I am in my 2nd year of the PhD program (4 years into the MD/PhD program) and am contemplating quitting the PhD due to various reasons. My advisor left 6 months into my project and the other advisor who I was interested in working with told me she has no funding for me after 2 months of work. I am in another lab now but I do not think it is a good fit for me. All the other professors that I am interested in do not have funding and/or do not take grad students.
I think the best option for me is to quit. I still love research and think that I just had bad luck. I would like to get a PhD in the future after I finish medical school or at least do a research fellowship.
So my question is how bad would quitting the PhD look in residency applications and if I try to stay in academia? Would I still be able to pursue a research fellowship or a PhD after or during residency? Thanks a lot!
Let me offer some words of encouragement and advice.
My first PhD lab I joined out of intellectual interest and some bizarre idea that I could import my own ideas (that I had been thinking about for a while, based on research done elsewhere before the MD/PhD program) into the lab. I left after 2 months. It was a crazy husband-wife pair and my choice to switch was vindicated by a fellow grad student leaving after a year and a half for the same reasons (awful mentors). Big mistake to join a lab out of project interest alone!
I switched into a lab that I had previously rotated in. I was most interested in the disease they studied, although I had not carefully explored what the lab culture was like. It was a bad experience. The mentor was inaccessible, locked door while he was in the office and often wouldn't answer when I knocked, meetings with the mentor 1/month if that. There were no other grad students or post docs, there were two techs and a nutty research professor who has communication issues. No mentorship, unworkable project. After a while I was feeling desperate because I was getting no where. Big mistake to join a lab because they study a disease you are interested in!
After about 1 year in lab 2, the mentor decides to leave the university and academia entirely. He switched to a private hospital. His lab was out of commission for over a year, he lost his access to thousands of patient samples accumulated over 10 years as well as much of his pool of patients. He has tried to rebuild some sort of lab at his new hospital... Obviously, given how bad my research experience had been and the circumstances of his departure, I was thinking of either leaving the program entirely or switching yet again.
This time around I decided not to repeat previous mistakes. I switch departments and labs to a lab I had never rotated with but whose mentor was highly praised and recommended by everyone, including the MD/PhD program director and the graduate program director. He had graduated 3 MD/PhD students in 3 years (or less). He was an MD/PhD himself. Since some people had just graduated, spaced had opened up, and he accepted me.
From the first moment, I learned what good mentorship was all about. Starting slow while I learned the techniques, juggling multiple projects (some small, some larger), allowing me to participate in projects others were leading so I could get some 2nd/3rd authorships, etc. Right now I am about 1.5 years into my work in this lab and the constant thoughts of quitting the MD/PhD I had had in labs 1 and 2 are gone. I am engaged in my work, my two major projects are working well. One of them is pretty much complete and will be written up: a safe project that was going to be publishable whatever the results were (you need one safe project). The other more exciting project is really taking off and for the first time in years (since my pre-MD/PhD days) I actually look forward to going to lab and getting stuff done. I finally know what I'm doing when it comes to a variety of techniques and am able to accumulate in a week the sort of data that might have takne me 2-3 weeks to accumulate at the beginning of my PhD. I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel and hoping to graduate 1-1.5 years from now.
And to think I might have quit 2 years ago. I know how you're feeling: incompetent, foolish, nothing to show, lost, scared of the consequences of leaving, suffering, etc. I really think you should give it one more try but this time do not go after any particular project or even department. Go to a lab that has funding and a mentor with a great reputation for graduating students fast, training them well, and great interpersonal skills. The project will become interesting once you start getting interesting data, and with sufficient effort and time, you will.
