I fucked up

Any cuck with a finance degree can become a trader. Physicists on Wall Street are supposed to become quants.

Why don't you try teaching high school physics? You can use your knowledge for something fulfilling.

T-Thanks for the advice guys. Guess I have no other option but to just kms...

Why don't you get more time?

You gotta be kidding me. I used to get bullied by kids 5 - 10 years younger than me that forced me to avoid the cafeteria and eat my lunch inside a private toilet.

Nice trolling.

Well at least you have digits

Man. It sounds like it sucks to be you. How about you take a job that's "beneath" you, learn how to program while doing that, and then become a programmer?

Yes I'm linking reddit, because some of the comments might help.

reddit.com/r/GradSchool/comments/4flrqp/job_searching_i_feel_like_i_was_lied_to/

>experiment

What experiment? If I have the right materials I could help you get some more Data. Otherwise you can always write that the experiment failed, but you would have to write why.

OP you were fucked from the moment you chose an advisor that let you do this.

Everyone on this board listen up and listen clear, this will literally save your life. In doing a PhD, your research doesn't matter. The field doesn't matter. The topic doesn't matter. The only fucking thing that matters is the mentor you pick. That is it.

picking a mentor: The ideal mentor is
1) publishing at least 10 papers a year. Yes, this many. You are an american, and as such you should pick the cream of the crop labs. Mentors publishing less are chinese slave tier labs.
2) mentor is generous with authorship. Look at past publications, make sure the students are regularly getting 1st, 2nd author spots on multiple papers a year. You want a mentor who puts everyone on every paper in his group. If he only puts you on papers related to your primary project, you will publish 1-2 papers total in your PhD and you are FUCKED.
3) mentor is a 45-50 year old FUCKING WHITE MALE. why? age 45-50 is where a professor is in their peak. They are just old enough to have gotten the hang of things, established funding, etc. But they are not old enough that they lost their drive to publish and make an impact on their field. Younger and you risk professor losing funding, failing at experiments, etc. older and they often slow down or do only low impact experiments rehashing what they did in their prime over and over. DO NOT PICK A FEMALE ADVISOR. You will be fucked. They will get pregnant and fuck your life up when they take a year off. they will take long breaks from research to be in teaching, administration, etc. Just dont do it. women are not stable. And don't pick a non white mentor (asian american possibly okay). professors from asia directly are just sketchy as fuck honestly, half of them are ready to go back to india/china at a moments notice. black professors dont exist in STEM.

4) pick a professor with funding. preferably the equivalent of an NIH R01 grant. You CAN NOT worry about your funding being cut on top of everything else while doing a PhD.
5) pick a professor who has had a student before. you DO NOT want to be a professors first student. let some slave from india/china do that.
6) pick a professor who gives you multiple projects at once, a few of those being SAFE projects to build up your pubs, and a couple being risky original stuff to make your name. leave the wacky shit with high chance of failure to the chinese/indian slave students.

Remember, your PhD is 90% decided on day 1. You will breeze through with at min 7-8 pubs (2-3 first author) mostly just doing safe projects your mentor tells you to do, while at the same time assisting him with other projects the build up your record as well, and finally doing 1-2 "unique" things to add some spice to your resume. assuming you pick your mentor right.

choose your mentor wrong, and from day one you are fucked. You can work 120 hours a week, but if your professor only gives you risky projects with little help and doesnt let you pad your resume with papers you helped a little on, you will only have at best 2-3 pubs at the end of your PhD. You will lose out on postdocs and industry positions to the students of the professor who gave their student 5-6 more papers than you, even if you worked way harder.

Life isn't fair, take advantage of this. Understand that 95% of PhD spots are intended as slave labor for international students from 3rd world countries. choose one of the 5% intended to train up the next gen of US scientists.

What field are you in where you can get that many publications?

I'm only doing a masters right now. But by every criteria you've listed, I should get the hell out of dodge. There's about a dozen students in my group, but the number of journal publications each year is less than the number of people. I've only been given one project and he wants me to do it in a fairly specific way.

go to fucking law school or med school

having a Master's in Physics or even just a Bachelor's will easily get you into school.

Patent Lawyers make a shitton of money and need to have some kind of scientific knowledge. Shit, it's Einstein got good at physics by spending 24/7 in a patent office.

Having a high Impact, highly published mentor is ideal. I only did a masters but got 3 papers in a year because i road the gravy train. My PI had over 600 pubs in his field and is always doing collabs, he'd just throw me on anything I touched.

Holy shit, what field?

care to elaborate on the nature of your research? what do you need for publication quality work - more conclusive data, theoretical work done, more analysis, or what?

I realized after submitting my first paper how much fucking love i put into it - a grave mistake. I am proud of the work because it is beautifully done.. however, I could have gotten two papers out of that research in half the time. don't get too attached and make it perfect

I personally am in neuroscience (computational, more programming than anything. some animal/cellular stuff). 10 papers a year is probably around 90th percentile for neuroscience professors. There is some variance from field to field, but shoot for whatever the equivalent is. Even in physics or chemistry, I guarantee if you look at any of the "distinguished" professors in your department they will have at least 200 pubs. If they are 60ish and really got started with tenure around 35, they easily were doing 10 papers a year in their age 45-50 prime.

This is exactly what to do. A PI who just fucking understands that these days, pubs are a big deal. A nice guy who knows that by letting a student finish up the last 10% of a side project, that student will be able to prosper after completing their PhD instead of committing suicide.

There are professors who do 2-3 "big" papers a year. Many PhD students go after these guys because they are doing exciting stuff. This is a mistake. The type of professor you want is the one that will publish one of those "big" papers as 4-5 bite sized ones instead. you want a professor who is continually collaborating to have many side projects, writing review articles, just doing whatever bullshit it takes to spam the world with publications. And you want a guy who is nice enough to put you on those publications.

Don't want to be too specific but it's in biomedical sciences.

>10 papers a year
Jesus fucking christ your fields are insane. The typical number for mine is half that at most. And if a grad student finishes with more than three first author papers under their belt they're basically gods.

But yeah OP in a perfect world your advisor would have been keeping track of your progress and making sure you were on course to fill your graduation requirements. The very fact that your first thought was to ask fucking Veeky Forums amd not talk to your advisor about your concerns is an enormous red flag.