What I have learned so far as a PhD student?

I  joined PhD program in June 2017, around two and a half years ago. I have learned  many things (both academic and non-academic) during this period. The focus of this article is to highlight some major academic learnings.


Discipline and Consistency 

Research is a mix of interesting and mundane tasks. Unfortunately, a lot more mundane tasks than interesting ones. Who will not love to finish interesting work ? The problem arises when you meet a roadblock of mundane tasks. To finish them, you need discipline. You will have to put your heart aside and try to finish tasks at hand like a duty.

Consistency can outperform intensity when it comes to a long journey like PhD. A typical engineering student mindset suggest to complete things by working intensely in last hours.  At times they think themselves like Dhoni who can finish game in the last overs. But, this strategy doesn't seem to work well when it comes to PhD which is much like a test match. In test match, you need to play like Rahul Dravid.


Freedom and Flexibility in PhD 

Before entering into this program. I had perception that academia offers a lot of freedom and a lot of flexibility. I have revised this belief because PhD (and also academia in general) too suffer from having many constraints (though different ones compared to industry) which reduce both freedom and flexibility.

Yes! it is true that PhD offers freedom specially to choose the topic of research work and you can choose any topic you wish to work on as long as it is aligned to your area. You may try inter-disciplinary work, but it might be challenging to do so. And, when it comes to flexibility to do work, you have limited control. The kind of flexibility you can exercise is like you can work in night instead of day (that is very unlikely in most corporate jobs). Even in academia, you will have to meet deadlines and you should be in sync with your advisors' schedule and expectations, you will have to compromise on flexibility.

Attend Conferences, it is useful

There is a common perception among PhD students that attending conferences is a waste of time. This is not true. I too had similar impression before attending my first conference. So, I was not open about going to conferences. I want to thank my adviser for pushing me to apply to conferences. I have learnt a lot from going to conferences.  You might not get adequate and quality comments from audience on your presentation. But, you may still learn from presentations of others and you will realise that you learn more from other's presentations than that of your own presentation provided it is a good quality confernce.

Develop a thick skin 

When you present your work, you will get comments, no matter how much effort you have put in. There will always be a room for improvement in your work.  You will receive both useful and unnecessary comments. It is up to your wisdom to categorise them as useful or unnecessary. You need not incorporate all the comments. If a comment is useful and feasible,incorporate for it can improve your work significantly.

There might be situations where the tone of comment is too harsh. Don't take comments personally as  comments are on your work and not you. You need to develop a thick skin and you develop it when you spend time in the system as it is evident from an excerpt from Fault Lines, a book by Raguram Rajan.

"As I walked away from the podium after being roundly criticized by a  number of luminaries (with a few notable exceptions), I felt some unease. It was not caused by the criticism itself, for one develops a thick skin after years of lively debate in faculty seminars: if you took everything the audience said to heart, you would never publish anything."

Don't avoid presenting your work in front of others. Whenever you get an opportunity, present it. It can improve your work a lot. All this can happen, if you have a thick skin. Otherwise, you will waste a lot of time to recover from emotional turmoil by assuming that the comments are on you, not on your work.


Science and Social Science are different

I  majored in Computer Science where most things are deterministic unlike empirical economics where most things are probabilistic. This change of field created some kind of discomfort (cognitive dissonance) in my mind for first few months. I am still trying to accept the probabilistic nature of empirical work.

Disclaimer: All opinions are personal.