Have you ever put yourself through a long-term, difficult process in order to reach an uncertain end?

University with a double major in Philosophy and Psychology while running out of money and sanity. The rest will be in my book…

Isn’t that everyone’s life…..lol.

I’m not at the stage you are in, since I just started, and I’m not a classroom person. I’m still under the false pretense that my work will pay off. I’m kind of like a crazy christian zealot that can’t see logic, because I don’t want to believe it won’t pay off. You gotta have faith (did I really say that?)!

Yes….8 grueling years later I finally own the company and the old boss is not welcome around these parts no more!

I felt like that when I was in university. My major was English, and in my third year I thought to myself, “Boy, I’ve toiled through 3 years of hard work, got excellent grades, but will I ever get a decent job with a Bachelor of Arts degree??” I was very unsure of whether all this work would pay off. But it did. I got an editing job with the government and it gave me valuable experience, so it wasn’t a waste at all. Hard work and learning any kind of skill is never a waste.

When you’re in the “fish bowl”, you don’t know what it’s really like until you’re in the big pond, so I wouldn’t worry too much. Circumstances change all the time, and there may be many opportunities when you graduate.

However, if you feel like it’s going to be a long haul, and you are not interested in what you are doing now, sometimes it’s okay to change your goals. It’s never too late to change. I know you’ve worked hard for 3 years so far, but really, 3 years is not that long. I went to university for 8 years, and changed my goals three times. After my editing job, I went back to university and completely changed my educational and career goals, toiling for another 5 years to get another Bachelors degree and finally my Masters.

I’m in a similar position. Starting my fourth year of my PhD. Might be done in 5 years, but probably 6 and maybe more.

It is difficult, and sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it. But to be honest with you, if I didn’t enjoy the process I don’t think I would do it. Your kind of school is different from mine—I don’t have guaranteed job options at the end (I think pharm school has pretty good odds?). So maybe in your case it makes sense to stick it out even if it’s horrible.

But, you know what they say, life is short. I am not sure that it makes sense to waste years of your life being miserable in the hopes that you’ll have more money than you would have otherwise.

I don’t mean to suggest that you should leave school. Are there specific things you can do to improve your quality of life? I know when school is taking up 99% of your time it seems impossible to think about taking on new projects or starting new things. But in my experience, if you can carve out time for things that make you happy, everything else is so much more bearable.

Regular exercise, enough sleep, cooking awesome food, and quality time with the people who are important to me keep me happy enough to make the rough patches worth it. What about you? Are you taking good care of your physical and emotional health? Are there things you can do to take better care of yourself?

I’ve changed direction, oooh, about 7 times over the course of 52 years.

I just consider all my skills to be fallback skills. lololol

Wouldn’t that sum up the experience of life itself for many?

Pretty much a perfect description of my past seven months!

I’ve had a series of 3 surgeries to cure my ulcerative colitis. It’s been a very long process with a lot of worry about how successful the end result would be. I’m finally reaching the end of that saga and am so happy with the direction things are going. It’s been a very uncertain time for me for sure.

everyone goes down that road but if you truly believe that you are wasting your time soon you will become bored, so if its really what you want to do block out all those thoughts and focus on getting to the end of the tunnel.

You say “what if I waste 6 years, to find out that’s not what I hoped for?”
It is often the difficult things in life that teach us the most. I don’t mean teach book knowledge, I mean teach us about ourselves, teach us about life. I’m sure that right now you are giving up a lot of your social time in order to go to school and study. You feel that as a sacrifice of the things you would have more fun doing.

First of all I would say to try to find out if your chosen career is one you would be happy in.
Reassess what appeals to you about it and why you chose it to begin with. Try to talk to people in that profession about what their typical day is like and what they enjoy about their work. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves, in the midst of the hard work trying to reach a goal, why we chose it to begin with. We need to recommit ourselves to the goal so we won’t mind as much the sacrifices we need to make in order to get there.
But if you reassess and decide that maybe this isn’t what you want I say better to change course than stay with it. You have to know yourself and be honest with yourself.
If you decide to change course maybe you can use your academic credits toward a different profession that you would prefer. See what those possibilities are before you make any drastic changes.

Also, don’t forget to make time for yourself. Time to see friends, to just relax and take some of the pressure off, basically time to “smell the roses” along the way.