My PhD experience (so far) as the 'first' student of my adviser

I am approximately four years and four months into my PhD and expecting to graduate sometime this year, most likely in the second half which will make it a five-year PhD. Like any other PhD student, I will not hesitate to say that the last 4+ years have been a tremendously enriching and learning experience for me not only in research but also in my personal life. Turns out I have gradually matured, most sharply in 2012, with respect to being able to manage myself better, says my room-mate of 4-years who witnessed my transition first-hand. As with any typical PhD path, there have been much more (and repeated) failures and disappointments than successes, and it has been a continuous test of my ability to sustain the enthusiasm and focus in spite of painful failures, but as the saying goes: A minute’s success pays off for years of failures. I am a typical PhD student in most respects.

However, the thing which makes my PhD a little not-so-typical one is that, I am the first student of my PhD adviser. So my adviser is pretty young that way in that he hasn’t yet graduated a single student with PhD. He joined as a faculty immediately after his post-doc way back in late summer of 2008 and I became (and still is) his first PhD student. It was a gamble for both him and me: the first student is always a gamble for the adviser, since the fresh post-doc-turned-adviser has no prior experience of guiding PhD students throughout and hence most likely lacks the experience of judging candidates’ profiles in terms of being able to do quality research just from their CVs or resumes. For me too, it was perhaps a gamble, for I was joining an assistant professor who had never guided any PhD student before, and who had never published a single journal paper as a faculty.

If you join a well-established group with plenty of senior PhD students and post-docs around in the group, then it is relatively easy to receive guidance and inputs and to kick-start one’s PhD research. This is particularly true for a core experimental research group (such as ours) where senior students and post-docs would have set up, calibrated and maintained all the equipments and fabrication processes in the cleanroom (for transistor or LED fabrication etc. for the area I am working on). The recipes for fabricating a transistor or doing an epitaxial deposition of semiconductor with precision of one atomic layer would have already been set up and running. You just walk in, ramp up the learning curve, interact with senior students, and get going, assuming the group dynamism is good. However, when you are the first PhD student in the group, there are two ways of looking at it.

The ramp up time for doing (experimental) research is relatively long in that scenario, and that is the first way to look at it. There is no senior student/post-doc around to learn from or interact with, and worse, the lab is not set up yet! So, as the first student, one needs to build the lab up, get the equipments running and also start doing research. Luckily for me I had the second student join my adviser’s group around four to six months after me, and the role he had/has played in setting things up and running the lab is probably more than (or at least equal to) that of mine. The most important (and pretty sophisticated) equipment in our lab, which is called MBE (Molecular Beam Epitaxy) system costing around a million US dollars, arrived only in mid 2009, since it required lots of clearances. Thus, I could actually begin my research close to one year after I had joined for PhD. And this damn equipment demands lots of calibrations, and a lot of time is needed just to learn to use it. Both of us (the other being the second student in the group) have seen the lab build up from scratch and so the second way to look at this picture is that, we both had gained some truly enriching experiences in setting up a new lab, in maintaining and fixing equipments and in developing process recipes for fabricating transistors and other electronic devices. That certainly lent us some good depths in our understanding of how things work. It is now perhaps obvious that throughout this period of setting up the lab and starting our research, our adviser had played (and is still playing to some extent for us both) the triple role of being a friend, a senior colleague/PhD student and an adviser. He is not only super approachable for brainstorming problems or bottlenecks and new challenges and crazy new ideas in research, but also maintains an unusually constant positive, optimistic, feel-good and energetic vibe around him. More on him on a later post sometime in the future.

Thus I began my research, and have been seen the group expand to a 12-member strong, diverse, big and vibrant group in four years. I have not only seen a group (or lab) set up and expand but also have seen my adviser evolve as an ‘adviser’ in 4+ years, I have seen myself evolve as a researcher from a zero or rock-bottom level where I had to ask my adviser what 'MBE' stood for when he had told me in 2008 that he was getting an MBE system! In such a new group, when the adviser is young, energetic and ambitious, and students joining are friendly, helpful and smart, then strong group dynamism is inevitable and an intrinsic passion for research and learning becomes infectious. Interaction with our adviser especially for the initial few students in the first couple of years was very frequent, which however has declined to some extent recently since he’s got busier with 12 students under him and with many more funded projects.

“If you do research, then either be the first to do it, or be the best in doing it. Else don’t do research” is what my adviser told me in the starting days of PhD. In hindsight, that was a very bold statement for a fresh assistant professor who was yet to set his lab up! Becoming the ‘best’ in doing something in (experimental, technology/engineering) research requires sufficient time to build a technology up, to develop the know-how within the group to compete and beat the world’s best, so our group hasn’t been the ‘best’ in any area yet, but living up to our adviser’s ‘bold’ appeal, we believe we have been doing certain things first in the world! Or at least, trying to J. Those may or may not be technologically applicable research eventually, since judging/predicting the practical usefulness of experimental research is a nearly impossible task. When one starts doing research, one has no idea if what one delivers is going be inside a cell phone or a laptop which will be commercially available; mostly it isn’t. But (experimental) research mostly is incremental in nature and over time, these increments add up gradually to lead to something which actually goes in to a product, say smartphone.

Overall, it’s been a very enriching and fun experience for me, and although it’s a very new group which perhaps puts me at a disadvantage (for jobs in academia) by depriving me of a well-established pedigree in a non-top-tier but still a reasonably decent school (Ohio State), yet I feel fortunate and privileged that we (group members) are able to build a reasonably decent research profile with the three senior-most students expecting to graduate with about 14 to 17 journal publications each (authored/co-authored) in reputed AIP and IEEE journals, and more than 30 conference presentations each (authored/co-authored). That’s a reasonably decent profile, I’d repeat.

Looking back at 2008, for a new group and being the first student joining, it was a gamble that paid off way more than my expectations in all ways.