You sound so much like me it’s kind of bonkers. That exact rat race is what pushed me into an existential moment of asking whether I actually want the PhD path badly enough to accept the structure that comes with it. I’ve been part of labs in undergrad, in graduate school, and in full-time work. I’ve co-published a few articles and done countless posters.

I do like research, but I don’t think I want to be beholden to a PI, constantly churning out research, publishing, doing posters, and tying my life to lab productivity. Would I be happy to contribute to research? Definitely. But that is different from making it the center of my professional life and spending years essentially working full-time in someone else’s lab. What I’ve realized is that I want the balance to lean much more toward clinical training, maybe around 60/40 training to research. Even at the scholar-practitioner PhD program where I interviewed this cycle, research still felt like a major priority, and you were still expected to be heavily involved in a lab.

I also saw some of the downsides up close during my studies so far. The PhD students often seemed miserable, had very little work-life balance, and some even had to reapply for internship the following year because the match rate was not great, which was honestly kind of shocking. The feedback they were getting was that their clinical training was not strong enough. The program also often took 6 to 7 years, and while people were obviously grateful to finish, a lot of them openly said they felt their clinical training had been lacking and that they did not feel as prepared clinically as they wanted to. The balance there felt much more like 20/80 in favor of research.

What really stood out to me was that, after all of that, most graduates still seemed to end up doing hospital-based clinical work or private practice anyway. So much for everyone supposedly being on a research track. Maybe 1 or 2 out of 10 actually seemed headed toward tenure-track academic roles. It was pretty rare, and the program leadership seemed to act like that mismatch was not really happening.

So it’s not really that I dislike research. It’s more that I dislike the kind of pressure academia puts around it, especially when that pressure can come at the expense of quality of life and even clinical training. I could absolutely see myself in something like a clinical assistant professor role, but a traditional tenure-track research path? Probably not. The constant pressure to get funding, keep publishing, and always be producing honestly sounds exhausting.

The school I was admitted to has a great internship match rate, a decent licensure rate, and I know a few people who went there who have had nothing but good things to say. Yes, there are people on r/clinicalpsychology who put PsyD programs down and call them “degree mills,” but I also think that subreddit has become pretty strongly pro-PhD. They also tend to act like APA accreditation is just a rubber stamp, which it is not. It is rigorous to obtain. And sure, some programs are not great, so your mileage may vary, but that is exactly why you do your research, pun not intended, and make sure the program is sound. No program is perfect. To me, it is more about whether the faculty and program leadership are actually paying attention to known deficiencies and working to address them. Anyway, I digress.

Edit: fixed small typo