I am going to start my PhD degree this week and I realised that, for personal and professional reasons, I don't want to do it.
- Personal reasons: I live in a foreign country and I don't like living here, I have no friends or girlfriends here and I'm far from my family. I already lived two years here during my masters degree and I'm just sick of it.
- Professional reasons: I don't want to work in the academic area. I don't hate it, but I prefer to work in a company or start my own company in the future. Besides that, the companies in my home country don't value too much a PhD degree, so after 3 years of sacrifice in the PhD, I would be applying for the same jobs I could apply now.
At least I'm not officially engaged with the university (I'm not even enrolled), so I could just give up, the problem is telling my PhD supervisor this.
I'm having lunch with my supervisor tomorrow and I don't even know how to start to tell him this. He put a lot of effort to put this thesis together and to make this work for me, he'll be very upset. I'd like to be the type of guy that says "f**k the world, I'll do whatever I want" but I'm not, I'll be very ashamed telling him this, he'll probably try to convince me to do it, and I'm afraid I won't be able to say no.
So basically I wonder how to start to tell my supervisor about dropping out and how to say no when he tries to convince me.