Glossary:
PhD students
noun
A group of overachievers constantly feeling subnormal and that life is going nowhere
Two days ago it was the third anniversary of my PhD studies. Yes, I've been into it for three years aka surviving it for three years. I've definitely undergone sinusoidal curves of progress, knowledge and emotions. Read this post- incase you have no idea about what doing a PhD means or relate to it if you are sailing in the same boat as I am.
When I chose to do a PhD three years ago, in all honesty, most of it was inspired by chronological order of graduate degrees and the rest was, liking what I was doing and a conscious decision to invest the next years of my life into learning in-depth a subject of interest. Most PhDs start out like this. 1) You have a subject of interest 2) You look around the world for groups with similar interests 3) You interview and in most cases, if you are good enough to express interest with a curiously to learn, you get the job (or study). While this seems pretty straight-forward, the reality is far away from just those things.
While choosing to do your PhD everyone is taught to be ready for the three key points mentioned above. But no one talks about the rest 66.6667...% of what a PhD actually is. Let's start with this. Country. Where you do your PhD really matters. I know PhD students who are currently in several countries, India, USA, UK and several countries in Europe. We all have different durations of our PhD, we get different salaries, we have to fulfill different requirements and we all have different projects from varying fields. But all of us have the same goal- publish our research in good journals, graduate with a PhD and undergo the same sinusoidal wave of emotions associated with it.
Family and friends: For most families, this terminal degree is an enormous deal. I belong to one. It is a big deal in the family cause not many were presented with an opportunity to pursue a PhD, let alone obtaining one. The expectations are very high even though no one really cares about the specifics. Except my grandfather. He asks me during every video call if I found something new. And sometimes I think if he will be disappointed if I tell him the number of failed attempts I had in the past month and the numerous plastic waste I generated working in the lab. I was doing something, but will he understand? I end up giving a subtle explanation in layman terms about the result of a recent experiment that worked (two months ago) and move on to other topics... Later I ponder over if this (my career) was a good decision. Friends on the other hand, are very understanding and listen to your stories over calls and coffees at a restaurant, which I probably have to watch out because of the health and money I spend over it. The late evenings and early mornings can leave a mark on your health if you do not acknowledge it.
Other sailors: Amidst a range of uncertainty, if you are doing a PhD you definitely know others who are sailing with you. These people understand you the best and depress you the most. Hearing the day and night toils of other PhD friends who probably work as hard as you but science fails on them and still keep it going with resilience is the primary need of the hour during the course of a PhD. There is always this point somewhere in the middle when everyone complains that it feels like 'traveling through a tunnel with no light'. It is very hard to keep the motivation going when you are at a stage when you have invested significant time into a topic of interest and it is hard to go back, and at the same time requires twice as much as your motivation to finish it right. There are also other who may make you feel depressed because science decides to befriend them and they have a good publication out of all their hard work in pretty much the same timeline as you.
Timeline: The next most unanswered/ annoying questions..'Are you in your final year?' 'When will you finish your PhD?' The hard truth is, we don't know. I will tell you if I do. Most PhDs are not well structured from the very beginning. You have a list of questions that you would like to ask and then pretty much everything else depends on how these questions go. And these basic questions are the toughest to answer because they need a lot of optimization and set up time and a right mind to understand when the question cannot be answered because the hypothesis was wrong or because the experimental setup was not right. No one wants to be wrong, even professors. And no PhD students wants their PhD to fail. But time is such a relative term in a PhD that it is hard to decide when to stop. So there is no final year until we actually finish with that degree.
By this time most PhD students are frustrated and tired. Of life and everything around them. I chose to continue my higher studies abroad and one of the reasons was, 7 years ago I met a PhD student during one of my internships in India and I have never seen such a young soul up until that point who was so frustrated with life- because of science, her supervisor and how things were going. I said to myself that if I move abroad maybe I will overcome this. But this is absolutely not true.
The frustrations of a PhD student are universal. Everyone around you are accomplishing something marvelous and there you are dwelling in the sadness of failed experiments, people of your age making 3x more money and bringing up a family. You answer scientific questions of great value but since your surrounding is always the academic hierarchy of internship students < PhD students < post-docs < junior group leaders < professors, you feel like you are in the lowest of the academic chain (internship students still have their way out). This internal frustration is tiring and by the end of 4-5 years it consumes you completely.
I have a few ways of coping with this. In all honesty, I go through all of what I mentioned in this post. But with all this comes the greater truth. When I take two steps back, I see that my academic chain is a tiny tiny part of this fast moving world. Just like several universes there are several of these chains in different fields of science and profession. And anyone who is far away from science or academics views this chain as a resourceful contributor to the advancements made in this world. And is that a big deal? Hell yeah, it is. There are amazing discoveries made constantly around the world, cures to diseases that have been solely possible due to the human mind and PhD students are building pillars of foundation for it. While it is absolutely normal to close up into your world and feel worthless because of great expectations of oneself, I hope as PhD students we learn to give a pat on our own backs once in a while. Even though I hate to answer the question 'So how is your PhD?' because most of the times it is the worst, taking a U-turn or completely lost... the real question, 'Is it really a big deal?' and it will always be answered with 'It truly is!'.
Fourth year,
Swetha
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