops on my circuits that were blowing up my fragile nanowires. Or fighting the sputtering chambers we used for deposition (and realising they had been contaminated with magnetic materials making it impossible to grow clean superconducting films).

I saw my friends at other schools write paper after paper in top journals working in their well-established labs with huge-budget clean rooms and facilities with full-time maintenance and support staff. Meanwhile in my lab we had limited equipment, no maintenance staff, and we had to fix stuff in our ‘spare’ time, etc.

I became jealous of my theorist friends who could work anywhere with just their notebooks and a pencil.

I became jealous of my astrophysics friends who were assigned observing time on Hubble and other telescopes, where teams of technicians would make sure their observations would go smoothly and provide them with perfect raw data.

I saw that without any seminal publications, my postdoc opportunities were slim. I thought about changing research areas, but came to the realisation that I’m stuck doing the same narrow brand of research that I had been doing the past few years. Because no faculty member would pay for a postdoc who wasn’t ready to hit the ground running as a domain expert.

I saw some of my successful friends with lots of amazing papers struggle to find a postdoc appointment. Or if they found one struggle to find a second, or a good faculty position. And if it was a struggle for them, my lack of publications would make this nearly impossible for myself.

I was working 12+ hour days making barely enough to live on. And not enjoying it at all, and feeling depressed, with difficulty getting out of bed to come into the lab.

Then one day pretty much on a whim I applied for an internship as a quant on Wall Street. I was invited to an interview where I was grilled over two days in 11 separate one-on-one sessions. In between sessions I would look out the window of the 30 floor of a skyscraper in NYC and wonder if I was betraying myself and my fellow physicists, as if academia was a cult.

I was offered an internship, and really liked it. This was my ticket out.

I went back to school at the end of the summer to write up my thesis.

Many of my physics friends were curious about my internship and were considering doing this themselves. All of them told me not to tell anyone else that we had spoken.

I wrote a few drafts for papers, one was published, defended my thesis and got myself outta there.