Lessons from my PhD

My big eye-openers (some from postdoc) were more about the sociology of science than the day-to-day productivity:<p>- Even the most blatantly wrong and illogical published work can only be displaced by another publication that explains&#x2F;does the same phenomenon better; i.e., people are going to keep believing in phlogiston until someone shows them oxygen. If you simply point out inconsistencies in phlogiston theory, in person or in writing, they may well make a variety of unwanted psychological deductions about you.<p>- Similarly, nobody actually enjoys being around critics or enduring criticism, and therefore you will observe many senior scientists partially avoiding the major downsides of being a critic by artfully concealing criticisms inside what sounds to the uninitiated like mutual affirmation sessions. You have to listen very closely and learn the lingo to pick this up.<p>- Never question a scientific superior (other than maybe a direct mentor or very close colleague) with any other approach besides &quot;I have a helpful suggestion about how you can maybe reach your intended destination better&#x2F;faster&#x2F;more precisely&quot;. Regardless of where that destination might be, such as off a cliff or into a wall.<p>- The opinion&#x2F;fact ratio you are allowed to have as a scientist is directly and very strongly correlated with seniority, H-index, and so on.<p>- The incentive structure of scientific publication is such that there are big rewards for being right on an important question, bigger the earlier you are to the party, and little to no penalties for being wrong, so long as the error cannot be provably and directly linked to fraud. There are a variety of interesting consequences to this incentive structure.

Missing from this actionable survey is the skill of answering questions that haven&#x27;t yet been answered in the secondary literature (books, reviews) or even primary literature (journals). This is, of course, what research and a PhD is all about in the end.<p>In my experience, this fact was the #1 reason why some peers dropped out of PhD programs. They joined expecting a continuation of undergraduate education, which consists largely of recapitulating what appears in the secondary literature. Instead, what they got in graduate school was the expectation that they would be producing the primary literature. That&#x27;s a very different game.<p>It was a game these peers discovered they hated playing. Nothing in college can prepare you for the isolation of spending your time becoming the world&#x27;s expert on a narrow technical topic. Your usual reinforcement mechanisms of approval from family and friends gives way to slight comprehension at best. Then there is all of the alone time doing research requires. But I suspect the hardest part of all is the seemingly endless lineup of dead ends and false hope. Not only is success not assured, you often have no idea whether the result will have any utility even if you succeed.<p>Then, just when you&#x27;ve gotten the hang of this finding answers game you discover that the real expectation is to be the one who formulates good questions. The kinds of questions that, although they will certainly involve dead ends, will ultimately pay off in some meaningful way. Very little in a bachelor&#x27;s prepares you for doing this. It&#x27;s a hard-won skill that comes from a round or two (or three or four) of months (or years) spent answering questions that nobody cares about. A lot hinges on your relationship with your advisor on this one.<p>The PhD isn&#x27;t just a bachelors degree but harder. It&#x27;s a completely different animal. The skills in this article are very useful toward that end. But there&#x27;s a lot more to the story when it comes to skills for finding answers to those unanswered questions, and formulating worthwhile questions without answers.<p>The benefit of all of this work and discomfort is that you come away with the ability to answer worthwhile questions that haven&#x27;t yet been answered. And that&#x27;s a highly transferrable and applicable skill.

Two things I would add to this that I learned early on in my PhD:<p>1. Presentations aren’t really about conveying information.<p>I sat though so many dull presentations, they were very informative but I can read a paper quicker than they can badly present the same information.<p>The best presentations were the ones that covered the whys of the work, the applications, the next steps, the specific problem areas - often these aren’t covered in the paper but, armed with that extra insight I am far more likely to read the paper and remember it.<p>Presentations are (as the author says) about telling stories.<p>2. Show up. So many PhDs waft around not doing a whole lot, and so land up being on the program forever. This only benefits the uni and is detrimental to the student. I noticed in the first month of my PhD that most people did a lot more work at the end than the beginning - so I flipped it, worked consistently from day one and got done in just under 3 years.<p>Carry this over to your daily life and it’s almost a super power for getting stuff done. Consistently showing up and plugging away in something reaps rewards.

I also did a PhD and this is all true. I realized many of these things years later.<p>I think many of these points come down to confidence. When you are in the trenches, you really, really do know a lot, and you know it in incredible detail. In fact, in your career, if you leave academia you will probably never know a unique small &quot;thing&quot; in such detail ever again simply because you will have to <i>make</i> something as opposed to <i>studying</i> it. Not even your professor knows everything about what you do, and so she may give advice that seems to contradict what you think. It is vital that you trust yourself enough to speak up. Yes, the professor is really smart, and knows more than you, but she didn&#x27;t spend 3 weeks in the lab wrestling with some optical setup like you did and you know some things better then her, better than anyone in fact. It&#x27;s hard to admit, I know.<p>Also, you may really have wrong assumptions about the progress you&#x27;re going to make in the project. You may feel very bad after a year of messing around while the prof thinks you&#x27;re doing well. Talk about these feelings. The prof knows what&#x27;s normal, you on the other hand may think you&#x27;re the next Einstein (and assume Einstein wrote something great every other month) and constantly disappoint yourself.

All of these tips are good, but the “get excited” one has been my secret weapon through life.<p>A professor in undergrad gave me the tip to get excited or even feign interest when reading dense written material in order to retain more.<p>After trying it throughout a difficult class I was amazed at how well it worked. I applied it to every other academic thing I didn’t want to do and noticed immediately how much easier and enjoyable school was. I still use the “fake excitement” trick for my work all the time.<p>Also, it’s kind of like a Trojan excitement because after I fake the intense interest I do genuinely become interested more often than not.

There is another, more fundamental lesson, that I learned during my (failed) PhD - make sure that the environment suits you. By this, I mean do some research beforehand about the supervisor and the alumni. If possible talk to one of the other PhD candidates in their department and find out if you are compatible with the working environment.<p>This could be hard to do such early in your life, as one does not have much experience. Usually it falls in one of two categories - either you are someone that can do the work but needs support and guidance, or you prefer working on your own, in which case a more hands-off supervisor would be OK.<p>If you are of the former type and find yourself working for a supervisor that doesn&#x27;t offer much support, it will be very hard to finish anything, and most likely you will become demotivated and drop out. Likewise, if you want to try things on your own but your supervisor wants to dictate where to go next, there will be a lot of conflicts and even the possibility that they block the thesis until it is done their way.<p>Having other PhD colleagues around and bouncing ideas off of them is worth its weight in gold, make sure that there is at least one that is working on something similar as you are.

All true. I learned about topic sentences only recently, I wish I&#x27;d heard of them years ago!<p>I&#x27;ll add something else I have realised:<p>Your Gantt chart is not for you.<p>I hate Gantt charts - they&#x27;re out of date the second they&#x27;re created; they take too long to update; there&#x27;s very little decent free software for them that everyone uses; etc etc.<p>But your supervisor will probably want to see one. Or your funder, or examiners, and so on.<p>That&#x27;s the point: sometimes you just gotta transform information into the format that&#x27;s expected. From your perspective it may be easier to say &quot;I&#x27;ve completed task X but task Y will drag on for another two weeks&quot; than it is to update a spreadsheet and render a Gantt chart, attach it to an email and stick it in a shared drive. But from the supervisor&#x2F;funder&#x2F;examiner perspective, they need a way to very rapidly assimilate complex detail and spot problems.<p>A lot of academia is about clear communication of complex material. Your supervisor probably has several students, as well multiple projects of their own, teaching duties, management duties, and so on. Your Gantt chart is for them, not for you!<p>Simple and obvious in hindsight, but it really helps me put aside the grinding resentment I feel whenever it comes to updating a Gantt chart :)

I did a PhD in physics and feel like I missed all the great &quot;meta lessons&quot; some people seem to learn in their PhD. Mostly I just spent my time alone doing calculations either with pen and paper or computer. Most of the stuff I did was either suggested by my supervisor or was obvious continuation of some previous work. Even after I got my PhD I didn&#x27;t feel like I was really a member of the research community or that I had a PhD level command of my field. I just did a bunch of calculations, wrote papers on what I did and got a PhD. It was almost like doing homework on a really long course, but just more difficult.<p>I left academia after a failed postdoc because I realized I had no clue how to conduct research on my own; I didn&#x27;t know how to pick good research topics, or how to manage my time, or how to find people to collaborate with, or how to collaborate productively with someone for that matter.<p>I&#x27;m not sure if the fault was my supervisors or mine. I&#x27;m a bit &quot;on the spectrum&quot; and have lots of difficulties with social interaction, but I guess so do many other people drawn to technical fields and still they manage to navigate the system somehow. I certainly never sought for any kind of mentorship because I didn&#x27;t realize it was needed and, also, because it felt extremely awkward.<p>Also, the whole academic system seemed a bit fucked up. People do research and write papers because they have to produce something measurable, not because the research they do is actually interesting or important. I published five papers during my PhD and I would say that maybe only one of them was slightly interesting or important, and even that could have been much better. All of the papers were published in proper, highly regarded journals (mostly Physical Review). Towards the end of the PhD I started having some vague ideas of stuff that would be _actually_ interesting and more worth my time, but also more difficult and less certain results. When was I supposed to do those? I was still in the mindset that I wanted to stay in academia so I couldn&#x27;t take any risks.

The &quot;lead or be led&quot; trope is apt, and certainly became the paradigm of my doctoral years. I might, however, amend this slightly. There&#x27;s another idea of going rogue too soon or too late (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matt.might.net&#x2F;articles&#x2F;ways-to-fail-a-phd&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matt.might.net&#x2F;articles&#x2F;ways-to-fail-a-phd&#x2F;</a>).<p>Students, new employees, and other inexperienced folks need to be led initially, and then rapidly, transition into a self-directed paradigm. Success emerges if and only if the advisor and student recognize the need for this transition at a similar moment. The alternative is either the student who runs down rabbit holes repeatedly despite being guided elsewhere (those students tend to at least get SOMETHING done and while they take forever to graduate, do find some interesting results along the way) or the student who after a couple years is still just reading papers and waiting to be told what to do (these students often fail outright as advisors get fed up with the hand-holding).

The <i>topic sentence</i> idea is particularly valuable, and it&#x27;s something I try to pass on to students. I also use latex macros to turn this on and off (and to put in margin notes, also). All of this advice was so similar to that I give my students that I went to the author&#x27;s homepage here on HN, to see if it was somebody I had taught. (Nope, wrong field.)

One point that I seem rarely mentioned especially in the life sciences is learning when to tell your mentor that you have enough to leave. In my experience a lot of labs will try to keep their senior PhD students around as long as they can because they don&#x27;t have a suitable replacement and they are cheap labour. I know people who stick around for 6 to 10 years to chase after a high impact paper (that doesn&#x27;t often manifest) or they can&#x27;t let their work go and pass it off to someone else, or in the very malicious cases the PI won&#x27;t let them go until they publish another paper etc. The department I was in was determined to get the average PhD down to less than six years but still hasn&#x27;t reached that point.<p>The trainees supervisory committee is usually there to push them out but in many cases they also have a close relationship with the PI and aren&#x27;t going to force a productive student to graduate. Those extra years are rarely useful for their overall career prospects.<p>I think students need to be aware of when they should draw the line and move on. Spending three more years in their PhD probably won&#x27;t pay off nearly as much as three years of accumulated experience in industry job or in a post doctoral fellowship in a new lab.

Lessons from my Ph.D.:<p>(1) Role of Math. In most fields of research, the most respected research <i>mathematizes</i> the field, that is, makes progress with math techniques and results. So for Ph.D. research, try to have math play that role.<p>(2) Ugrad Preparation. To be successful with that role of math, have a good ugrad math background. Then maybe get some more math from independent study, work in a career, a Master&#x27;s program, or whatever. Likely the math topics that both come first and are the most important are calculus and linear algebra.<p>(3) Find a Good Problem. In your career, independent study, whatever, find a good problem to solve. Pick a practical problem and intend to get an <i>engineering</i> Ph.D. where a solution to that problem is regarded as good research. Make some progress on solving the problem.<p>(4) Pick a University and a Department. Want a department that respects applied research, maybe in a school of <i>engineering</i>. Hopefully the university will state their standards for a Ph.D. dissertation, e.g., &quot;An original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication.&quot; Look at their description of their Ph.D. qualifying exams. Do enough study at the ugrad or Master&#x27;s level and&#x2F;or independent study to be well prepared for the exams. If the department offers courses for preparation for the exams, in addition plan to take those courses.<p>(5) Enroll. Become a grad student in the chosen department.<p>(6) Progress. In your first year, take some courses, especially in subjects you already know well. Continue your research. Pass the qualifying exams. If you see some opportunities for doing some fast publishable research, as co-author, better as sole author, do that. Show the department that you have done publishable research. Then, sure, technically will have done a Ph.D. dissertation (I did that).<p>(7) Finish. In your second year, finish your research project, stand for an oral exam, and graduate. Of course, if there is any question about your research being publishable, then just PUBLISH it.<p>Done.

Unmotivated details are also my pet peeve. I want to know why something is important or valuable before I decide to invest my time and energy into it.<p>Other people generally don&#x27;t care about your personal struggles with a problem, so leave them out. Or at the very least don&#x27;t lead with them. Lead with something that piques the interest of your target audience.

Solid advice, not just for PhD students. This is also invaluable for helping final year&#x2F;capstone students navigate their supervisor interactions.<p>There’s nothing better than a student you wind up and they go off and solve a bunch of problems in interesting ways. They’re having fun, you’re workload is reduced and there’s even potential for a publication. Meetings are indeed about giving feedback and learning on both sides.<p>In contrast other students show up empty handed, unmotivated and expect a list of instructions some of which they might attempt. You feel like repeating yourself constantly and that they are not listening.

My lesson from my failed Ph.D (graduated with a Master&#x27;s in Chemistry after far too long) is that after the first year take a long critical look at what you&#x27;re planning to accomplish and whether you really made the progress you needed too.<p>I didn&#x27;t, and simply tried to power ahead on the assumption I&#x27;d pull it out of the fire: this was absolutely the wrong conclusion. You already have a university degree, and you&#x27;ll get paid more in industry: the right answer is to abandon ship it you&#x27;re not looking at a clear path ahead by then.

The author became a professor unlike the 90% of the other PhD graduates, so you need to take all the lessons with a heavy dose of selective bias. Most of the things the article talks about is the effective processes the author has learned during PhD. This is definitely useful in any work where agency is involved. However, these effective routines can be learned from a decent job in a good organization and does not need a PhD. There is nothing in the article that suggests a unique learning that can be achieved only through pouring years into an endless pursuit like PhD.<p>In my opinion, there is nothing unique that can be learned only through a PhD for a successful career (except maybe for a tiny slice of outlier of CS researchers). Most people will be well better served to take a job that provides some agency, or better try to start a company and fail. They can learn a lot more this way without jeopardizing their financial future.

&gt; Lead or be led &gt; If you show up to a meeting&#x2F;internship&#x2F;job expecting to be told what to do, then chances are someone will tell you something to do... Alternatively, if you show up to a meeting&#x2F;internship&#x2F;job with a convincing game plan, then chances are people will get out of your way so you can go do it.<p>Wholeheartedly agree.

My wife is finishing up her PhD in American History and I can tell she&#x27;s getting bored, at least demotivated reading a billion books a week. I&#x27;ve seen this motivation decline in a lot of founders as well 4&#x2F;5 years into their startups, but I&#x27;ve not seen much reignite the fire. Can anyone recommend any specific tips for staying motivated through a PhD?

If I had written this article myself and titled it “Lessons from my First Year as a Full Time Software Dev” a lot of the bullets would have been the same. Especially the Daily Progress and Get Excited bullets. Those two tend to go hand-in-hand given how often you need to do a thing with the only tangible reward being the accomplishment of the thing.

I do not have a PhD, but this is how I believe professional work should (and probably used to) operate. I’m extremely bored and annoyed by management practices that do nothing but track and assign work. When I started my career, it seemed a like a lot like a PhD described here. It was in space systems, and everybody was responsible for finding a problem to solve independently within the mission requirements. In that scenario, a PhD felt like a waste of time compared to professional work. Today it feels like I sorely need it (or an MBA) to climb the micromanagement hierarchy.<p>Is there such a place today as a professional?

The value in formal education is mostly reading, writing, and thinking skills. How to express and communicate increasingly complex ideas to others. PhD is not much different.<p>There was just a Reddit post saying that 54% of US adults have a reading level equal to or below a sixth-grade level according to the US Department of Education. Many communication problems can be attributed to differences in prose, document, and numeracy literacy.<p><i>&quot;If we want to have an educated citizenship in a modern technological society, we need to teach them three things: reading, writing, and statistical thinking.&quot;</i> – H. G. Wells

Nice list! A bit micro on a few points, but nice things to highlight. On a zoomed out View, a PhD will teach you a lot about the life cycle of creative projects in general - idea inception, prototyping, feedback, iteration, presentation. It will also teach you perseverance - oh boy, will it teach you perseverance.<p>At the same time, it will not teach you some things you&#x27;d pick up in industry - team work in particular.

Great article. I especially loved the parts about presenting, greying out the boring stuff makes a ton of sense.<p>What is the appeal of posting your daily progress on a public form? Do you not feel this to be a kind of invasion of your privacy? Is there some benefit that isn&#x27;t immediately clear?

Really helpful! I love the &#x27;Managers as input&#x2F;output machines&#x27; part.

This is really good and I&#x27;ve saved it to revisit it later. Very concrete and insightful. Unlike a lot of meta-posts about PhDs that tend to be pretty watered down or abstract.

This is really good advice, with actionable tips for once. Bravo!

You could have learned all of this stuff at a good mid sized company.

Invaluable.<p>I&#x27;ve put that on my list of things to distil, review, and put into action.

YMMV. What I learned from experience that I already knew from education is that absolute power corrupts absolutely. There is a real tension when picking a graduate school. Do you go with the topic of interest and a tyrant? Or do you pick an amenable advisor that&#x27;s in a different research field? I guess one can get lucky and find both but that wasn&#x27;t an option the year I applied. The thing about graduate schools and research domains is that there a typically only a handful of choices if one is lucky. The other thing I learned is graduate schools never admit absolute power corrupts absolutely and when one points that out one is immediately ostracized. Go along to get along should be a sign over ever graduate schools doorway. Or dog eat dog.