5 Lessons Learned From Doing PhD
Maybe I was crazy. I thought doing PhD was sexy in a weird way. My parents, friends, and family supported me above and beyond what I was hoping for. The idea of being an expert in an area, and have the ability to teach or disseminate well-understood knowledge to large audiences was attractive to me. So I plunged in and did it. It was one of the hardest things that I have done…. by far. These are the lessons that I learned.
1. I learned that PhD is not just about research, it’s also about teaching
In theory, your PhD thesis should be about uncovering new scientific knowledge. In fact, PhD stands for “Doctor of Philosophy”. Creating new knowledge is the main goal. Although often your idea might not be completely original, often we strive to create incremental progress in our knowledge area.
In practice, however, you will find out pretty fast that there are a lot of other things to do besides reading academic articles on your research topic. You have to learn, for example, how to run a research project. This will include many steps such as setting up an experiment, qualitative and quantitative data analysis, and writing and publishing research papers. You also realize pretty quickly that you need to network with other…
