Good lord yes. I loved every minute of being a graduate student, even the parts that sucked.

First, the bad parts:

1) I chose to major in a program (controls engineering) that my undergraduate program left me completely unprepared for. I was also in a massive department - over 100 faculty and several hundred grad students, so it was either sink or swim. I audited all my classes my first semester, and then nearly failed out my second semester.

2) I fell head over heels for a girl my first year. It was awesome for about six months... until she dumped me for a football player. The infatuation and ensuing depression certainly contributed to my nearly failing out.

3) My advisor wasn't the easiest guy to work for. He had a very hard time treating students as intellectual equals, and hence wasn't open to collaborative work.

That being said, after the first year I got hired to be a research assistant in a lab that was developing robotic spacecraft. It had a neutral buoyancy tank, the only such facility on a college campus anywhere, and I got to build robots and go scuba diving with them.

I learned how to build robots from the ground up. I got to destroy them and build them again, better. On somebody else's money!

And my labmates. Oh, my labmates. I had the most awesome labmates. Three got asked to interview for astronaut candidate positions; one made it. Another is on the team that designed the JPL "Seven Minutes of Terror" Mars landing system and got featured on the cover of GQ. That says a lot about the caliber of student and people they were. I've never seen a tighter group of students anywhere. Two of my best friends in my lab, both women, were the "best men" for my wedding. When you pull twenty or thirty all-nighters with someone, you tend to either hate them or bond.

I also got to fly on the NASA KC-135 "Vomit Comet" and do a spacesuit run in NASA/Marshall's neutral buoyancy simulator, both experiences most people will never get.

But most of all, being a graduate student gave me long periods of uninterrupted time to study interesting problems. My advisor and my lab director were both hands off enough that they didn't mind me dropping everything to take three months to get a new robot working, or to teach myself a new subject. And I got paid to do this. It wasn't much, but it was enough to live, and I didn't need much.

Finally, just walking into the building, early in the morning before anyone else was in, and walking onto the deck of the neutral buoyancy tank, looking around at the various robots, spacesuits, and scuba gear - every day, I was living the dream that the eight year old me dreamed when I saw the Apollo-Soyuz mission on television. No matter what else was happening in my life, I grinned like a fool every time I walked through that door.

I upvoted several other answers months ago, but since I've been A2Aed on this, I'll add my own experiences.

• Yes, the PhD was worth it. However, it would have been far more worth it if it took 2-3 fewer years, instead of the 7.7 I spent in PhD. That's mostly wishful thinking: the computer architecture and compiler areas hit a bit of a rut and a shift to topics I didn't care for, so it was difficult to find my niche.
• Does it optimize one's earnings? Probably not. If I had worked after my M.S., and learned to program earlier, I would have more money now.
• To address the question details: yes, I had some depression. However, my depression wasn't anything as bad as I had in high school, mostly because I knew I could leave with good employment if I failed. I didn't really have much frustration: several people made it very clear before I entered that it wasn't the most intelligent people who made it through, but the most dogged. I held to that.
• Don't count on a career in academia. Don't even count on a job in your research area. I know you've likely heard this many times, if you lurk on Quora much, but it bears repeating. I no longer work in my primary or secondary research areas. Several of my friends do not either.
• You have to love the act of learning, and especially love learning things that can't be told to you and must be discovered on their own. You have to love it even when it crushes your ego. It should be your purpose. That's the big change from earlier levels of school. Some people just want to be told knowledge, and some people want to show their knowledge off. Those people shouldn't enter a PhD program.
• The PhD is a job, but it's not a 9-to-5 job. It's far more like working at a place like Google, Facebook, or Apple: passion, extra hours, and pressure to succeed. It's a place for "true believers." Like several people have said, it's very bursty: 80-hour weeks some weeks, 20-hour weeks on others. Don't be busy for the sake of being busy: once I moved away from that mentality, I enjoyed the process much more, but more importantly, I was much more productive.
• I met my wife during my PhD. The last couple years of PhD were a lot better, partly because of visible progress, and partly because of her. If the life of the mind is key to your being, then graduate school is a good place to find someone to share your life with.

I did. I enjoyed my grad life thoroughly. Here's why:
1. I was surrounded by really smart people who were passionate in what they did. I am an introvert and hate small talk, so the experience of talking to people who could talk for hours about science, engineering and philosophy with a glint in their eyes was a refreshing change from "real" life.
2. The experience of discovery was exhilerating. There were days, weeks or months when every single intuition I had was proven wrong. This was humbling, but it also meant that every intuition proved wrong was knowledge that was hard won. Every project that I finished left me with vastly more knowledge than I had started with. And the thing that makes it all the more fun is that this is knowledge that no one else has; it is not an answer at the back of the book, it is something that I discovered myself. My own little contribution to the collective knowledge of the world.
3. I was very lucky to be part of a fun and collaborative atmosphere, and work with an advisor who was top notch and also gave me space to explore my own ideas. Over time, I have come to realize this is one of the most important ingredients in a happy grad life.

Yes, God yes.

Lest you think my graduate experience was somehow semi-charmed and thus I'm a biased source, I'll start with the bad.

1. I had two advisors for a short while until one got jealous and insisted I choose. When I chose the other, he threw a tantrum and berated both myself and the other.
2. My main PhD problem became essentially intractable and I had to pivot.
3. I was rejected from all four fellowships I applied to as a graduate student.
4. I lived in the middle of Kansas, and was mocked in public constantly for my strange appearance.
5. Most of my research efforts died off and didn't result in papers.
6. My advisor passed away during my dissertation year and I was forced to delay graduation for an additional year, and finish the hardest part of my work sans advisor.
7. I ended a 10 year romantic relationship months before defense.
8. I incurred crippling debt that almost bankrupt me(I was within days of declaring bankruptcy officially), despite getting a high paying tech job right out of grad school.

Amongst all that, I loved graduate school.

I have a pithy reply when people ask me "do you recommend people go to graduate school?" I say, "no, I cannot in goodconscious recommend anyone go for a phd. And to a lesser extent, masters." And as they often reply "so if you could go back, you wouldn't go?" I smirk and say "I would absolutely still pursue a PHD."

The thing about graduate school, is that I know of no other way, to give yourself such an extended, focused, supervised period of time, to grow yourself, in a direction of your choosing. For me, and many others, graduate school was in a field of my interest. So take a minute and realize the meaning of that: I spent six years being paid to get really good at something I really liked.

The second important realization, is how it influences the rest of your life. Admittedly, I've been Dr. only for a year, so my opinion is a bit naive, but bear with me. Finishing grad school is an incredibly salient point in the argument "can I do a thing?" This is a conversation you'll have to have with yourself. This is a conversation prospective employers will have about you. Hell, even potential lovers may wonder this about you. While it may seem idealistic, knowing that you have done a thing, goes extremely far in the judgement of can you.

Third, is the rush one gets from progress. There are few graduate students that make it very far in graduate school without some progress. It sounds silly, I'm sure, but progress is something almost every grad student gets to experience many times during the tenure. This is a damn good feeling. Not to be lewd, but this feeling is oft compared to sexual release. That is the intensity of the euphoria that comes with some progress. I'm not going to say "yea, it was like a mental orgasm per day"; I experienced it far less frequently than some. But it eventually happened. To me and to the students around me. We had our afternoon where we had bug-eyes and flapping tongues, dying to advertise the arcane mental gymnastics we'd just performed that threw us up and over the bar of impossibility.

I think the essential argument to make is this: if the way is painful, and mostly at emotional sea-level, is it worth it for the dozen-odd highs which are stratospheric?

(Last line is especially relevant if you're in atmospheric physics.)

I am currently doing my PhD and I am enjoying it very much. I would enjoy any permanent job that would be exactly like the day to day job of a PhD candidate, that's just how much I like it. I wouldn't say that this is about "finding a field you are passionate about". It's about finding an environment that makes you enjoy your work.

Why do I enjoy studying for a PhD ? Because I like to learn.

A PhD is basically full-time learning, but contrary to all the schooling that comes before, you are in control of what you learn. I define my own problems, thus I define the topics I will have to investigate to solve those problems.

This is a typical day for me:

-Go to class. I decide which class I want to take, on what topic and with which instructor. I choose topics that I wouldn't want to learn by myself just by reading a book. I choose topics that I want to be taught by someone else, in a class, with a black board. I choose topics I will only learn properly through homework and exams. I choose instructors based on how well they communicate and what they require from their students. I also choose how much I care about certain classes. At the end of the day, I can choose to care a ton, because the topic is relevant, and I will get an A in the class. I can also choose to care less because the topic is interesting but nothing more, and I will take a B in the class. That has no impact whatsoever on my success as a PhD students. (That's a big difference with undergrad and high school where grades were so important !)

-Perform experiments in the lab. I picked a field and a research team based on what I would have to do in the lab. In my case, it is a mix between playing with lasers and playing with mice. I like to learn how to align an optical system. I like to learn how to perform animal surgery. My experiments are based on manipulations I enjoy doing and problems I like to have. I like when my problems can be solved by tweaking some small screws or taping something down in place. I like learning better ways to tweak screws and better ways to tape. I want to learn more on the experimental methods I use and how to become better at them.

-Sit in front of my computer, and stare at some code. I chose a topic where I would have to think and come up with original solutions to theoretical problems. I am currently building a model, which involves less than 50 lines of codes per day, but hours of staring at my screen and thinking. I like to create my own problems and my own solutions. I am the only person on Earth who understand the problems that I have, thus I am the only person who can come up with the solution. This is really empowering.

-Meet people and discuss with them. The best part of my work involves meeting fellow students, my advisor or some collaborators and talk with them about my work, or our field of research in general. I chose an advisor with whom I enjoy talking. I chose a lab with great folks who can listen to me and offer advices. I chose a department that encourage collaborations inside and outside of the department. Our lab meets three times a week to discuss various topics, related or not to our research. My advisor also encourage me to attend conferences where I can meet new people. This allows me to discuss with them and learn from them.

Every single day I learn from teachers, I learn from my own experimental work, I learn from my own theoretical work, and I learn from my advisors and the other researchers around me. That's all I do, learn, and I love it.

I'm thoroughly enjoying my time in grad school. Academia is fundamentally different from industry in that, at least theoretically, good work primes over immediate value. This allows for doing things the right way instead of doing things the fast way. For people who are interested in doing quality work this is very rewarding. In addition, the level of freedom that (some) PhD students enjoy is not comparable to anything in industry.

Good academic work does requires what I call "love for failure". This basically means that if you never fail then you're not taking enough risk, and your work is probably less valuable because it's either obvious or it could just be done by anyone else. When the 5 or 6 first things I try on a project fail, I start to think "this is going to be an interesting paper", in the sense that it may end up having some non-obvious conclusions. This is not to say that it's a bad idea to get involved in a few low-risk projects in order to have a cushion to fall back in case the high risk ones end up not going as expected.

I consider myself passionate, but that's a word that means different things in different people's minds. For me passion means "being interested enough in the topic that a failed experiment/nasty referee/funding problem will not significantly condition my experience". Those who genuinely care about something generally don't get put back by failure but see it as an opportunity for improvement. It pays off though to not build one's scientific self confidence in the outcome of the research but rather in the learning, the attitude and the execution.

As a side note, I'm doing my PhD at ETH Zurich, which is quite isolated from the funding problems that plague some other schools. This is a deliberate investment from the Swiss government that seeks to create a high added value, knowledge based economy. Also, my advisor is excellent in securing funding.

I kind of won the academia lottery, with a great advisor, great research area, working on the right problems at the right time, etc. And to be honest, if all of that hadn't happened, I'm pretty sure I would not have enjoyed my PhD nearly as much.

For me, I really wanted to be doing something that I personally found very fulfilling. Many of my friends had found great jobs in the tech industry (and were getting paid a lot more than I was). Doing a PhD does come with an opportunity cost, and I personally set a pretty high bar for what I would find fulfilling.

I did make my own luck to some extent. I was hungry to learn all that I could about computer science research. There were weeks when I would literally read dozens of papers, and just try to internalize as much of computer science research as I possibly can. I attended as many talks as I can, in areas spanning systems, cryptography, graphics, artificial intelligence, game theory, statistics, optimization, and computational social science. I cannot emphasize enough how much you need to be driven to learn and try new things, to not settle, and to find your own identity as a researcher. No one else can do that for you. And you will be much more likely to have a positive PhD experience if you do (at least in computing-related fields).

When I finally chose my research area at the end of my first year, I was reasonably convinced that it was something I would want to do for the next 5 years of my life, and possibly for much longer. What I didn't anticipate was how awesome my advisor turned out to be (see: Yisong Yue's answer to What are the biggest contributions of Thorsten Joachims in Machine Learning? and Yisong Yue's answer to What does it feel like to be a PhD student of a scientist who's generally considered to be a leader of the field?). That was just pure luck.

There were plenty of stressful or depressing moments, like during paper deadlines, or when my research was in a rut. But those things are curable with hard work, reflection, and support from your advisor. As a whole, I found my PhD very fulfilling, which I think is more important than constant happiness.

The question has already attracted many nice answers. Of course, everybody had different experiences and glad to see so many happy PhD students (current or former) like me.

I enjoyed being a PhD student the same way I enjoyed being a child. Of course, there was a steep learning curve, hard times, frowned faces but overall it was a great experience.

I still remember the day when I got my first publication after six months of hard work. The day when I gave my first international conference talk in Hong Kong and a few senior academics appreciated my talk in personal conversations, I was over the moon. Later on, traveling to different countries to attend conferences or research internships was a great exposure and awesome fun. I am indebted to my supervisor to supervise me that way and enabling me publish papers regularly and allowing me to travel to international conferences to present those papers. There are a few people here said they were lucky, I can fully relate to them. I was indeed lucky.

When I was at the end of my PhD after 3.5 years of starting and I looked back in the past 3.5 years, I thought about what I was when I came to Australia from India and what I have become with the learning experiences and being in association with superb academics, I felt a sense of achievement, which also made me happy. Of course, there is a long way to go in life and achieve many things but the amount of learning during the PhD days is unparalleled to any other phase of life.

The happiest moment of my PhD was when my father travelled to Australia to join me and my wife on the day of my graduation. The feeling that I could make my father and my wife (two people I love most in this world) happy, was the happiest experience of my PhD.

I would consider Ph.D. time to be the best days of my life. Basically, things worked for me because I started my research in the first year of Ph.D. to get a Ph.D. degree. However, when I was halfway through, I realized I was doing research just because I genuinely loved doing it.

Ph.D. is where you pick the subject you genuinely love, and you have all the time in the world to master it. I realized in the first few months of my Ph.D. that I genuinely love artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Since I am basically doing the job that I genuinely like, I don't feel burdened at any day. I simply do things because I love it, and that’s a great feeling.

Funnily enough, I peaked during my Ph.D. I was kind of in the top 4–5 in class throughout my school life and undergraduate studies, but reality struck me when I entered postgraduate studies at NIT. Imagine picking toppers from different schools in India and putting them into a single class. That’s practically what my postgraduate life was like in NIT Trichy. I realized I am no longer special, and everyone is equal or better than me. So, I graduated with a pretty normal GPA in my postgraduate studies.

Enter Ph.D. I never expected my Ph.D. to turn out the way it did. I graduated with top research outputs and earned the ‘Outstanding Researcher' award in institute day(basically a gold medal for Ph.D.). I never expected that I would be a topper at NIT. Hell, I thought entering NIT was my best achievement. So in my mind, coming out as the top of the batch in NIT Trichy, one of the top ten institutes in India, is just way out of my league.

Not only did I top in my department, but I also topped overall among all departments combined when it comes to research output.

Fast forward to now, I am a professor, and I still do research cause I genuinely loves doing it.

Thanks for the A2A, User-12934483509274756356!

I am not done with my PhD yet, but hopefully I will be soon, and I can say I definitely enjoyed it. Having said that, I can also see why my experience was different from the answers that you have seen on Quora. I really liked Inna Vishik's answer, so I am following the same template :)

Luck

I was insanely lucky with my PhD. Here's all the things that happened that led to it being a great experience:

• My advisers are among the very small subset of people who are both brilliant at research and also great at nurturing/mentoring grad students
• I work in operating systems. There is huge demand in industry right now for people who can build operating and distributed systems. So there was never the fear of "Can I find a job after the PhD?"
• I had a great cohort. A number of people from my undergrad institute in India, College of Engineering Guindy, Tamil Nadu, India, did Masters or PhD at Madison during my time here. So I always had a great group of people from a similar background to hang out with. Believe me, this is absolutely essential. I would not have done the PhD if I was all alone in Madison.
  
• I had a number of friends from undergrad in the US who supported and encouraged me all throughout the PhD. They were essential to my mental health :)
• I was able to de-stress and kick back with regular internships at Microsoft Research in Redmond and Seattle, where in addition to doing great work with researchers, I was able to explore a new city and hang out with friends. I used to go back to Madison completely refreshed each summer. This prevented burn out.

Mindset

Academia requires adjusting to a very different lifestyle, where there is a ton of work at certain times, and very little work at other times. This happened to suit my work style: I like working really hard for a short amount of time, and then kicking back for a prolonged period of time.

You have to be self-driven and not be a perfectionist. It is very easy to enter a PhD, and then spend months spinning trying to decide what you want to do. You can also spend months doing that perfect experiment or making your prototype better. You have to learn how to let go of perfection.

And of course, you have to somewhat be a happy person. I agree with Inna Vishik on this -- if you are easily depressed when you are alone, you will have to learn how to cope with that. I hated being alone before starting my PhD, and now I've gotten used to it.

Choices

Try to be social as possible, and to keep as normal hours as possible. I think the benefit of being in your office during the daytime was highly underestimated. Catch lunch with other grad students as often as you can. Have someone you can complain to about research.

Thanks for the A2A, Elynn Lee, and thanks to the OP for giving people who enjoyed grad school the opportunity to share their voice.

My Phd was a series of ups and downs, but overall, I enjoyed the experience and I look back on it with great fondness (and I am enjoying my postdoc equally much). I attribute my positive feelings to the three interrelated variables of luck, mindset, and choices.

Luck

• I was fortunate to work for a brilliant, well-connected, well-funded, hands-off, and kind PhD advisor who was also a great leader. The intellectual freedom and the opportunities I enjoyed in this environment were a big factor in my positive memories and in my successes thus far.
• My colleagues were brilliant and helpful, and I was fortunate to work with such inspiring people.
• I chose a subfield (back when I was too young to make a deliberate and thoughtful choice) which is generally well funded (as compared to other subfields of physics), even though specific topics may wane in fundability over time
• I happen to have chosen a field (physics) which takes young people seriously. While this may originate from an outdated notion that natural ability matters more than experience in physics, the end result is that grad students tend to be treated like junior colleagues rather than lab slaves.

Mindset

• Passion is not a prerequisite; competence and grit are. While I thoroughly enjoy what I do and I am curious and excited about the problems I work on, I view academia as a job, and I think this pragmatism played a big factor in my success and my enjoyment of the process. People that are 'passionate' tend to get extremely discouraged during the inevitable doldrums of grad school. There are days, weeks, or months which fucking suck. This is perfectly natural for a creative career, and even more so when you are subjected to external sources of malaise such as funding woes, mysteriously broken equipment, and sadistic peer reviewers. If you are motivated by passion, you will convince yourself that grad school has killed your passion and there is no more point in doing research; if you are motivated by being good at your job and advancing knowledge in your niche, you will have a less emotional response to inevitable periods of failure.
• Many people are very naive about academia--what tasks are and are not important, which jobs are and are not worth taking, and how the whole enterprise deviates from a perfect meritocracy. A little bit of realism and cynicism can be healthy.
• I think I am generally a happy person, and I can deal with delayed gratification. Maybe this should be the tl;dr of this answer.

Choices

• I optimized certain lifestyle considerations in my choice of graduate program, including weather, location, and stipend. These lifestyle choices can optimize your happiness and well-being and should not be ignored.
• I didn't work long hours when I didn't need to. Yes, when I had pressing experiments I pulled all nighters which would put a meth head to shame (and I still do); yes, when I had important deadlines I would put in the appropriately gargantuan amount of work (and I still do). But the rest of the time, I am not ashamed to leave earlier (and vow to work from home) and pursue other activities/obligations.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…"

C. Dickens, from his Doctoral Thesis Introduction.

I chose to not pursue an academic career in neurophysiology. Instead I chose the far easier path of academic medicine and enrolled in Med School after a postdoc. In retrospect, the lessons learned and experience gained during my Ph.D. were invaluable and the best of times.

Listen to Rishabh and the others here, not to all the complainers. Like everything in life, your experience of grad school is what you make it. Sure, there is a big diversity of hard luck vs. good luck, hard times vs. good times, bad choices vs. good choices, etc. But you still get to choose how to process it and remember it. Let me tell you the first years of my story two ways:

(1) In the summer before I went to Berkeley for grad school, I was accused of stealing a shipment of rifles from the US federal government. (See Gliders, Glasses and Guns.) To ward off being arrested I had to spend my grad school nest egg on lawyers. At the last possible minute they caught the real thieves and I was allowed to drive across the country to take my Prelim exams, which I flunked. That meant I had to spend my first year on probation, taking undergrad courses and wondering if I would survive. Many days I felt like my head was going to explode. Eventually I passed Prelims and got a job at the Rad Lab, where I mainly had to work on programming the online computer for a Bevatron experiment. At the end of that experiment my supervisor left Berkeley for another job and I had to go look for a new one. Woe!

(2) In the summer before grad school I gained a deep understanding of how the American legal system really works; this was excellent political preparation for the Berkeley of the 1960's and 1970's. When I arrived I got a chance to beef up my undergrad preparation and took great courses from Nobel laureates that I've never forgotten. Then I got a cool job at the Rad Lab working on a high energy physics experiment and learning how computers work at a fundamental level that I've never forgotten. Better yet, when that experiment was over I got freed by my supervisor to pick and choose his replacement and my PhD topic; thanks to the experience I had gained, I was able to choose wisely and found something that excited me and had great promise. Yea!

It goes on in the same vein.

Both stories describe the same facts. Which do you prefer?

Yes. I am really enjoying my time as a PhD student. And so did many people I know who are currently in academia.

I don't know if I am (or if I ever was) really passionate about mathematics (or anything in general), but I love doing it. A lot of my time away from solving particular research problems is also devoted to mathematics in some way or the other. For example, reading the basics of my field and learning things outside my field. I love teaching mathematics too, though I haven't yet got any opportunity to do that in a classroom setting.

Doing a PhD right now is totally worth it for me. I can't imagine doing anything else at the moment which I would find as fulfilling and interesting as mathematical research. That might change in the future, and if it does then I'll go find something else that I find fulfilling and interesting.

Also, I think the fact that my salary is pretty good plays an important part in my general happiness. I am not really living the stereotypical poor grad student life here that I read about on the internet.

I've had some enjoyable times in grad school, but I certainly wouldn't say that I've enjoyed grad school as a whole. For me, much of grad school was soul-crushing, but in the best way possible. That is, while these times were not at all enjoyable, I believe that I'm better off for having been through them.

In some ways, my time in grad school resembled a bizarre parody of PHD Comics. I'll admit to having sometimes felt a temptation to blame my difficulties on other people or on institutions. And I do think that some of my experiences speak to problems that are beyond my control.

Having said that, I also know that it was largely through my decisions that those problems became my problems. When I started at grad school, I had a habit of making important decisions by going with the default option, and this contributed significantly to my landing in a deep rut.

On top of that, because I felt that my work was going poorly, I tried to compensate by working more, so I didn't take the initiative in finding a satisfying social life. This made my low points worse by an order of magnitude or two.

Grad school taught me that I can and should take charge of my own life. Those years spent feeling stuck were a hard way to learn the lesson, but I still feel that I was very lucky. For some people, not making their own choices leads to a life of crime or substance abuse. For me, it brought nothing worse than a few years of relative unhappiness. And I'll manage to get an advanced degree out of the whole thing. How could I complain about that?

Ever since I started to see the light at the end of the tunnel, my life has been quite enjoyable. But the life lessons, the research lessons, and the degree--rather than any enjoyment while a grad student--are what made grad school worthwhile for me.

I am thoroughly enjoying my Ph.D experience, and do consider myself to be passionate in some sense. This does not mean that I would continue research if I wasn't well paid, this merely means that I like it enough to not get deterred by (some amount of) failure/rejection, or a few consecutive bad days. I concur with Quora User, passion means different things to different people.

That being said, here are some of the reasons that have contributed to my good experience:

• Good relationship with advisors
• Reasonably well paid stipend
• Not having to sacrifice too much on personal/social life
• Projects that haven't crashed and burned (yet)
• Great lab environments
• Flexibility in schedule: helpful, especially when you have important life events and no jarring deadlines
• Access to great resources and people

Some of it is definitely luck, but a lot of is dependent on how you approach things and your mentality. Everyone has a different experience, and it might not work out for all, but most of us do enjoy the learning process, and the freedom in thinking and execution.

Those out there who really enjoy their time as a PhD Student, I salute you! You are really blessed to have a good experience. Keep it up!

Here’s my analysis of what define as a good experience in a PhD Program:

1. You have a good PhD Advisor. This is the MOST IMPORTANT because PhD Advisors determine if you are worthy of graduating with the PhD or not. Therefore very important to have a Healthy Professional Work Relationship with them as much as possible. If they like you as their student, they will help you excel such as they give good advise in your dissertation project, they’ll assist you in publications which guarantee you’ll get your name published in journals, they’ll introduce you to other people who will be potentially useful for PostDoc or Post PhD jobs, & finally excellent letters of recommendations & references from them. That is, if you able to establish healthy professional work relationship with them; there are many unfortunates who unable to do this & things do get ugly.
2. You have a good & healthy work relationship with your surrounding PhD Peers in the Department where you are getting your PhD as well as in your Dissertation Research Lab. Another important thing is to get along with other PhD Students in your Department & in your Dissertation Research Lab. The ones in your Research Lab are supposedly your teammate & partner because same research lab, despite different dissertation projects; they can help you when needed. Meanwhile other PhD Students in a different Research Lab, but in the same department, they can develop friendships with you & it’s important to have friends, because supporting each other from academically to personally like mental well being. Good teamwork is also established from this too. However, to have this good thing happen, it starts with you. Don’t make the same mistake like I did. The PhD Program itself is already a difficult journey, where things can get competitive. Be careful with the competition, don’t sink to turn a competition into a TOXIC competition because once a competition gets toxic, you will see hell in a PhD Program by you will be feeling socially isolated & alone with lots of anger/resentment/bitter feelings, which can be detrimental to your mental health & well being. In fact, best to avoid creating competition. Remember, PhD Program is already hard, therefore, don’t make it harder by turning it into a toxic environment. Be humble & supportive & kind to one another, including yourself & you will see a good, healthy work relationship establish with your surrounding peers (Advisor too).
3. Sufficient Funding. If your PhD Advisor & Research Lab acquired a good Grant & sufficient funding, then you do not have to do TA for funding support. No TA is good because less distraction to you working on your Dissertation. This meant you have potential to complete your PhD Degree on-time within the average of 4–5 years. When sufficient funding is available (mostly by PhD Advisor/Research Lab, but also from you yourself awarded a Fellowship), you can use the funding to get better equipment, chemicals, & reagents necessary for your dissertation project; this would help speed up the completion of your dissertation project, meaning you have more potential to get things published as well as if you complete your dissertation early, meaning you finish the PhD Program early (but usually within the 4–5 year period).

To summarize, those 3 things above are necessary of having a Good Experience in a PhD Program. Those 3 things also interlink 1 another too.

I know several PhD Students did have a good time in their PhD Programs. I was jealous at them for that. But I have to say, those PhD Students who did have a good time in their PhD Programs, they were blessed.

Meanwhile, unlucky PhD Students like me, who experienced Hell & a Pyrrhic Victory from the PhD, the unlucky situation taught me a lot of things about life. It taught me how to be humble. It taught me to appreciate the little things. Finally, despite me unlucky in the PhD Program, I was “lucky” enough to still get the PhD Degree & a job in the end, even though it’s not what I dreamed of. Reflecting on this, I have to say, it could have been worse. Therefore, thank God I got the PhD Degree in my hands, despite my unlucky experiences of not having those 3 I listed above.