Getting a PhD sucks, no doubt about that. On the one hand, enjoying what you're doing requires you (or at least me) to get lost in the work. Thinking about problems, rotating issues in your head all day. On the other hand, you can totally lose yourself in a thought and effort for months this way. It takes a certain kind of person to stick it out in grad school, but even the best student isn't that person every day. Nor should they be, that's why PhD candidates are so much more likely to develop mental disorders (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733317300422).
The paradox is really that you have to be simultaneously completely devoted to your project, while at the same time retaining your sanity and awareness of the world around you. This is especially true for people looking to jump that fence from academic life to work in industry. A postdoc I used to work with told me not to get too invested in your work, because you would never be able to graduate and you'd lose all perspective on skill development needed for life beyond the ivory tower. I'm not really sure how to get satisfaction from my work without obsessing, so I seem to flounder between extreme productivity and deep lulls of apathy.
It's not all bad. I just gave our department seminar and it went really well. There's no reward for that though. I can speak. I can explain. These aren't new skills. It does feel nice to pull everything together into a cohesive narrative arc, but I need to focus on long term goals. Reorient a bit. Isn't that what we're all doing though?
The paradox is really that you have to be simultaneously completely devoted to your project, while at the same time retaining your sanity and awareness of the world around you. This is especially true for people looking to jump that fence from academic life to work in industry. A postdoc I used to work with told me not to get too invested in your work, because you would never be able to graduate and you'd lose all perspective on skill development needed for life beyond the ivory tower. I'm not really sure how to get satisfaction from my work without obsessing, so I seem to flounder between extreme productivity and deep lulls of apathy.
It's not all bad. I just gave our department seminar and it went really well. There's no reward for that though. I can speak. I can explain. These aren't new skills. It does feel nice to pull everything together into a cohesive narrative arc, but I need to focus on long term goals. Reorient a bit. Isn't that what we're all doing though?
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