Why I dropped my PhD. program after 10 years?

 I started to pursue a Ph.D. with a major in computer science in 2011. My goal was to learn knowledge and make my parents proud. However, I did not receive the certificate of a Ph.D. degree in the end. Instead, I applied for the certification of attendance in 2021 as proof of official academic achievement and as a souvenir. I did complete my dissertation and had passed the inner defense, but there was still an academic review and an outer defense. I have acquired 2 patents, which are a novel method of analyzing trajectory which can be applied in the traffic management system or accurate Estimated Time of Arrival(ETA). I wrote 6 papers, all on my own, listed as the first author. The best one was published "IEEE Access." The worst one was published in arxiv.org. I had finished my dissertation. I passed the English requirement by getting an 845 score on TOEIC 11 years ago. I finished all the courses that are required by the department, and I took some extra courses as much as possible to advance in every possible way. In my following essays, I will explain the two main reasons why I decided to drop my Ph.D. program after 10 years of effort. 

First and most important, my abilities might not be enough. One of the abilities is English. My language ability is always my weakness. Since I was a child, I hated reading and writing, resulting in me not being able to keep up with my peers. I spent decades improving the reading of my native language, Chinese, but I later had to face the same problem of doing it all over again in English. However, slowly reading is not the primary problem. My slowly English reading disables me from finding well writing academic articles so as to waste my precious time spent on reading poor articles. Furthermore, I have a family to take care of, my wife and two kids, which decreases my time that I can put in on my research. Also, I am already 40 years old; as I age, my learning and research ability is not as good it was.

Secondly, the advisor was not helping at all. After the inner defense, he gave me two classical comments. One is that "You don't need to respond to every word. You should lower your head and make your notes (translation)," while half of the time at inner defense, I already had no words to debate and lowered my head to make my notes. Another classical suggestion is that "Doing academic research is a useless thing." I may create useless work, but my goal is to contribute to humans, not the opposite. After considering previous events, he asked me to pay half of the publication fee while I submitted a paper to "IEEE access," and he rarely helped me to improve my paper. What is even worse, he actually made it worse. At that moment, I realized  I should never receive a Ph.D. degree under this professor’s guidance because it may harm my reputation in the future.

In the end, I made the decision to give up the PhD. program after 10 years of effort. I think I have no time to be wasted in that place. There are plenty of things to be done. There are urgent matters in my family that need to be dealt with. I want to sell my own inventions, for example, a modified Infrared Human Sensor. Moreover, I like to go abroad to see other cultures with my family. Nonetheless, reflecting back on my 10 years’ effort, I have still done something that I am proud of —  I can have control over the fact that I am the only author on my dissertation. 

Thanks to my TOFEL writing teacher helps me by correcting this article. I wrote this article that is also for practicing my writing skill.