Ask HN: When to give up on dreams? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: When to give up on dreams?

30 pointsrwanda51 comments

I made a similar thread a week ago but realize that it was far too long and unrelatable. To keep things short, I’m currently a very difficult 5-year math & CS program in a small European country. My main goal with attending this program was to get into machine learning-research as I feel I have the interest, aptitude and the field still having massive potential. Unfortunately, the workload is very high, and I’ve lost much of my interest for pure mathematics which the first three years mostly consist of. This makes the 60h/week required to maintain a decent GPA much more difficult. In addition to this, the program is basically unknown internationally despite being very competitive, so I feel like my chances of landing a PhD position at a good US school is quite low even if I feel like I have the talent.

On the flip side I can switch to a top medical school here (top 10 worldwide). I find medicine to be as interesting as mathematics while the workload being significantly lower. Getting a PhD position seems way easier too as it’s way more well known internationally. Simultaneously I can work as a physician or a software engineer if all else fails. By choosing this path though, I’d be giving up on my dreams in machine learning and not living up to my potential.

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Honestly, you sound burned out. I wouldn't make any career- or life-altering decisions until after some rest. There is a reason you picked the program to begin with and while medicine may be a good alternative, you will likely feel the same way if you get burned out in that industry as well.

Rest well friend!

I was going to post a top-level comment but I wanted to make sure to point out that the parent is the most important point; You are burned out and need some rest and perspective.

That said, consider that with a career in medicine, you could get into research aspects, learn some machine-learning on your own, and apply that to your medical research. I believe it would be much harder to go in the other direction.

Yes, burnout is something very real. Especially regarding disciplines so close to academia, as is the case of math. Even some of the most prominent mathematicians of the 20th century (e.g. Jean-Pierre Serre, Stephen Smale) thought of giving up at some point or had a bad streak. I wouldn't in good faith recommend that someone leaves the field, based on pre-asymptotic performance (what you see on the short term).

This is very good advice and I feel like you've gotten at the heart of the issue. The way you frame it makes it obvious to me that what you're saying is very true, and is not something I've thought about as explicitly as you stated. Thank you!

Medicine is crazy hard... way harder than ML/CS I think. Particularly emotionally hard.

Regarding a PhD, I am a Mexican who was "just ok" in a no-name Mexican college where I studied my BSc Computer Science.

I got a scholarship for the UK to do PhD in CS on a 'red brick' university. It was amazing and life changing. So you being on eastern europe surely can easily get somewhere good as well.

Dont give up your dream! Specially when your dream is so fucking profitable. (If you told me it was arts or something similar I would have doubts).

Since that seems to be resonating for you, I think you owe it to yourself to at least test the hypothesis before deciding not to do your original plan. I'm just repeating here what quantumite already said, but I wanted to comment from personal experience. I dropped out of mathematics when, around the time my first kid was born, I suddenly started to feel like my brain was paralyzed and unable to think mathematically anymore. I remember blankly staring at textbook pages for hours, unable to do any exercises at all. I didn't talk to anyone about it at the time, just concluded that I had lost all my ability, and suffered in silence.

Only years later did it occur to me that it might have simply been burnout, and with the right kind of coaching I might have been able to continue. So that's the other bit I'd suggest, besides just taking a rest: find some people who can advise you about this and who you have a good connection with personally. Don't just go through it on your own. Something that may not be obvious to you at all might be the first thing to occur to a more experienced person with your best interests at heart, and it might turn out to be a big deal. You don't need to deprive yourself of help.

This is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone say that medicine had a light workload, especially compared with other academics. Every person I’ve ever known who went into medicine was extraordinarily overworked for many many many years.

Having my feet in both worlds, I can say medicine is definitely not a light workload. However, I do think some of that is self-inflicted and unnecessary (in terms of medical organizations doing unnecessary things for the sake of hubris and/or impression management and/or exploitation and/or rent seeking). I also think the costs of academics in terms of work demands aren't generally acknowledged in public discussions, so there's kind of a "default relative assumption" about the two that's a little distorted. Medicine also varies a lot by location, so what's involved in different places is really different (this isn't to say some places are subpar, just that I think training philosophies etc can be really different).

Finally, in a broad sense, the OP is probably right that pursuing academics will be more difficult. In a hours per week sense, maybe maybe not (it's probably about the same), but academics is so completely broken that it's going to be a lot less straightforward and fraught. Europe, from what I get from my colleagues, is much more sane in both areas, but similar costs and benefits probably are involved.

I agree with others that the OP is probably burned out. But I think that's the nature of his problem. I'm more concerned about the fact he's saying that he doesn't have the interest for the math. That might be a function of that program, or might be a clue he's not interested.

Some random thoughts:

1. I might reconsider the goal of going to the US. There's plenty of great places in Europe, and (speaking as an American), academics are screwed up in the US. It's a bubble if there ever was one.

2. The OP might reach out to people in medicine and see if there are projects in medicine they could help out with, in terms of research etc. Even if it's remote I imagine there might be things they could do? It might help figure things out and/or open doors.

OP here. This is country dependent. From most I've heard medicine is one of the or the most difficult program to study in most countries workload wise. In the country I live it's quite different. From what I've gathered, the average seems to be 40h/week including lectures with only P/F. This might be due to medicine being a 6 year program as opposed to 4 years such as in the US. I'd put the difficulty to be quite comparable to a good CS or engineering program. I think the dropout-rate is ~10% which is very low.

I gave up on a dream about a year ago. I had been working hard, not very successfully, for several years to make a passion into my career, and it not only caused me burnout and depression, but also made me hate the thing I was meant to be passionate about in first place. Now I'm on a mediocre, safe, boring path (web dev). Of course there is still some lingering regret, but overall I feel very relieved.

My advice would be simple: Try to take a few days off if at all possible so you can go into this with a clear mind. Then for each of your possible choices think about:

* What does a successful outcome look like here?

* What does failure look like here?

* Is there an in-between outcome?

* How do you feel about ending up in each of these cases?

* What is the likelihood of each of these cases?

* If you go all in on this and fail, what realistic backups do you have? Does this change your opinion on the previous questions?

Take however long you need to choose, then act decisively and look back as little as possible.

I will also say that your expectations of a PhD in medicine being way easier seems off to me, but I am clueless about both medicine and machine learning, so what do I know. Do make sure though that you are making your decision based on good information.

Thank you for the thoughtful response. Switching to medicine is something I've been contemplating for a couple of months and though about all pros & cons, best-, worst-, average-, expected outcomes extensively, yet I still feel at a lock. To put it shortly, my best case is better staying at my current program and my worst case is worse. The average case is too difficult to determine as the probabilities I assign to each case are speculative.

As for a PhD in medicine being easier, I don't mean that doing the actual PhD is easier but rather the entrance requirements are. The medical school in my country is good so I can just do my PhD there which would be quite easy. On the other hand, the technical school I'm in doesn't have that much research in machine learning so I'd have to apply abroad which would make things much harder. Not to mention that machine learning is a hot area and perhaps the most competitive of all PhD-subjects.

Is your dream a PhD in machine learning, or to work on difficult machine learning problems? Many people (most, probably) come out of their PhD less happy than they were before, maybe there is a different way you can pursue this interest? If you even have a chance of becoming a PhD candidate, I assume you already have some skills in the subject that you could apply at a corporate job, on an OSS project, etc. I understand the appeal of "pure" research, but there are other paths as well.

I don't know much about the field so I can only guess, but maybe you can find some people here or elsewhere to talk about this who have the relevant experience?

My dream is to improve & develop new machine learning algorithms. Weather I'd do this as a researcher or through a private company doesn't really matter to me. It just seems to be a prerequisite to have done a PhD to most such positions I see ( Take Google Brain as an example).

Unfortunately, there aren't too many people/research in my interest area in my country, but I'll try to ask my classmates. Thanks for your comment!

> working hard, not very successfully, for several years to make a passion into my career

But did you learn anything ? If yes, I'd think of it as a very expensive education.

In terms of quantifiable skills that your typical recruiter will be interested in, not much. In terms of everything else, absolutely. I also had much more fun in my 20s this way than I probably would have had otherwise, at the expense of entering my 30s broke.

> I find medicine to be as interesting as mathematics while the workload being significantly lower

Dude, there’s something wrong either with your schools, or with your perception of reality.

In any case, life is not a picnic, there’s nothing unusual in constantly putting extra effort to achieve something worthwhile.

> Dude, there’s something wrong either with your schools, or with your perception of reality.

Talk to some doctors. Ask what their workload is like.

It turns out that software engineers are worked way, way harder.

In school?

Maybe in the US is different but where I am the self reported preparation times for medical exams are lower than that of a Physics/Math/Engineering exam: if I recall correctly Physics was at the top, then Math, then various Engineering disciplines (but not all, maybe CE was an exception), then Medicine.

Edit: Obviously things change in the actual job.

This is just not true for at least the first 15 years of a doctor's career.

Source: Worked with multiple surgeons all over the country.

Surgeons are not typical doctors. That's not a valid comparisons.

Sorry, I'm going to believe the BLS over one random person on hn

Certainly not true in the US. Medical professionals often work double shifts and put in lots of hours. Being on call or working weekends is mandatory in many cases. Beyond that, the work environment is much more stressful, especially now. The patients' lives are in your hands, and on top of that you have to deal with being assaulted (yelled at, spit on, hit, etc) or making a mistake and being sued.

Having worked as a software engineer/developer, I can at that sometimes the work can be challenging but overall the job itself has been pretty easy and low-stress in comparison.

During the first half of my career, I put in a lot of extra hours but then I realized it wasn't going to help me get a raise or get promoted so I stopped doing that and stuck mostly to the 40 hour work week which I was being paid for.

I don't undermine the stress of a software engineer (althouth 95% of them out there are doing quite simple and boring stuff on a daily basis, if you ask me).

But the nature of the medicine is incomparably harder and more complex than the nature of CS discipline (which is an artificial human-made construct, however sophisticated).

It only means that if someone puts less time/effort in studying more complicated thing, this someone is much worse in it than in less complicated matter.

Agreed. This quote stuck out to me. You either have a natural aptitude for medicine or you think the grass is greener on the other side. Maybe Dunning-Kruger effect. In any case, devote some time to the hard stuff. It will pay off.

OP here. To be clear, I'm referring to studying in school and not career-work. In my country it would be very non-controversial to say that the program I'm currently in is significantly harder and more time-consuming than medicine. I think this is due in part to the fact that medicine is 6 years here, as opposed to 4 years in some countries. Average workload for a medical student is around 40h/week including lectures with only P/F grading, while at my program it's around 52h/week on average and my guess is around 60h/week for good grades. Every one of my classmates who has a good GPA puts in 60h+/week.

Then the medical school you refer to is probably not worth it (I would never choose to visit a doctor, who didn't study harder than a programmer).

Being born in eastern europe myself I know of plenty of shitty schools, both medical and engineering.

I mean it ranks very well and the school itself has some very good research output. I need to reiterate, it's a 6 year degree and not 4 years. The workload is about the same for all medical schools in my country. I think the workload is similar to a CS degree at some good university but that's mostly speculation on my part.

You can give up on a dream when you have a clearer one.

Ask yourself if your dream is actually to have any PhD or a PhD in machine learning.

Sometime we confuse the goal with the means. If you don't like what you are doing, quit ! The sooner the better. When you like what you are doing, it doesn't matter how hard it get, you enjoy it.

If your goal is to have a PhD position in Machine Learning and you feel like your chances aren't good where you are, try to think about creative way improve your chances (competitions, side project, etc...). Don't just give up if it is really what you want.

But if you goal is just to land a PhD position, then move to improve your chances !

I really want to avoid invoking any cliches to the effect of "youth is wasted on the young" here, but even though that's an unfair generalization, there's still a grain of truth to the sentiment: there are certain aspects of life which truly cannot be understood except by irrevocable passage of time. I hate to say it, but many of the insights that might help you navigate your current situation are of that nature, so it's possibly that they could be misunderstood, but I'll try nonetheless.

One thing (among many) I didn't (couldn't) appreciate when I was your age, Is just how much of my life was still ahead of me. The notion that your path will be set in stone based solely on how you spend the next five years is silly, but it's an easy assumption to make, since it's what you're currently focused on, and (if your upbringing was anything like mine) there are probably lots of people insisting that this is a life-or-death situation.

Secondly (and I'm not sure whether this will come as a comfort or not), your dreams might change. What if you push through your current program and end up hating the field? Or get into a PhD in the US and hate it here? What if you become a medical researcher and find you hate that? Or decide to become a physician and hate it (while still harboring a love of machine learning)? And what if you suddenly decide that you'd like to pursue something altogether different than CS or medicine?

I'm not saying that because the outcome is unpredictable you should just choose a direction blindly. Rather, you shouldn't stress too much about whether your path will line up with your current passions. Ultimately, your interests may change in ways that you can't anticipate, but you're young, and (per paragraph 2) you'll have lots of time to change your mind in the future.

If this advice seems unhelpful, I understand (per paragraph 1), since none of it addresses what you should actually do. But, whether you realize it or not, this isn't actually a question about what you should do, it's a question about what you value in life. For what its worth, none of the imagined outcomes (ML PhD, Med School, SE) seem like a terrible fate to me, so you should just follow your heart.

Just make sure you're not swapping out one slog for another. Is it that you lost interest in the material, or that it's the amount of work required to pursue it? I doubt that you're going to find medicine less mentally (and physically) demanding.

I started a PhD and found that I just didn't love it enough. I think one's innate curiosity and drive regarding the investigation the subject matter needs to outweigh the undesirable aspects of the pursuit. I saw other people absolutely driven by their work, and they basically sailed through. The others who found it more of a chore often completed the program but then left the field.

It sounds like you and your program are not aligned.

The way you frame it, it almost seems like a no-brainer to switch. Perhaps that kind of work is just something you're more comfortable with. You can try these deep, introspective thought experiments, but I know it's hard to really know without actually doing it. The grass is always greener on the other side. Sometime it actually is.

First of all, thanks for your input and sharing your experience. I think I'm a similar position to you for as so far that I don't really love math enough. My main motivator for doing it is to become more competent for other things I'm actually very interested in (algorithms, machine learning etc.). It's a means to an end and therefore a chore in some ways.

To put frame it in a more positive light: I'm confident that if I am able to grind through the first years of math, things will get much easier due to my much higher interest and a less workload during the latter years. There is some career/research advice that goes along the lines of "do what you think about when you shower". When I'm showering I often think about something relating to machine learning or similar.

As for medicine not being less mentally challenging, I don't think that holds true in my country. I know it's the case in most countries but here medicine is 6y and average study time is around 40h/week with only P/F grading.

> By choosing this path though, I’d be giving up on my dreams in machine learning and not living up to my potential.

If I were you I'd reconsider this statement, which I've probably internalized so It's never challenged. Is any part of that statement actually true?

I studied one year of medicine in Switzerland and switched to something different afterwards (at ETH Zürich, a more technical university). My expectations of what medicine would be like were completely different than what it actually was. In my experience medicine was: - too many entitled people (due to the student selection process) - huge competition between the students (no one cooperating, or sharing learnings) - a lot of learning by heart (which I'm not good at & is very boring) - not very difficult to pass the exams

These were all reasons why I switched, but the main reason was the job I would end up with in the end. It's so much harder to work remote, have a good work life balance and move abroad (depending on where you live) once you start working than in other jobs.

I think even if you don't end up in machine learning in the end, having a strong computer science and math background opens you so many possibilities in this world that I would give it another go if I were you (after some rest, like others already recommended). Maybe you could make an exchange semester in another country? that can really help motivation wise :)

Good luck!!

Thanks for the response! Interesting comment :) I do however suspect that the "entitlement" you see among medical students has more to due with societal prestige than selection process, but this is pure speculation of course.

Yeah that's probably true :D it was just hard to imagine myself working with this kind of people for the rest of my life :O (of course not everyone was like this...)

It sounds like you feel your dream is unachievable, not that it's the wrong dream. I'd at least spend some more time exploring how else you can achieve it. Transfer to a different school without switching fields? Do the 5 year program in six years? Do a different program that still leads to a career in machine learning? Just take a break and go back to school in a few months?

Just throwing some thoughts out, but it sounds like you're burned out because you've lost touch with what made you passionate about this in the first place and it seems a pity to abandon it without exploring other paths to the same goal.

If you have knowledge both in biology as a physician and can code, you can also become a bioinformatician, where you can still apply ML. Maybe the difference will be that it will be more on the application side of the ML rather than the theoretical part.

Also, I will be cautious about "... landing a PhD position at a good US school", from my experience and others, I've found out that it's more important to look after a supervisor with whom you can resonate rather than chasing a reputable institution.

(Disclaimer, I'm a PhD student in the UK)

It's sort of the problem I'm facing here. Research in machine learning is weak in my country, so I'd probably have to apply elsewhere. Medical research here is very good though, so I would have no problem just staying here as there are multiple good advisors. This is what makes A PhD in machine learning so much more difficult.

It sounds like you need to evaluate whether or not your dreams are a good match for your personality. If you don't have the ambition or drive to do the daily work required for either a machine learning PhD or a medical degree, then your dreams are irrelevant, since the odds are good that you won't complete either of them.

Take a step back and try to really come to grips with your own limitations, and whether or not you're actually willing to put in the work to overcome them in order to achieve your dreams, whatever they may be.

This is the situation I'm in. I feel like it not be feasible for me to keep up with the very high workload for another 4-years, hence why I'm considering switching to medicine. I know realize this sounds provocative but it's not intentional, medicine is genuinely quite a bit easier here than the program I'm in. Probably quite comparable to a regular engineering degree from a good university.

Bringing machine learning skills to medicine (if you focus on medical research and the MD/PhD route) could give you a serious advantage if you're on the medical side and can code and understand ML. There are often advantages to having uncommon skills in adjacent areas. I agree with others here that you need to be highly motivated and in a good place to start a path like that, but it sounds like you're ambitious and planning ahead which is a great start.

I think you should talk to a therapist. They will help you work through issues like burnout, self-perception, self-acceptance, self-sabotage. Life is not easy and getting through a PHD program is not easy. Rewards do no scale linearly with aptitude or work effort. Our dreams usually do not reflect reality and it's easy to chase a fantasy and catch it to find nothing there. This will be a lifelong learning process.

You should take a year or two and work at a grocery store, then once you've figured out what you enjoy and don't enjoy in your work life balance you can make better decisions about professional development or education.

Also, things have a tendency to work out. When I was in college I wanted to study astrophysics because I thought space was awesome and humbling and I loved learning about it. However, as I worked through my courses I found myself doing a lot of heavy math and very little cosmic wondering. So I switched to English Literature and absolutely loved reading about philosophy and politics and the human condition. Nowadays I work on software development, which has the right balance of creativity and quantitative reasoning for me. I didn't set out on that path, or spend any of my university time studying it directly, but by being flexible and open and listening to my own needs I arrived at a great place (and I hope you do too!)

Keep track of your average goal-progress growth rate over time, and the timescale of the discounting factor of future rewards - longer timescales w/ really unpredictable progress is the riskiest combo, but that doesn't mean that's totally disqualifying.

Hopefully early progress leads to somewhat multiplicative growth of future progress - compound gains on early achievements.

Additionally, you're in a good situation if you can be at 80% peak effort and 20% peak effort at will - balance it about 50/50 imo. Lean on help - ask professors for mercy, order takeout when you're exhausted, etc. - to nudge your life towards that ratio, when possible.

Otherwise, if you're operating at max burn almost all the time, no matter how hard you work and how much it pays off, it won't be your dream - it'll be your yoke.

My understanding is the growth in PhD holders far outstripped the slots they could fill in Academia in the US sometime around 1970. Why would you want to put yourself into such an oversupplied labor market?

I assume your talents can be far better used in the private or government sectors.

Fellow HN users: Am I mistaken?

So here’s my question, someone can probably explain here.

I want to do R&D work in an industrial capacity. The particular domain/industry is a very credentialized one. I have no interested in going in academia as a career (becoming a professor, etc.)

I look at industry/government roles doing that sort of thing and they want you to have prior research experience in the domain, if not flat out listing a PhD as a requirement. How do you get in that sort of role without the research experience of a PhD? I’ve heard plenty about the institutional corruption, financial sacrifices, etc. That stuff is all fine with me in the long run, nut admittedly the time-cost is a bit intimidating.

80% of machine learning time is spent cleaning up bad data.

Go into medicine, you’ll dodge a bullet.

I agree. If I could rewind time I would do Medicine, at least my work would have some positive value instead of being neutral at best.

I'm from a small European country too, I work in machine learning research and I didn't complete a PhD, and had mediocre grades in uni.

Finish. Doing lots of math and computer science in your undergrad degree opens a lot of doors, doors you likely don't even know exist.

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