I wanted to write a unique PhD survival guide, that really focused on realities after you manage to get your PhD. There really isn't anything on the market, and what I learned I learned through hard, expensive lessons. Further, it's not advice that you will really get in academic circles, for many reasons. I will expand more on this later, but there are a few similar books out there. A PhD is not enough, Getting what you came for, and other books are pretty much exclusively focused on grad school or academics, but nowadays so many of us are leaving academics, and we are fumbling as we go along, there isn't much out there for us..
I am really focused, herein, in #1 getting out of grad school (preferably with paper in hand, err but not the toilet paper, leave that. I mean the sheepskin that has your degree), and #2 what you do with the paper (not that. Well you could do that, but why would you? Toilet paper is softer and less expensive).
Why write this?
Why do I want to write a book/booklet? Well, I think I went through a lot of unnecessary hoops and hardships, many of which were due to my ineptitude or poor planning. Plus, this will help me on the path of recovery. It's like AA or something. I still have alot of bad memories of grad school, which is unfortunate, because ultimately the process has completely shaped my life, and many of my most happy memories are when i was in grad school; and of course I would not have found my lovely wife if i did not go through grad school.
A (hopefully brief) life history
Pre-grad school days. I remember not doing much useful stuff in high school, and wondering what the heck I wanted to be when I grew up. I remember my discussion with myself went something like this. "Well, both my parents are doctors*, they'll never respect me if I don't have a doctorate" (* Dad is MD, Mom is PhD). Also my dear friend was in a pretty similar boat back in early college, Both of his parents and his sister were PhD chemists, so naturally he chose chemistry (i'm not sure 'chose' is the right word, but that's his story, not mine). So anyway i decided the closest I could become to being an MD but not have to do all that *WORK* was to become a PhD. Hahaha. Little did I know that both paths were pretty hard (but I still think the MD path is harder and requires more sacrifices).
I had no clue as to what to enroll in for college. I thought I liked biology (and it turns out I really did). I though to be successful, I had to go far in academics (my godmother did tell me, before grad school, it would take a long time) So right off the bat my entire career was based on emotional, external things. "Everyone is doing it" "People, aka my parents would never respect me". Folks, these things are not going to get you through grad school.
Why listening to others is a bad idea
It is surprisingly simple. Other people are not going to write your dissertation. They are not going to be waking up at 5am to run gels. They are not going to spend 2 back to back days in a refrigerator (at which point i promptly got sick for a week, but I did the experience successfully). You are going to be doing all of these things. Support is helpful, even essential, but when push comes to shove, it is YOUR life and YOUR degree. Honestly nobody in the world will care all that much about your degree, honest! What your friends and family do care is about you, your life, and your happiness. People you love want you to be happy (on the other hand people who don't really care about you all that much don't care about your happiness).
Is grad school right for you?
What do you want to do? This is atomnomical (a word I made up that means 'the very essence of the idea' - I'm a PhD, I can do this. It says on the diploma!) This is the fundamental idea that you must embrace if you have any hope of success in your life. You simply must know what you want. Too many people wander aimless through life, never really accomplishing anything, because they have no goals, no direction, no focus. They don't know what they want! Maybe mozart will blunder into a piano and start producing symphonies, but maybe not. How many Mozarts were janitors just because they did not know what they want, nor how to accomplish it? How many students wander through university and later into academics just wandering around, hoping from topic to topic, interest to interest, because they don't know what they want? Tons, and most of them do not make it.
How do know what you want? Well, what do you like doing? Go ahead and write it down. (That was easy wasn't it?). Okay, now that you know what you like to do, is there any way you can make a career out of it? Do you like it so much you could make it into a career? Is there a market for your talents? Okay, great. Now you have something. You still have no clue. Okay, go read What color my parachute (really fantastic book). We'll get back to this more in depth when the mid-life crisis comes. Right now we are muddling through grad school.
Seven Secrets
Let us assume, niavely, that you have some clue about what you want and desire (beside beating your high-score at pac-man), and to do so requires a graduate degree. What I am trying to get at here is what it will take to get through grad school. Conveniently enough somebody (Dr. Rob Hydnman, expanding on some other guy) wrote down '7 secrets of a successful PhD student)
- Meet regularly with your supervisor.
- Write up your research ideas as you go.
- Have realistic research goals.
- Beware of distractions and other commitments.
- Set regular hours and take holidays.
- Make full use of the available help.
- Persevere
So, having been through the process (luckily for both of us, me since i'm still sane, you because otherwise you wouldn't read this), let us examine these. Of the 7, 6 are practical 1 is essentially emotional. Its all true, absolutely, but I'd like to discuss more intangible things. This would be my meta-emotional (yes I made that up, see above) list.
1. Perservere
2. Perservere
3. Perservere
4. Heavy drinking
5. Solid relationships
6. Enthusiasm for the project/field
7. Solid financial footing
1-3 is pretty obvious, so much so that I repeated it thrice. Internal fortitude is, at the end of the day, the knot at the end of your rope that allows you to hold on. Whether that comes from spite, rugged individualism, a well-planted sense of being, I can't tell you. But you have to have it, because there will be times during the long slog when you do want to give up and throw it away. In fact, over half of people entering grad school do not make it, according to some statistics (which are, to be fair, twenty years old, and from Princeton, but probably still accurate, probably higher than today's average).
Fourth is supposed to read 'coping mechanisms'. Not sure how that other text got in there. You must have some external pressure release valve, otherwise you will explode. I remember going briefly insane during an incredibly stressful point in my life, I had something like 4 jobs at once (typist, doing phycology research, doing some DNA research, finishing school). I remember I just about snapped, but at the time I had no real safety valve to ever stop the situation from getting bad in the first place. I remember at one point sitting at the lab bench and mumbling to myself (mostly swearing) for hours. Finally a lab mate snapped me out of it. So, my advice is to find some relatively non-destructive way to cope with stress. Because it really doesn't go away, and that's the truth. Incidentally this goes back to what I said early, what do you like to do for fun. Some people just love exploring different cultures, places, and so forth. Some play video games. Some do sports, which is a really fantastic way to reduce stress, I did 5 or so 180 mi bike rides during my grad school/postdoc days. I'm very grateful that i could turn all that stress into useful productive energy.
Fifth is very much related to fourth. I'm not sure how I would have made it if not for people who were very dear to me, including my wife, who I met about halfway through grad school. I think it's pretty much essential to have a solid social network, hopefully people who are not your colleagues, but that's okay too. Its nice to be able to talk to 'normal' people and vent in a fashion that does not led to a black hole of despair, which many of my conversations with fellow grad students inevitably produced.
Sixth is about being passionate for what you do. Because you are going to do it alot. You must be the expert in that one little minuscule area of the field, and you must love it enough to do useful productive research on it, and not despair when you can't get anyone to listen to you for more than two seconds to let you talk about what you think is so great about the 7 eyes of drosophila or whatever you are obsessed over
Seventh is about speed mostly. In most fields they either don't fund you or fund you very limitedly. Either way, somebody is making an investment in you, either yourself through loans, or others through scholarships. You need to be productive and fruitful, and keep those accomplishments going. A chapter, a paper, a poster, whatever. Keep a steady flow of productive useful work throughout your grad school 'career'. Then at the end you tie it up into a bow and plead for them to let you go. If you run out of funding you will be in great peril. Many of my colleagues had funding issues; either their advisor left, or lost confidence in them, or they had so much loan debt that they gave up. Know your timeframe, and know what you will need to do to get it done.
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