PhD in Science

Since the start of my PhD in science, a question lingers on my mind. Why is it that once you start studying for your doctorate, you cease to exist as a proper human being and become someone who is more like a ghost than a person.

Upon starting a PhD you always imagine how you will get a lot of results, you will receive a lot of help from your supervisor, you will have massive amounts of friends and a lot of time that you can call your own. If you think like that you are mistaken.

The first week is great; you talk to your supervisor who will put all of the dreams into your head. That you will have a great and fast PhD, it will be so straight forward and once you finish these experiments, which are very easy to do, you will be an excellent researcher and will achieve a lot; you might even win a Nobel Prize!

So on the weekend you go out with your friends and tell them how lucky you are that you thought about doing PhD. How lucky you are of having this freedom of working ay hours you wanted while they have to work from nine till five and everyone envies you.

On the second week you start reading papers and you moan about it but you are still happy because you see that people have done something similar so you should be able to do this. Sure how hard can it be?

Then you start doing your work… You set up your experiments and buy in all the chemicals. Then the work starts. A month passes then a couple more and suddenly you are terrified. What did you get yourself into? Experiments are not working. You initial work went well. You got good results but when you actually got to the first big experiment, it refuses to work. Your supervisor who was encouraged by your initial wave of success demands results. You start coming in early and leaving later. Soon you leave home at six and come home at half ten. Still it refuses to work. Then you start working weekends. You stop going out, you occasionally talk to your friends through email and on very rare occasions do you actually get to go home before eight.

Your life becomes a lab. You live in it. You would have slept in it if it was allowed. You get desperate. You think about quitting. Your supervisor thinks you are lazy. He (she) starts comparing you to other students. Tell you that he thinks that undergraduates are better at getting results than you. You lose your self-confidence, you think yourself a failure, you burst into tears but you keep going.

Your friends, if you still have any, don’t envy you any more. They have fixed hours and earn much more than you. They pity you and think themselves lucky.

The stress starts giving you gray hairs. You are so desperate to get anything working that you shut everyone out. You are angry at the outside world. You don’t think anyone understands you. You look at the people on the train and think what do they know? You doubt yourself and your choice of career.

You become a ghost. Your friends are enjoying their life; you are not part of theirs. You start avoiding your supervisor for you don’t want to add more stress to your already stressful life. You disappear…

And then, a miracle! You get that experiment working. And the feeling! That feeling, like you are on the top of the world. You start feeling that it was worth it. That everything that you went through is what happens to everyone yet at the same time you know that it will never ever be as hard as it was. Everyone is happy; your supervisor shakes your hand. You get your PhD. You are full of dreams for things to come…