I am thinking of quitting my PhD program to leave with a master's degree. I don't think I learned much in my PhD so far, and I would have gained more skills if I got a normal master's and took a bunch of classes instead of spending the past two years doing research.
Is it a good idea to quit my PhD program and then apply for a second, coursework-based master's degree in the same field? Or is there some way I can accomplish this at my current school?
If you want to try making a few changes, to see if they have a positive effect, before deciding, here are some ideas:
Each semester, take one of the classes you're interested in.
Before reporting the week's results to your advisor, anticipate what he might prescribe as the next step. Write up your ideas about next steps each week, to show to your advisor for his opinion and/or green light to go ahead as you proposed.
Set aside one or two hours every day for literature research (reading of papers). In the beginning it might take you more than a week to get through a paper, but it will get easier with practice.
Please note, your distractibility is something you could talk over with a doctor (general practitioner), if this is a significant problem for you. There are a number of things you and your professors can consider trying that might help.
If your doctor screens you and finds a noticeable difference between you and the general population in this regard, you can get some assistance with management of the distractibility from your university.
The main thing that a student should learn as the result of studying for a PhD is how to be an independent researcher, which means being able to formulate new research questions, generate hypotheses, design experiments to test hypotheses and analyze the results. Another important aspect of research is being familiar with the work of others in your field (which means reading lots of papers), both as a source of ideas, but also for proper evaluation of your work. Sure, you will also gain some new technical skills in the progress, but that is not the primary goal. To be a researcher you need to learn how to gain these technical skills without being taught them, because if you are near the state of the art, there is largely nobody there to teach you anymore (other than by reading their papers).
The important question is why are you studying for a PhD, what to you want to do as a career? If this is not research based, the need for a PhD is perhaps questionable.
