Reflections on My PhD
It has been some time since I defended my PhD thesis and closed this chapter of my life in the US. Since becoming a scientist was my childhood dream, and since I spent five long years abroad to get there, I think this is something worth sitting down and reflecting on. Doing it now, after the story is over, feels like the better strategy — I can remember those moments fondly instead of being constantly hounded by the deadlines that make you hate a PhD while you’re living it. I’ll try to be as honest as possible about these past five years.
One might ask what the point of writing this is. A few reasons: first, it’s for me — so that years from now I can come back to this and remember what I went through and what I was thinking at this age, right after graduating. Second, it might be useful to someone who is considering a PhD and wants to know what it looks like from the other side. And third, it might help a friend who is going through it right now to see that we all go through similar things, and to feel a little less alone in it.
Let’s begin.
1. PhD is more than just research
When I started, my sole purpose was to break into cutting-edge research, develop new technologies, and eventually land at a big tech firm working on some product I use every day. What actually happened is that research turned out to be the smaller part of these five years. I moved to a different continent alone, lived in a culture very different from my own, and spoke a language that wasn’t my native one, for five straight years. Given all that, my PhD ended up being about much more than developing any piece of technology.
For instance, I had to learn how to cook, since before this I was used to my mom cooking everything for me. Interestingly, cooking is one of my hobbies now — I’ve even bought several recipe books. And cooking was just the start. You have to learn every small errand: cleaning, keeping track of what’s left in the fridge and when you need to restock, handling every bureaucratic challenge on your own. In the US, that last one is no small thing — taxes, hospital bills, insurance, all of it. Nobody was there to help me with any of this, and that’s really how you grow. In the end, research is something you do at a place like a lab for six to eight hours a day, and you spend the other six to eight hours on the ordinary things everyone has to handle just to live.
This was also a period where I had to learn how to communicate with people from very different backgrounds — and I don’t just mean professional backgrounds, but people from entirely different parts of the world. Everybody has a different English accent, myself included. I remember that in my very first weeks, I would fake-laugh along with my lab mates because I couldn’t actually follow the slang of people who’d grown up in the US. A year later, I was one of them, following most of it, because I had grown culturally and linguistically closer to that world. But it took time. For me, research itself was challenging, but it was less challenging than all of this.
And that wasn’t the only kind of conversation I had to learn. My field was interdisciplinary — as an engineer, I had to work with clinicians, biologists, and physiologists — so there was also the challenge of communicating with non-technical people. Believe it or not, this is one of the hardest skills you can learn during a PhD. As engineers, we’re trained to focus on the technical side of things, and we tend to assume everyone thinks the way we do. The reality is that they don’t.
In the end, a PhD is a degree that gets awarded — that much is true. But for me, what mattered was the process, not the degree itself. This was the first time I really noticed that everyone has different priorities and problems in their lives, and that everyone who commits to this five-year journey is sacrificing something to be there. I know this because I did the same. During this journey, I missed the weddings of people I love, including my own brother’s, and I was not there when my grandfather passed away. My girlfriend and I accepted, from the very beginning, that we’d be in a long-distance relationship for these five years — and it was never easy. So at some point, it wasn’t just me making sacrifices; the people I loved were sacrificing things in their lives too. Maybe that’s why I found it hard to easily accept it when other people told me they had something else planned that meant they couldn’t work on something at a given time. I think a PhD is, in part, about developing the maturity to realize that everyone is carrying their own problems and sacrificing something, and that we should appreciate other people’s time, because they’re giving us their time and effort to help advance science. Of course, this happens in industry and other workplaces too. The critical difference is that during a PhD, you’re not compensated fairly, and you accept that; you’re still treated as a student, and you accept that too.
2. It is a phase of failures
At the end, a PhD looks like a collection of successfully executed projects. Honestly, one of the things I hate most is the defense presentation itself — it’s filled with what worked and what turned out to be cool. But there’s a reason your work takes up this entire five years, and it’s not because everything went smoothly.
You will be rejected, over and over, at every stage of your work. Sometimes you’ll start working on your newest, coolest idea and reject it yourself within days, once you realize it’s not as fruitful or as logical as it seemed a while back. Other times, your advisor will reject it for you, because it’s not really advancing the science, or because you’re overcomplicating something that should be simple. And most of the time, journals will reject your paper too, citing “not suitable for this venue” or some other reason that often feels made up. The important thing is that you have to embrace this kind of failure, because you — and your work — only grow through it. And most of the time, it isn’t personal, even though it feels like it.
Believe me when I say this: these rejections will also take a toll on you mentally. At some point, you will absolutely question yourself and ask, “Is this really worth all this stress?”
Here’s an example I actually used in my defense presentation. My own PhD journey looked like a Gaussian curve (technical term alert) — time on the x-axis, stress on the y-axis. Roughly in the middle of that curve, stress peaks: you have a mountain of responsibilities, you still have a long way to graduation, and your ideas keep failing one after another. You genuinely don’t know if you’ll ever land on the one that works.
What got me through it were anchors. Mine were, first, my girlfriend, who kept reminding me that this had been my lifelong dream and that I actually had the capacity and the talent to finish what I’d started; and second, my friends, who were going through the exact same thing, in the exact same environment, every single day. You talk to them about your work, your group, your advisor, everything — and you realize that what you’re feeling is a natural, almost universal part of the process.
Embrace the failures, and go looking for a new way through. That’s one of the best skills I picked up during my PhD. Sometimes you have to admit you simply won’t solve a particular problem with a particular strategy. And when that happens, you have to change one of the two — the problem or the strategy — before you give up on both. I called this “pivoting” (maybe that’s the actual term everyone else uses too, but that’s beside the point). Learning to pivot was one of the most crucial things this whole process taught me.
3. What is a PhD about, then?
I’ve had this conversation many times before, so by now I think I have a fairly mature answer to it. People ask me about the value of a PhD in this era, given that we have AI tools doing so much of the work for us. Honestly, it’s a fair question — we (myself included) have started treating these coding tools almost like junior PhD students. My impression is also that a PhD used to be more financially valuable. There was a time when having a PhD from a top school pretty much guaranteed you a job at a big tech firm. That’s simply not true anymore. Now you need connections at these companies, and you need to get through multiple rounds of interviews that often have very little to do with your PhD itself. My own path was different, since I wasn’t pursuing a career in the US, but I still saw firsthand how hard it’s become to land those interviews — that’s a topic for another piece I’m planning to write.
So the underlying question is: the value of a PhD seems to be diminishing, so is it still worth it? My answer, after living through it: yes, absolutely — but only if money isn’t your main priority. What matters is more personal. The kind of growth I’ve described matters most if you haven’t lived alone before, but I believe it matters even if you have, because you’ll still come out the other side more of an adult. You’ll learn to question things, to look for reliable sources, and to stop believing everything the moment you hear it. You’ll end up with deep, current knowledge of one very specific thing — whatever your thesis is about — but more important than any of that, you’ll learn how to ask good questions. You’ll learn how to start something from nothing and how to plan an entire project. And if you’re lucky, like I was, and you land in an environment where your advisor genuinely gives you freedom and leadership, you’ll learn how to manage people and projects too. These are the skills this whole process gives you over five years. But as I said, you have to be ready to make sacrifices. You will give up multiple things along the way.