[Daddys_Visa]

Age: 29
Stakes: SNGs up 10 $109 and some 1/2 2/4 NLHE to mix it up.
Occupation: Medical resident
Status: Single, but have a few things in the works.
Happiness: Happy with some stresses. Not much free time, tons of student debt. General mood seems pretty dependent in what hospital ward I am on, some are fun and some suck ass. Main concern is not so much about finishing my training, its what I will do in a year and a half when I am done. Have to start thinking about where to move and what job responsibilities I want to take on and what specialty extra training I want to get etc etc. Am considering signing a 4-year contract with the army (Canadian Army). Pay is not bad, huge signing bonus (enough to instantly wipe out my student debt with some to spare), pension after 3 years service, only one 6mo active deployment (Afghanistan likely -- non-combat, base hospital), whatever specialty training I want at full salary with a 1:1 return-of-service commitment as far as time of extra training. Don't know...with all they are offering, looks pretty appealing. Have been in school so long I am institutionalized now. School is familiar, school is comfortable. Real life is scary.

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age: 27 in a couple of days.

occupation: physics Ph.D student

family: getting married in a few months

happiness: This is a mixed bag. Most days, yes. However, it's become clearer recently that grad school was probably a mistake. I'm close enough to finishing that I think I'm going to ride it out, but the postdoc route doesn't look very appealing for a variety of reasons, so I'm going to try and find some industrial job. I am pretty open to this not involving physics per se.

This is an occasional source of depression/frustration and is the main source of unhappiness for me. The academic route is what almost everybody goes into grad school expecting, and is what the culture is built around, so even if you've made the conscious decision that it's not for you, you still feel like you've failed. Sometimes this triggers jags where I get to feeling that I'm not very interesting anymore (which assumes I ever was), and that's not so fun. But this is pretty rare. For the most part, things are pretty good. I like my friends (grad school has been fun even if it wasn't the greatest idea), and I feel pretty lucky to have found my fiancee. She's a great companion, and considerably more tolerant of some of my foibles than most women would be.

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And dude, I hear ya. I was in your shoes when I was 24. Was in a PhD program in medical microbiology and I hated where that career was going. That was maybe the unhappiest years of my life. In the end I cut my losses, downgraded to a MSc and bolted. I then locked myself in 4 years of medical school which was a tough decision. I don't have any regrets, but with you having a fiancee and stuff it might be tough for you to take on 4 years of another program and all that extra debt you will incur. Once you start a 9-5 with steady income things might turn around for you.