Hi Muffintop! I love your username, too :)

It's such an interesting thing in academia that these brilliant researchers get thrust into advising positions which they may really have zero experience in or training for. There seems to be a huge variation in grad school experience based on who a student ends up with and how well their mentor picks up the advising role. At least the end of the tunnel is in sight!

My SO does all the cool laser stuff. He's more in the condense matter field and works on designing and testing IR detectors. My research is focused around designing and building instrumentation to observe X-ray sources in outer-space. Really cool things like the explosions of stars and the environments around black holes emit X-rays, so we work on ways to study the emissions from those kind of sources. X-rays don't make it through the atmosphere very well, so we have to put our detectors out on satellites or strap them onto sounding rockets to take observations. It's a fun challenge to design equipment that works well but is low mass/low power/happy in vacuum/can survive launch.

How about your research? Do you at least like your project if not really the environment?

I'm 4 years into a Physics/Astronomy PhD and have 1-1.5 years left (hopefully). I had a rough experience with my starting adviser, which lasted for 3 years before I realized that I couldn't/wasn't willing to continue constantly being demoralized by my work environment. Luckily my current adviser reached a hand into the darkness to pull me out, and I'm now working on very similar stuff in a much happier environment where I feel useful and appreciated.

I'm also thinking of leaving academia when I finish, although I am becoming more open to the idea of taking a post-doc if I fell into one I really felt good about. My husband is also a physics PhD student, so we are preparing for the prospect of hunting down two jobs in a single geographic location in related fields. I just want to have a lab to work in with good employers/coworkers and a decent salary doing something that doesn't make me claw my eyes out from boredom.