Everything I’ve learned from doing a PhD
As I am slowly approaching the closure of this academic chapter representing my doctoral studies, I have been catching myself in reflection on what the takeaways I have been forming from the past six years of my life are. I’ve spent those years deeply devoted to my academic path, I gave it quite literally everything, all of myself until the very last drop of my energy.
What I’ve learned from doing a PhD moves way beyond the technicalities of conducting academic research. The purpose and ultimate expected outcome of obtaining a doctoral degree is to become an independent scholar yet doing a PhD grants access to so much more if known how to “use” it. I am supposed to feel like I mastered a research topic and while apparently, I haven’t yet fully tamed my imposter syndrome, I do feel like I gained an ever-deeper knowledge and understanding of myself. And I’ve learned how to give myself a much-needed break and an appropriate recovery time. My takeaways and, therefore, anyone else’s takeaways from the PhD can be very far reaching, transferrable to other environments, and broadly impactful - use them wisely and make the most out of your journey.
In the below bits, I aim to share these as part of my farewell to the ENT PhD representative role. It was a pleasure and honor to hold this position and be able to emit my voice and the voices of my peers into the broader scholarly community. Throughout the past year, I intended to engage with this position by creating content that is authentic, at times deeply vulnerable, warm, supportive, and constructive for my peers. I hope I succeeded at this, and I hope to be closing my term off in a similar fashion.
Everything I’ve learned from doing a PhD:
(1) Writing requires a state of grace, create the conditions for it - I often fall into the trap of comparing myself and my way of doing things, the amount of things I do, and so forth, to others. Others who are completely distinct individuals living their unique lives. I catch myself comparing my efforts and productivity to fellow academics, but the nonsensical exercise goes further to comparing myself with people who have nine-to-five jobs in industry working on completely different timelines. Yes, I hear myself, I am being silly. Yet, my frustration rises when I have a bunch of things to do and when from rushing from one thing to another, I finally get to my two hour time slot that I mindfully blocked for writing and I just stare at the page unable to have a clear overview of the bigger picture that would guide my two-hour micro efforts or to ground my chaotic ideas to rest on paper. I had it with this blog post as well - just the other day.
The thing is writing is a creative process that calls for calmness, composure, and clarity of thought. In the academic world, it is a strongly analytical and methodical process as well - only combining and holding those two (creative with methodical) is already a challenging and energy-consuming task. Give yourself some credit right there, we are doing difficult things. We are all different people, and we may approach writing in our own unique ways. There is no universal formula. If there is anything universal about writing, then that may be captured by the words of a novelist referring to creativity needed for one of the most difficult tasks - writing - I found them inspirational, hope you will as well: “Creativity requires a state of grace. So many things are required for it to succeed—stimulus and composure, inner peace and a kind of bitter-sweet excitement.” So go ahead and think about when do you feel gracious and what are the necessary ingredients for recreating such state of grace that would
help you in the generative process of grounding your thoughts in paper.
(2) Give yourself some compassion - Following the high standards that academia often promotes, it is easy to internalize them and fully lean into them. It is not seldom that one almost in an absolutistic manner keeps expecting the same outstanding results demanding high productivity levels no matter what day-in-day-out. How many times have you caught yourself after a long day of extraordinary productivity feeling hyped and energized about how great you did and expecting the same level of output for each and every following day? I certainly engaged in this wonderful behavior many times. The results? Feeling pretty close to miserable as I set myself up for a self-fulfilling prophecy of utter self-disappointment. People often refer to how unreasonable it is to keep repeating the same behaviors that led to an unwanted outcome and hope for a change in the output. What they do not talk as much about is that the other way around can be characterized in a similar way. Namely, there is no one day in which we feel the same way or in which our circumstances are exactly identical - isn’t it then something close to silly to expect that this variance in input will produce the exact same output time and time again?!
While I am a strong proponent of doing one’s best in any situation including their (academic) jobs, I do think that our best varies and is relative to the interplay between the set of unique circumstances and our inner physical, emotional, and mental being. It is easy to lose track of this and expect the same productivity levels every day. Instead, what can be helpful is to account for context and for our inner state of being. We can ask ourselves few simple questions to gain some more functional perspective: How am I feeling physically, emotionally, and mentally right now? What is the current state of affairs when it comes to the circumstances I operate in? Once we answered these simple questions, we can start making connections between these two - e.g., “it makes sense I had capacity for fewer items on my to do list today, given the bad sleep I have been struggling with in the last period or given the long working hours the day before”. This way, we can start practicing self-compassion through building a more well-rounded understanding of our situation. Slowly, we may start exercising taking a more relativistic rather than absolutistic stance on our daily efforts and achievements, which can facilitate our emotional stability and, in turn, support our work engagements in a more sustainable way. Even just zooming out to see the bigger picture of academia and scholarly work to which certain degrees of criticism and skepticism are inherent can help with this. Our productivity levels do not solely depend on ourselves. It can be helpful to acknowledge the nature of the work we do and its underlying principles - where some levels of such criticism and skepticism are generative and supportive of learning and development, but they are often not dosed very mindfully in our environments. So, when you start being hard on yourself, remind yourself of the different dimensions of the context you operate in and give yourself some warmth and understanding.
(3) Slow down and be present - Although, our work seems to be different from “prototypical” nine-to-five set ups operating on different timelines as well as responding to different demands, we somehow often end up equally rushing through our tasks as the holder of such “prototypical” job would do. I have been certainly struggling with this, aiming for high efficiency, speed and quality all at the same while engaging with tasks that require free flowing inspiration, time, and relaxed effort. More often than not, I ended up forcing creative outcomes from myself yet again resulting in self-disappointment and self-loathing, crushing my self-efficacy away. It took me pretty much all of the years of my PhD to understand that when I slow down things start flowing and I can start doing more than when I approach my tasks through a forceful rush.
Deep focus, immersion, and elaborate and iterative contemplation are all important inherent characteristics of scholarly work, yet somehow we often keep neglecting these and forcing our efficient ways on them. The consequences? Various, spanning across different levels - the burnout culture that we have been all part of at the individual level, the erosion of the quality of thought and knowledge that we produce at a societal level. So, I would encourage you to (despite the external expectations and norms) slow down and take a breather to bring yourself back to the present moment. All we have is here and now. No matter how crippling our anxieties may be, they are by definition placed in the future whereas our scope of action and impact are always and inherently bounded to the present moment. All our efforts and actions are only possible at this specific moment. The pace of our activities often reflects the pace of our thoughts and thoughts that are pacing in our head are often a reflection of anxious states of being. So, I am repeating it again, give yourself the permission to slow down in this hurried world and be there for yourself in the present moment.
As the way we breath can also mirror our inner state, it is often advised to do breathing exercises to tame our anxious thoughts. I wouldn’t go as far as to suggest yet another breathing exercise, but one of the things that one can do to anchor themselves in the present moment is to focus on consciously taking slow and deep breaths in and out for couple minutes. I often do as much as small reminders for myself to breathe more consciously, and it helps! What may also help in pulling ourselves back into the actionable space of here and now is to step back and focus on our senses for couple of minutes - this one has saved me from some overwhelmth many times. It is as simple as taking in our view and labeling few things we see in our surroundings, becoming more aware of the sounds around us, taking a mindful sniff and sip of our tea and savoring these sensations for a moment, feeling the warmth of the cup that we hold with our fingertips, the texture and fabric of the clothes we are wearing. Stepping back, pausing for a mindful moment, and getting in touch with our reality at that moment can help us compose ourselves and reach some clarity of thought.
(4) Stay true to yourself - Voice your opinions even if they are deemed unpopular. They may challenge how others think and even perhaps lay ground for wider shifts in the way goals are set and tasks are approached within the broader work environment. Expressing our own views, wants, needs, and ways of working that we hold as fair and just, are all important for living a value-driven and personal needs-informed life, which is in turn crucial for long-term well-being. Things can get heated at work if our views and attitudes clash with the norms a community may cultivate. Holding unpopular opinions can trigger unfavorable responses from others. What is important to remember is that anyone’s behavior speaks first and foremost about them and them only. It is unfair to jump to ungrounded conclusions that the pushback or disapproval we receive speaks about the wrongness of our own choices and behavior just because these deviate from what is the “usual” way within a certain line of work.
We are all different and have our own ways of doing things particularly in a stream of work that is so independent or better say self-dependent, and craft-based as research and writing are. Chances are high that what is deemed as an unpopular opinion within a community is challenging the world views of those who comply with the usual standards and norms of behavior and thought pushing them into cognitive dissonance. The most frequent way to resolve such dissonance and avoid discomfort created by it is to lean more heavily into either of the two polarized sides. Hence, the pushback that we may receive when we disagree or suggest new ways of doing things more often than not reflects the struggles and attempts at resolving the cognitive dissonance of those on the receiving end of our opinions. Such responses may create discomfort in us as well - it was hard enough to express an unpopular opinion, let alone having to repeat and rephrase it over and over again. Managing our expectations in this sense is an important part of the way we can cope with such discomfort.
Similarly, reminding ourselves about the described unfairness of our tendency to jump to ungrounded conclusions is another one. Last but not least, building awareness about the rights that each human being holds can help us in situations of standing up for ourselves. The bill of assertive rights has saved me from some self-blame and taking over responsibility that does not belong to me plenty of times - one of them being the right to disagree with others and another one to be independent from the good-will of others. Check them out - maybe they liberate you from some unnecessary burden as well and empower you to act from a position of confident and autonomous integrity. And who knows, perhaps the opinions we thought were unpopular in a community may actually be more widespread than we think. In this sense, voicing them can be an important means to connecting with like-minded colleagues who hold similar values. This community building exercises does not only bring the advantages of sharing common struggles and mutual understanding and comfort, but it has not once spanned out into strong personal bonds for me - Some of my most meaningful friendships throughout my PhD have developed through such collective expressive efforts. Give it a try, and you may become richer with a friend :)
(5) Your needs first, everything else can wait - When there are hurling demands coming at us from different directions and burning pressure that we additionally aggravate by pushing ourselves at work, it is easy to lose track of our own needs in the process. I have shared before about getting deeply into my red zone and one of the main contributors to that mental and physical destination was the negligence of my own needs. Prioritizing the work demands above everything else in an absolutistic manner in the long run ultimately got me as far as a burnout. Although, my intention was to maximize my productivity at all (personal) costs, sacrificing the attendance to my own needs to create more time and space for work hours only led me to the opposite. One of the most important things I’ve learned from doing a PhD and the entire mixture of experiences I’ve had during it, is that there is nothing more important than actively and regularly attending to my own needs. Everything else can wait (yes, including all the endlessly accumulating tasks on my to do list) and everything else will flow (and yes, including productivity). This is the case both at a micro (daily/weekly) and at a more macro (monthly/yearly) levels.
Before anything else, I would encourage all of you to do as many things that feed your soul as it is humanly possible. This moves beyond the usual ones that we hear about - good sleep hygiene, nutritious diet, regular exercise, etc. - and entails everything else that attends to your psychological needs as well (e.g., autonomy and volition, relatedness, warmth and a sense of belonging, competence and a sense of evolving mastery). Regularly attending to these needs is crucial for our long-term well-being, which then in turn also supports our efforts at work. As such, I would like to encourage you to take a moment and think about the following questions: To what extent do I make autonomous decisions in my life (as opposed to being driven by external demands)? What can I do to create more space for acting from a place of autonomy? What experiences bring the most relaxation and joy to my life? Who are the people whose company I enjoy the most? What are safe spaces for me to practice and learn a new skill I deeply care about? And what would that skill be? Once you have a clearer image of the answers to these, make a little commitment to yourself to integrate at least one small item from the list of answers into your days. The joy I have started experiencing and nurturing the moment I started listening to what I want and need and living a life informed by these is invaluable.
Sometimes, it may be challenging to have an insight into what we want - there are so many things out there and we more often than not do not have much time to reflect on the specifics of our wants. What may be helpful for this discovery journey is to try and reflect on our values: What do I care about in this life? (Try to park the reflex to say work this time around.) In fact, let me try to rephrase this one: If the world would end tomorrow, how would you want to spend your last day alive? In what activities? Connected to which feelings? Who are the people that you would like around you? While in the grown-up world, it is easy to get carried away and become fond of what some of our most memorable (fictional) characters would deem unimportant - like numbers, for instance. Let them inspire us to move beyond the discernible: “What I am seeing,” I thought, “is no more than the shell. What is truly important I cannot see.” So while engaging with this exercise, don’t be afraid to lean into your intuition and listen to what your heart feels as important. That will help with identifying your values and support you in your attempts to attend to your value-based needs. Nourishing those roots will eventually bring the desired fruits both within and outside of work. It certainly did for me!
I hope you find these words helpful - I know, this one was pretty dense. I hope you take at least one piece of thought with you that resonated the most and you incorporate it into your well-being toolkit for navigating your academic journey. Wishing you all the best in achieving what you want!