u/Cardie1303

I’m a chemistry PhD student in Germany and I’m starting to seriously question whether I should stop aiming for academia and focus on industry instead.

When I joined my group, I was very open with my PI that I was seriously considering an academic career. He encouraged that and presented himself as supportive of academic ambitions. Over time, though, I realized that his idea of “support” is very different from what I expected.

His philosophy is basically that PhD students should be independent scientists from day one. He does not see it as his job to provide publishable projects, actively steer publication strategy, or discuss journal placement before everything is done. He often frames himself as “quality control at the end.” If students need infrastructure or resources, the answer is often essentially “figure it out.” For example, I needed LCMS access for reaction control in complex synthesis work, and the response was not active help securing access but more or less that I should solve it myself.

The group also has a culture of very long hours. We are often the only group in the faculty working something like 10 to 10, but the publication output does not feel proportional to that effort. Former students have told me the PI used to be much more proactive and project-driving in his junior group phase. Now, papers can sit on his desk for months, funding applications are delayed for years, and he still tends to frame the productivity problem as mainly the students’ responsibility.

This has been difficult for me because I had tied a lot of my self-worth and future plans to becoming competitive for academia. I cared intensely about timelines, publications, and strategic positioning because I thought I had a fair chance at a PI career. Recently I started looking more realistically at academic hiring and realized how much high-impact publication output, strategic positioning, and mentorship matter. That led to a pretty serious spiral.

I’m not saying my PI is abusive. He is generally collegial and probably means well. But I increasingly feel like I am expected to carry career-level responsibility without receiving career-level guidance. I am supposed to be independent enough to generate publishable projects, solve infrastructure issues, coordinate collaborations, teach, and keep projects moving, while still being evaluated by publication output in a very competitive system.

The result is that I have developed significant mental health issues around academia: panic, constant anxiety about productivity, inability to relax, and a growing sense that I’m sacrificing my health for a career path that may not be realistic or even worth the cost. I have almost no social life outside work, and academia had become basically my whole identity.

Recently I started considering industry not as “failure” but as a legitimate primary path. Strangely, that immediately made me feel better. I started feeling motivation again for hobbies, language learning, travel, and taking care of myself. That makes me think the problem may not be science itself, but how much I had fused my entire future and self-worth with academia.

Now I’m trying to recalibrate without overcorrecting. I still want to do good science and finish the PhD professionally. I do not want to throw a tantrum, disengage, or burn bridges. But I also do not want to keep sacrificing my mental health for a PI-track fantasy if the environment is not actually structured to support that path.

I’m wondering whether others here have experienced a similar realization: not necessarily leaving because of one dramatic abusive event, but because the mentoring structure, uncertainty, publication pressure, and lack of strategic support slowly made academia feel psychologically unsustainable.