A 4th year PhD student asks—

I've been dealing with a lot of personal and professional stress lately, and I’m looking for advice. My experiments are going well enough, but there’s always more to do and the scope of my project keeps growing. I know I'm prone to burnout; I was working at a startup before coming to grad school, and the long hours were so bad I ended up quitting without another job lined up. I’m starting to notice similar signs of overwork, but I am seriously committed to finishing my PhD. Do you think it’s reasonable to take a leave-of-absence at this stage, or should I focus on pushing through my final year or two? I don’t really hear about other people doing it very much, except for parental leave and things like that. Do you think I’ll regret it?

I'm glad you have an awareness of what the signs of overwork are for you, and I’m sorry to hear you are noticing them! Knowing and respecting where your limitations are is a really important part of navigating your career, so I commend you for building and using that skill.

I want to start with my personal take that if you are asking yourself whether you should be taking a leave, that itself is worth listening to! There is a real skill in building your intuition around when it’s time to push through a hard moment and when you are pushing past your capacity and damaging yourself. It’s your call to make—which means I don’t think you should necessarily be looking to other peoples’ examples for whether it’s what you need to do. I hear you asking if it’s “reasonable” to take a leave of absence, since most people don’t do it, but your PhD doesn’t need to proceed the way other peoples’ PhDs have, and what’s right for them is not necessarily what’s right for you. Especially in a work culture (of America, of academia, etc.) where having boundaries around work and saying “no” is not valued, I’ll do my tiny part here to encourage you to listen to yourself.

You mention regret, which is an inevitable part of being alive, and therefore also of having a career! You have finite time and energy, so you’ll always be missing out on something. Since you'll always be missing something, you can try to actively choose what you're going to miss, instead of trying to miss nothing (which isn’t possible) and therefore end up having the choice made for you.

To make this choice active, let’s consider how you might handle the various regrets. For example, if you take a leave, there could be the regret of losing a cohort of mice you’ve been waiting a long time for, or not finishing your PhD by a certain time. If you don’t take a leave, there could be the regret of pushing into burnout and ultimately taking even more time to finish your PhD. How do these weigh on you? How might you handle that regret? There’s also choice to make in the way you take your leave. For instance, it may feel like “take a leave” and “don’t take a leave” are the only options, but there’s also how long the leave would be, what kind of leave, when it starts, etc.

Ultimately, this is a personal decision. The fact that you are considering this option is enough evidence that this is a good thing for you—you don’t need more evidence from whether other people have done it or not.

-Ray Care, Program Director, Career Development Team for Researchers