What you feel exactly midway in your PhD!

 

I was reading a very recent article “Graduate students: Aspirations and anxieties” published in Nature Jobs (http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/2011/110728/pdf/nj7357-533a.pdf) which was comical but very true at the same time. It reflects what I and many of my colleagues (or personal friends) are feeling right now as I am writing this blog. The article, which consisted of statistical results based on a survey of about 5000 PhD students scattered across a dozen countries, shows how with each passing year, in an average five year period of a typical PhD student, things like - satisfaction in one’s PhD, interest in one’s work, guidance received from one’s adviser and probability of commencing a research career after PhD – decrease gradually. The dip is the sharpest in 3^rd year although it rises a little bit in 4^th year for some parameters and eventually decreases for the final year. I am going to complete my 3^rd year of PhD in a month, which speaks about my mentality, attitude and work-spirit that I have had enjoyed (or have been cursed with!) in the last one year. To add to it is the fact that many of my co-PhD students are in a similar phase as mine, and being very good personal friends as well, we end up spending a lot of time together within and outside of the labs where we mourn our lives everyday, curse our work and think of ways to postpone the work at hand. Inadvertently, we have had come out with the contagious Biblical phrase in our group – “Life Sucks”, quite more than a year ago. This phrase Life Sucks has caught so much of attention that we chant it like a mantra innumerable times in a day, loudly so that others in the room can hear and repeat for themselves, to constantly remind ourselves that life indeed sucks! And whenever we have a chance to waste time, like having lunch or tea at my home, we will gossip and effortlessly waste a few hours of time in the working-day period, after which we take off for the day and stay happy.

Well, this is not so surprising I guess. After all, even before I embarked on my PhD journey, I read a widely circulated funny email forward, where the key features of a PhD student’s life in a span of five years are highlighted in bullet, starting with the aspiration to win the Nobel Prize in the first year, to him being addressed as “uncle” by his non-PhD friend’s kids in his 5^th year of PhD. Midway in my PhD, I can actually feel the irony in that email. There are many reasons to why we all feel thus. I am not in a mood to discuss all those serious issues here, like lack of interest, ability to see the meaninglessness of one’s work, general lethargy about working (me and some of my co-PhD students!), anti-advisor mentality due to advisor’s bossy nature or something else may be, poor pays and less money, dragging along so-called patience in research, and so on. For me, and I believe for many of my co-PhD students cum friends, this general lethargy to work midway in PhD springs primarily because, now at this point, there is mostly nothing new to learn but involves applying one’s skills to do similar things again and again to get more experience and of course more results. In the initial two years, we are busy and excited in learning new things, making mistakes and trying again and again until we gain sufficient expertise over something such as a piece of equipment or an experiment. That keeps one occupied I guess (provided one is genuinely interested in learning, which should be the case or else there is absolutely no reason pursuing a PhD!). But midway in your PhD, when you are quite comfortable in using the know-how you are supposed to use, then you slowly loose the charm in your journey. Then it becomes similar to a real-life job in a company or industry where in general (exceptions do exist!), you are not supposed to do something new and innovative every day, but instead expected to repeat things or do similar things. May be I am totally wrong. But the inertia to work is immense, no doubt. And this is sad, particularly in our group, where, surprisingly and contrary to the conventional game-plan, we do have new things to learn, design, fabricate and test, almost every day. Our advisor actually gives us a lot of freedom to design and fabricate new things (or electronic devices to be more precise), limited as he says, purely by our imagination now. Literally, very novel concepts are germinated and implemented every week, and still, sadly, we feel so lethargic, absorbed deeply in an anti-working mood. I guess it is impossible to escape from the time-tested mindset of a typical PhD student, irrespective of how the PhD research shapes into.