Well this post here is the best thing I have read about the PhD ever. It completely sums up the issues I have been having with academia but as the author says, if I’d read it going in, I don’t think I would have believed it.
So one of the ways that a PhD breaks people is that it’s a huge task, where the final aim is extremely vague and there are often few meaningful intermediate goals. Brilliant student, you’re probably self-motivated and hard-working. Still, it’s pretty hard to stay motivated when you’re not getting any kind of feedback or sense of achievement, when you have no real deadlines on a timescale you can usefully think about. It’s research, so at some point it will get bogged down and you’ll spend many months or even years pursuing a dead end. Short-term student projects are carefully designed to give at least some kind of results in the few weeks available; actual research isn’t that predictable, which is good because the whole point of research is to investigate an unexplored area, but also pretty gruelling if you’re used to getting good results when you put in hard work. It’s not like working hard to complete an essay or project and being rewarded with good marks. You work hard, really really hard, and you often get no reward at all, you just realize you’ve been wasting your time.
This is what I couldn’t get my counsellor to understand the other day. Nevermind that my supervisor is often awful and that I’ve had a lot of personal and family stuff to deal with over these last four years*, this is the thing that has caused me problems over and over again. This, and chronic perfectionism. Continue reading
A Hat Full of Ness 