Tomorrow Elephant

Now that I have finished my PhD, it occurred to me that I should say something about the experience of doing a research degree in the UK, with the deep guttural voice of Authority. But I think I’ll let Tom Coates of plasticbag do it for me instead. He sums up many true things about the PhD experience very well, and I recommended his piece to anybody considering doing a postgraduate degree in the UK or elsewhere. As Coates says, there are things you should think about, especially when it comes to the grinding day-to-day routine:

When you’re doing research, you work almost exclusively alone - for three to five years. You should spend large periods of that time in a library - ideally (again taking into account that this is a training course and a career) you should use the working hours that you might expect from a job - eight hours a day. You will get paid either nothing or a barely livable wage to do this work (again - more true for humanities students). This is not a glamourous occupation, by any means. And as I’ve said before, there is no glamour in the work itself, a restricted chance that you’ll get a career in academia and a very real possibility that by undertaking this work you’re going to make yourself less employable. The “positive” aspects of the lifestyle (apart from your gradual progress towards getting your doctorate) are limited, but you do get relative freedom to think and explore ideas, you are forced to be self-motivating and self-determined and - when things are going well - you will get self-respect and the respect of some other people (who in my opinion are rather easily impressed). These freedoms, and the self-respect and the respect of others that you get from undertaking a doctorate will stay with you (to an extent) if you go into the badly paid field of academia. If you do not, they will swiftly evaporate.

Coates is talking about the humanities, but in my experience all this applies equally well to pure mathematics —- some branches of which at least are just as devoid of real-life applications and employability brownie points as a degree in post-Marxist analysis of the Simpsons. The basic lesson is that unless you are really, really motivated and truly love your subject (or really, really, really talented), give some serious thought to the alternatives.

You can find much harsher advice against doing a PhD on the web. For example, this article quite seriously argues that graduate school is essentially a cult., exposing students to brainwashing techniques traditionally associated with Raealians and Scientologists. While I’m not sure I buy this as more than a half-assed metaphor, I have seen a lot of people get seriously depressed during the course of their PhDs and had some bad spells myself. A PhD is a demanding activity —- especially in subjects like mathematics where it really is possible to hit a dead end and try wearing a hole in it by banging your head against unyielding rock. There are times when you wish it would just stop. If things go right, you back down the alley and find a better path, or get through the wall like a long-distance runner. Sadly, things do not always go right…

And the survivor’s guilt mentioned in the article is a very real phenomenon. Now that I’m on my way out from academia, I feel occasional twinges of shame and a little Come to Jesus voice in my head keeps telling me that one day I will go back…go back… go back…

In spite of all this, my PhD is likely to remain the defining intellectual experience of my life for a long time. In the end it was worth it, for all the reasons for studying physics that I mentioned earlier, and more: I think I would always have wondered if I could really do it or not. And in the end there was only one way to find out.