Imagination is the highest form of research.
Albert Einstein
In an earlier post, I mentioned being in my last year of my PhD. I thought it was important to explain how it all started. Why does one decide to do a PhD and dedicate at least 3 years of their life to research?
Great question, to say the truth… to which there is more than one answer! Different profiles of people decide to pursue their studies in higher education with a PhD. They are the ones that are truly and fully passionate about research and know in their heart that academia is the path for them; they enjoy everything about academic life. They are the “academic” PhD. They are the ones that like doing research, discovering new things, thinking about a way to answer empirical questions for the sake of knowledge, and the ones passionate about one topic specifically. Those two types are more committed to research than to academia as a whole; they are the “research” PhD. They are the ones that happen to do a PhD because somebody convinced them it was the way forward; it could be after an Undergraduate or a Masters degrees, a student good in research talked into doing a PhD with a specific member of the academic staff. Those ones are PhD “by default”. Hear me here – I am not arguing there one type of PhD students better or more dedicated than the others.
Doing a PhD is a huge commitment, regardless of why you got into it. But why is it so hard to do a PhD? On paper, it sounds pretty simple: you got a project with a main research question that you break down into sub-questions, usually easier to address and that will help answering the main one. Once you got that (you either come up with the topic and main question yourself or it was presented to you by your Director of study, a.k.a. your first supervisor), you need to design experiments to answer the different sub-questions, conduct the experiment, analyse the data, interpret those data based on previous literature and current research, and write up all the experiments into a comprehensive whole called your thesis.
Easy peasy lemon squeezy... Hmpf, right.
Rationalising the PhD process, it is hard to say WHY exactly it takes such a heavy toll on candidates. Yes we have to be autonomous, be pro-active, and be totally and solely in charge of our project. Yes we have our fair amount of work to do that can just come out of nowhere with a deadline for yesterday. Yes it is a stressful job. Yes it is hard to disconnect from it (we breath, eat, and sleep with our PhD on our mind). But it is not the only profession presenting those challenges. I’d dare say however that it is one of the rare profession requiring you to be an academic researcher, a gold miner, a manager, an accountant, a good writer, a good presenter, a good teacher, and a chameleon (I probably forgot some of our qualifications here, but I’m sure you get the idea).
When doing a PhD, you are told it is your project, yours entirely, and that at the end you will be the world expert on your topic. However, along the way, you still need to report your progress to others and check every important decisions with your supervisor(s). I think for me the main source of stress is the human factor inherent to every PhD, the fact that no matter how much you’re trying to be on top of things, at some point you will have to be relying on some else: booking a meeting with your (incredibly-busy-yet-managing-to-fit-you-in) supervisor, collecting data involving participants (humans or none-humans to be fair), waiting on a review of your latter paper, waiting for someone to answer an email… No matter how much we say a PhD is a personal solitary experience, at some point you will need to interact with other humans. And that slows down things like nothing else can.
The second main source of anxiety is learning to deal with the level of stress. Not the one resulting from other people; no, the stress YOU put on YOURSELF. When you start a PhD, it can be tricky to understand exactly what is expected of you as a PhD student/candidate. You have to make progress on your project and you have couple of milestone evaluations along the way – copy that. But what about the level of interaction with your first supervisor? You need to be independent but technically you are still learning to be a good autonomous researcher. Once in a while, you need the reassurance provided by your first supervisor, just making sure you are on the right track. How often is that exactly? Here’s one piece of advice for everyone about to start their PhD or still early in their PhD adventures: sit down with your first supervisor and ask about the expectations they have of you. Every job comes with a thorough job description with what is required of you – PhDs don’t. Develop your own with your first supervisor.
Being a PhD student/candidate is an incredible experience… on so many levels! It is challenging and stressful, but under the right supervision (i.e., with the right level of support from your academic mentors) it is worth it. If nothing else, it is a personal journey – you grow a lot, you learn a lot, and you develop transferrable skills… a lot of them! Whether you decide to stay in academia or not, remember this – not matter how far you went in you PhD degree, how easy/hard it was, at the end of it you are worth it. You have the ability to evaluate a problem and come up with potential ways to find a solution, you can deal with a reasonably large amount of data and interpret them, you can produce reports, you can present those report to larger audiences, and you can work independently while being part of a team.
Remember this – you got it.
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