My PhD life was fraught with challenges: my lab caught fire, I ran out of money because my scholarship was discontinued, and I was rushed to the emergency room in an ambulance. Here are five lessons I have learned from doing a PhD:
1. PhD is a team effort
While I believe we are a determinant of our own success, I would never have finished my PhD without the support of everyone I have met.
Doing a PhD is one of the toughest intellectual and emotional experiences you can have.
I survived mine not only because of my own strengths. People around me went above and beyond to help me, often at the expense of their own time and energy that they desperately needed for themselves.
So everything good that I do with my life since I came back from Australia is partly because of them.
When you start your PhD, you need to build relationships with others1Besides your professional relationships with those in the lab or faculty, your main priority is the relationship with your family. Maintaining this is not easy because you will be busy; you may not even notice you lose your time with them. But there are ways to protect that time. See Family Time: How We Lose it to Black Holes.. Yes, if you are an introvert, this is hard. I myself did it poorly, especially in the beginning.
But there is no other way.
No matter how talented you are, your PhD is a team effort. Your PhD experience will be more painful (and less likely to be successful) if you try to go through it alone.
So connect with others. Be a human, instead of a research robot who ignores social realities to generate experimental data.
At times, you must stand your ground for the right reasons, because you’ll meet some smart people who can be too opinionated. But don’t make unnecessary enemies.
Talk to senior students. Offer them your help. Tell them you just want to help while learning the basic techniques.
Find opportunities to make people’s lives better. Expect nothing in return.
2. I am not smart…
I am an average student. However, before doing a PhD, whenever I put my best effort into something — an exam, an assignment — I usually did well.
That did not happen during the PhD.
There were so many times I tried my best to grasp certain concepts or techniques, and I still couldn’t get them.
It is psychologically unsettling. You wake up at 2 AM, feeling anxious about your experiments. You worry, almost constantly, about how your inadequacy is going to create problems for others.
And yet, realising your limits is also humbling. The same fire that melts your self-confidence also purifies it; it burns your arrogance away.
So, be open to be taught, to be criticised.
PhD teaches you to be independent, not to be a loner. Often your supervisors, senior students, and postdocs are kind enough to tolerate you not knowing something and ask them stupid questions.
What upsets them is when you don’t ask for help, and then make mistakes that cost them time and resources.
There is another good thing I have learned about realising the limits of my intelligence: It nurtures your sense of compassion. It changes you. Now when you see someone struggles to understand abstract materials that come easy to you, you don’t feel frustrated at them anymore.
Because you know how they feel. You know that knot in the stomach, that dry throat, that shallow breathing.
You know how they feel, because you’ve been there before.
3. …but being smart matters less when doing a PhD
When doing my PhD, I learned that resilience matters more than intelligence. Three things can help:
- Be at peace with your current limitations
Don’t be in denial. Acknowledge that you’re not good at it, yet.
Notice how uncomfortable it feels in your stomach, how your heart beats when you’re afraid. To cope, learn abdominal breathing2Also called diaphragmatic breathing, it is breathing using your diaphragm (a layer inside your belly). Here is how to do it. And this how you apply it to anxiety..
Then, by being at peace with your imperfections, you can courageously confront your frustrations. You can then transmute these frustrations into fuel that propels you forward, motivating you to push beyond your current limitations.
For example, you are frustrated with how bad you are at explaining you results in the lab meeting. You sounded stupid and not even close to someone who is doing a PhD.
Instead of distracting yourself to avoid that frustration (I’m just going to watch a Korean drama to forget about that meeting), you use the frustration as fuel (I’m going to start practising my presentation earlier, I don’t want to sound stupid anymore).
- Push yourself beyond those limitations
It’s not just about working hard; that is just the starting point. You need to open your senses to resources and helpful people around you.
Focus on improving, not just specific techniques related to your PhD project, but also your general life skills.
For example, learn things like how to read more efficiently, why managing energy is more important than managing time, and how to escape analysis paralysis.
Relentlessly find new approaches to find breakthroughs.
And avoid obssessing over special apps or ‘secret strategies’. Take care of the fundamentals: daily prayers, sleep, diet, and exercise.
- Acknowledge your progress to yourself
Even if nobody sees that you’re getting better, you yourself have to see it. Otherwise, your motivation will wane and you will give up.
Don’t compare yourself to others (more about this next). Appreciation and gratitude are indispensable. Appreciate your own progress, and be grateful to those who help you get there.
4. Unique paths when doing a PhD
One of the worst things you can do is keep comparing yourself to others.
Every PhD experience is unique. Everyone progresses differently, faces different personal life challenges, and have a different set of strengths and weaknesses.
This principle applies to life more broadly as well.
For instance, people who have a PhD are not more successful than people who don’t. Women who own companies are not better than ones who raise children at home. Science students are not smarter than those who study Humanities.
Stop comparing yourself to others, or judging others based on what you have achieved. It depletes your life energy.
Let others define what their own success is to them.
You simply focus on defining yours.
5. Facing angels and demons
Doing something that challenges you to the core — even if you ‘fail’– is worth it.
For some of you, that challenge is doing a PhD. For others, PhD is not the right challenge.
Instead, it could be starting a business, moving to a new country, learning martial arts, or entering a competitive sport.
Whatever your path is, within that struggle, you will hear the whispers of both the angels and the demons. You will encounter the best and the worst of your inner world.
For example, during my PhD, when things go well, I find it easy to be patient and kind to others. But the demonic whispers are louder when my two-month experiments fail and I had to start over.
You will also ask yourself questions that you wouldn’t have asked otherwise:
- Is this what I really want to do for life?
- Was it really my decision to do this? Or someone heavily influenced me to do it?
- Are there better alternatives? Have I really looked?
Those questions will become real to you. They won’t be just some opinions on YouTube. They are about your life, and you need real answers to stop things from falling apart.
So don’t ignore those questions. What you discover in that search may change everything.
In doing a PhD, you will learn about resilience, seeking support, and recognising your own growth.
These lessons will not just prepare you for academic challenges. You don’t need to be an academician after you get a PhD.
More importantly, the lessons will equip you for life’s broader hurdles.
You will learn that it is crucial to understand that your path is your own—unique and not meant for comparison.
You will learn to embrace the tough times as they forge you into a stronger person. Success is not about never stumbling; it is about how you rise back up after you fall.
For anyone who is on their PhD journey, keep pushing forward, embrace the support around you, and always appreciate your progress, no matter how small it may seem.
Note:
- 1Besides your professional relationships with those in the lab or faculty, your main priority is the relationship with your family. Maintaining this is not easy because you will be busy; you may not even notice you lose your time with them. But there are ways to protect that time. See Family Time: How We Lose it to Black Holes.
- 2Also called diaphragmatic breathing, it is breathing using your diaphragm (a layer inside your belly). Here is how to do it. And this how you apply it to anxiety.