When to give up on dreams?

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!

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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!!

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 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.

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?

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

Go into medicine, you’ll dodge a bullet.

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.