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As someone who had a less than ideal PhD experience, while exiting ABD feels like a failure in the near term, the long term impact is very low, unless you're desperate to remain in academia.

In short, you don't have to take the abuse - I'd look to change major professors.



Yep I want to stay in academia but I'll probably try to sell my own products one day. I could change lab I think, but I'm not guaranteed that the situation will be better elsewhere. Heck, on the paper this lab is exactly focus on the kind of stuff I want to do.


"not guaranteed that the situation is better elsewhere" - almost certainly it couldn't be worse.

Labs change focus all the time, even without describing it to the world. Why else would they have bumped your research?


> Why else would they have bumped your research?

Cultural context. While the research product (papers, mainly) is very international, how the sausage is made vary greatly by countries. While one of my topic of interest have decades of interest in Europe, it got zero attention here. Also I've noticed that most papers I read in English are basically ultra-specific narrow crap tested in questionable conditions, while stuff written in my native language try to address bigger issues and are more convincing (but also less data centred). Even the way of writing a PhD thesis is different: monograph in Europe, slapping three journal papers with an intro and conclusion here.

My solution will be to continue doing the minimal amount of work that I'm forced to do and write interesting papers with my external network of colleagues. It's of course forbidden by the lab rules by I found a loophole I can exploit.




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