How to sell my choice for a PhD to people? That is a question that popped up now that I finished my 4-year adventure at the university.
In retrospect, my PhD was a mix of heights and lows, of opportunism and altruism, of freedom and pressure, and many more dualities. While these challenges are not necessarily different from other endeavours in life, I do believe it is the extent of the contrasts that really sets this job apart. Coping with these extremes is not always an easy task and, at least for me, required some unique factors.
Unique factors
- First, I needed to stare out of my window and think a lot. Being lucky enough to have only a limited set of predefined deliverables, I could essentially do whatever I was interested in. While it sounds amazing, it also demands a lot of curiosity. Finding a gap in the literature is nice in theory, but a lot harder in practice. Let alone filling that gap. I thank the skyline of Antwerpen Noord for helping me with that.
- Second, related to the previous point, it is easy to lose track of time when deadlines are far away. It demands a lot of self-organisation, but I noticed that it went way easier when having somebody to discuss with. Having long daily discussions (potentially in the Barracuda) takes a lot of time, but it helped me to structure my ideas and to actually make progress.
- Third, it is not easy to find a balance between the four research stages: reading, experimenting, writing and presenting. It is easy to get bored when a stage is dragging on for a long time, yet often the chronological order of the steps had to be maintained. A sufficient amount of conferences big and small, a lot of running kilometres and enough variety between the projects helped me here.
- Finally, conducting the PhD for me was for a large part about disseminating the work. Whether it was at a conference or a lunch seminar at a sector federation, having frequent feedback from my peers and people in the sector ensured that I did not fade away in the ivory tower and definitively helped to keep the job entertaining.
Putting curiosity in a work plan
Reflecting on these factors helps me to answer my initial question. I do believe that during my PhD I improved my ‘curiosity’ (I do think you can train that, as long as you take the time), I learned how to put this curiosity in a work plan that I was able to finish on time by myself. I enhanced my writing/methodological/presenting skills and finally, I learned to process feedback from a very wide range of actors. I won’t say that you cannot develop these skills outside of the university, but the blend itself is unique and results from the very hybrid character of the PhD trajectory.