When is a proper time to consider quitting a phd?

Question

I am considering the possibility to quit from the phd program I am involved in ( to be completely honest it is not me BiA considering that, but another person that wants to remain anonymous )

The group I am working in has several criticalities:

• the advisor is not good in managing his time, and he continuously postpones meetings. He already told me several times that I should be more insistent and try to go randomly to his office, so that we could have at least one meeting a week. I tried several ways to fix appointments with him but it does not work.
• the advisor changes goals for my work every time I met him. This is very confusing.
• I feel that what is asked for getting the phd is essentially cheating. The advisor wants more than 3 publication in 3 years, and after joining the group I discovered that this takes normally more than 4 and 1/2 years.
• a lot of people have left the group in the last year, more or less 50% of the people that I knew when I first came to this group. The reason are several but all related with the advisor
• the people in the group are very friendly but they do not work as a team, also because helping other people in the group is not considered a good practice. Moreover in a while the entire group will be formed of just phd students in their first year.

Since I am still in my first year I am thinking of exit this ugly situation. But sometimes I think it could be too early. On the other side I don't see possible improvements in the near future. And I don't want to stay stuck in a bad situation for 3+ more years.

My primary question is, should one quit a PhD within the first year if the working environment seems to be a poor fit?

As a follow up, what would be good way to describe this situation to a possible future employer without saying "my previous job was really bad"? No one wants you to blame the old boss...

Answer 1

There are a few subproblems I want to respond to, then an overall answer.

If an advisor is not invested enough in a project to spend time on it, the student is going to have to struggle with avoidable problems, i.e. issues which the adviser could have quickly addressed. It's still not impossible, and some students might even flourish without micromanagement, but it's not ideal. So then, is it that this advisor doesn't care to spend time on the project, or that they have many other commitments and are just doing a poor job allocating their time? If they earnestly want to meet but are being pulled away by teaching and committee work, then the student might be able to help out by tracking down the advisor when they are available.

Pressure to publish is almost universal in academia and if we want to be successful we have to embrace this as a delicious carrot rather than a heavy stick. However, for many PhD students there is a gap between what the program tells the students to do and what the median student who receives a PhD actually does. If you want to pursue a faculty position, you need to aim substantially higher than the median--in terms of publication counts, everyone should aim higher than the median in terms of personal achievement--but if that's not your path then it's less critical.

Now, those issues aside, I generally feel that if a student is bothered enough by a working environment to make a list of the reasons they think the environment is awful, then regardless of how common any individual factor might be, it isn't working out. Don't torture yourself. If you love the work you do, then look for transfer opportunities. You should quit a PhD as soon as you know it's not working, regardless of how much time has actually passed.