Is pursuing a Ph.D. really tough today?
How Completing a Ph.D. Transformed My Life
I think the main gain from a Ph.D. is improving your skill by practicing to collect, study, analyze, and improve or create a new valuable thing that will be related to your personal life, family life, society, or the whole world.
I learned that people were more important than technology.
I came to Padova because I wanted to solve “interesting problems.” But when I got there, nothing seemed appetizing. My supervisor asked me to come up with a new control algorithm for the electric vehicle charging system. Another day, he wanted me to prove theorems about electric circuits that would never be used in the real world.
I worked hard and focused on my deliverables. But at the end of my first year, my supervisor was not happy with me. The director of the Ph.D. program said in my first-year evaluation that I was good at carrying out tasks but didn’t have the “fire in my belly” needed to advance the state of the art.
A few months later, I found a novel strategy while focusing on the works of literature with my colleague in another department who was enrolled in the same year. But my supervisor said he was not pleased with this small novelty, so I needed to work more effectively. This meant I would spend 20 hours/week on teaching, 10 hours/week on coursework, and more than 40 hours/week on research.
I quickly realized that if I didn’t publish papers, it wouldn’t matter to anyone except me and my advisor. But if I screwed up my teaching, hundreds of students would be hurt. I doubled down on teaching and started inventing new ways to make my students happier.
Three years later, I had two papers to my name. But I had “changed a few lives, won one teaching award, and created conceptual algorithm notes that people still use”, even though I taught the class three years ago.
I didn’t have a great research CV. But that didn’t matter. I was hell-bent on being an electrical engineer. I wanted my algorithms to make it to production, so people could use them.
Now I work on dynamic wireless power transfer technology for electric vehicle charging systems. I haven’t published any papers lately, but every project I work on helps someone. I have the “fire in my belly” that comes from fixing people’s pain points. And I learned that helping people is my purpose in life.
I came to Padova wanting to solve interesting problems. I left wanting to solve problems for people.
‘In 2017, I was thinking very hard about what to do with the rest of my life. I didn’t want to be a manager anymore. It didn’t give me enough energy anymore. I wanted to be responsible for my own work again instead of managing others. I remembered the time when I was following a course at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. There was a spark. I realized I wanted to go back to university and get my Master’s degree.
I started the study program, and it was so much fun! One thing that struck me was how satisfying it was to study. It opened a world of opportunities for me and gave me a new future. I kept thinking, "Why didn’t I know these things when I was working? It really got me hooked on science and on teaching. After completing my master's, I started to teach at a university. But I wanted to continue learning through Ph.D. research, and I was enrolled in a Ph.D. at the University of Padova, Italy.
'The main lesson I learnt through my PhD journey is: always be learning!'
I will be joining a University soon as a professor but I don’t want to be a professor, I always want to be a student only.
It’s been a long three-and-a-half-year journey to earn the doctorate degree, and I would like to celebrate it with you. Perhaps, you did not realize it, but you were my influencers and my supporters all this time. Behind 156 pages of condensed thoughts, there are over 4 TB of data, sophisticated analyses, five drafted journals (among two accepted and three under review), five conferences, and several kilometers traveled across Italy by car, train, and plane.
I congratulate my supervisor, peers at the ESAaS lab, fellow candidates, and everyone who believed in me, especially at times when I doubted my decision to pursue a Ph.D. by traveling 7000 km from India to Italy. I also thank my family, who have always supported me in each and every situation for the past four years, even though they knew they were very far from me.
I realized the journey is not complete without some reflection, which, by the way, is not part of the official ceremony. The Ph.D. was overwhelming in the beginning, but looking back at plans, challenges, hopes, and achievements, I appreciate my Ph.D. experience more than ever.
In the meantime, I have this compulsion to share some of the post-PhD wisdom I’ve gained with a wider audience. You could say that these are just common sense observations, but in reality, common sense is not very common.
The nine valuable lessons I picked up the hard way are as follows:
1. Share your knowledge as much as possible. Ideas breed more ideas, and 1+1 is more than 2.
2. Communicate, communicate, and communicate with people around you.
3. Listen more and speak less.
4. Engage diverse people in your projects and learn from them.
5. Know that you can learn almost anything!
6. Do not regret the past and focus on the future.
7. Discover, test, fail, learn, and try again.
8. Always continue to disrupt yourself by testing your limits, and never give up.
9. Get out of your comfort zone, brush up on your language skills, and engage with the local community. Don’t let bias or manipulation hold you back.
So, how about the future?
In a world, where employers state that knowledge, innovation, thought leadership, entrepreneurship, and big data are in demand, I strongly believe that a Ph.D. degree gives an edge.
As a result, I am going to make use of this chance to talk about some of the talents that a Ph.D. taught me that are easily transferable to other jobs.
I have high hopes for my fellow Ph.D. candidates and doctors that they will be able to recognize the one or two qualities that set them apart from the competition in the employment market. In a similar vein, I have high hopes that organizations will feel more at ease and less scared by the prospect of recruiting PhDs, who, in reality, is not all that dissimilar from “academic” and “theoretical” professionals.
Effective data and information management is the key to knowledge creation, which I learned. When it comes to creating knowledge, you can’t just stop at analyzing data and conducting studies. It requires analytical reasoning, conceptual planning, and systemic analysis. Knowledge generation relies significantly more on the skillful interpretation of facts than on complex analysis or methods.
To put it simply, I honed my communication skills. The Ph.D. program helps students polish their communication abilities so they can effectively share their research findings with peers and the public. Working in global research teams as a Ph.D. student improves intercultural communication and awareness. Supervising, teaching, and coaching abilities can all be honed through working with students. In sum, the pursuit of a doctorate adds depth to one’s life and elevates one’s standards of ethics, honesty, and accountability.
I learned how to handle huge, multidisciplinary assignments. Getting a Ph.D. is like getting behind the steering wheel. As a result, it fosters a self-starter mindset and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Negotiation, time management, and controlling costs are widely used elements of the project management arsenal to effectively carry out the task at hand.
My understanding of what it means to be an entrepreneur broadened. A Ph.D. program nurtures originality, cultivates creativity, and distills insights that can serve as a solid basis for intellectual leadership. Earning a Ph.D. can spark the inner drive, dedication, and flexibility that will help you persevere through setbacks and have faith in your ideas and yourself.
In closing, I want to send my best wishes to all the Ph.D. applicants out there. To make the most of your Ph.D. experience, you should be original, resourceful, courageous, and honest. Those of you whose sole intention is to earn a doctorate degree should go ahead and enroll if the timing is perfect. Think things through logically, but don’t ignore your gut.
Being aware of challenges and developing strategies to address them can help mitigate their impact and make the Ph.D. journey more fulfilling.
