Decisions

This fall, I made the decision to quit my PhD, and I couldn't be happier.

Looking at the past few end-of-year blog posts I've done, the themes have been the futility of trying to engage with society and politics, and the hopelessness of my attempt at an academic career. I've finally been able to draw the appropriate conclusions from this, and I've pretty much stopped trying to be in any way politically active, and faced facts on my PhD project.

There are two principal reasons why I've quit: I believe the postgraduate system is completely unfair, but even if it wasn't, working conditions are so bad that I'd much rather do something else.

For background, it's vital to understand that the Finnish academic system has no transparency at all. Decisions on who gets grants and salaried doctoral candidate positions are totally opaque to those of us on the receiving end. The only obvious thing is that they're not based on any kind of publicly visible merit like publications. The same goes for decisions like which doctoral candidates get to participate in publications, research groups or teaching.

After several years inside the system, my impression is that from the beginning, doctoral candidates are divided into those whose careers will be advanced, and those whose won't. I don't know what the criteria for this selection are, but the split seems to me to be fairly clear. If you're in the first group, you will get funding and opportunities to demonstrate your abilities, and a way up into the academic hierarchy. If you fall in the latter group, you will get nothing, and nothing you can accomplish on your own will matter. I'm very much in this second group, which I believe means that in practice, even if I went on to finish my PhD, I would have no chance of getting any postdoc work or funding. More than that, though, I believe the current system is unjust and wrong, and I don't want to be a part of it.

The other reason is that even if I did know the right people and I had an opportunity to advance my career - which would probably effectively blind me to the nature of the system - working conditions are so bad and employment so precarious that I don't want to do it. Under some definitions of the word, people my age count as millenials; I was more skeptical of this until I realized that one of my fondest dreams right now is to get a steady job with a monthly salary. I don't think that's at all a realistic possibility if I pursue a PhD.

So I've officially quit the PhD, and next year, I'll be doing something completely different with my life. And I'm very happy with my decision. I taught a university prep course and a lecture course at the adult education center this year, and I've got some more teaching work lined up for next year. I'm also getting back into programming, so we'll see if anything will come out of that.

To conclude, I'd like to wish all three of my readers a very happy new year, and a succesful 2019!