Losing steam

I’m only into the second semester of my PhD, and I’m already having an existential crisis.

To cope, I spent the little extra time I had over spring “break”¹ going down a rabbit hole of PhD blogs and memoirs (starting with Philip Guo’s The PhD Grind, of course). It’s comforting to know that the emotions I’m experiencing aren’t rare. I now realize that the excitement I was experiencing for the first few months was, indeed, the honeymoon phase.

When I arrived in Pittsburgh in August, graduate school seemed like a dream. Unlike any other educational experience I’ve had before, my core responsibility as a PhD student is to research. Professors joke that “if you’re getting Bs in your classes, you’re not spending enough time on research”. The purpose of taking courses is to gain skills and knowledge to apply to my research, so I have a lot of flexibility in terms of what and how I learn. As someone who always loved the discussion and dreaded the assignment, I really appreciate this aspect of grad school. There’s not much pressure to prove your aptitude via homework and exams. Instead, there’s an emphasis on brainstorming and thinking deeply—a prospect that is exciting but has made me the most sleep-deprived I have ever been.

Don’t get me wrong. I still stand by what I wrote back in December. I am having fun in grad school. I guess recently I’ve just been doubting whether I’m actually cut out for it.

With regard to my duties as a PhD student, for the past few months, I have spent my time:

• taking courses
• working on one of my advisor’s current projects
• reading a lot of papers
• coming up with half-baked, abstract ideas
• talking about aforementioned ideas with my advisor and other people
• revising ideas in response to new papers I find and feedback I receive
• getting lost in ideation
• recalibrating and going back to previous ideas
• getting frustrated

Now, when I fill out my doctoral student review at the end of the semester, I’m probably just going to mention the first two bullet points. Because despite most of my time being spent on what is described in the remaining bullet points, none of that is noteworthy. However, that does not mean that I have not been productive or that I have been wasting my time. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.

When I started writing this piece, it seemed a little ridiculous at first to be having a “crisis” less than a year into my PhD. But I’ve found that several of my peers are in some sort of panic state/existentialist questioning mode right now. And it seems to stem from the expectation that we should be making more progress than we actually are.

I recently mentioned to a senior PhD student in my program that I felt a little burnt out, to which they replied, “You’re a first year. How could you be burnt out?”. This response felt a bit harsh and invalidating, but I suppose as someone who has endured the challenges of being a PhD student for 6 years, it would be annoying to hear a first-year complain about their struggles.

In reflection, I don’t think I’m actually burnt out. I think the reality of how difficult it is to produce good research is finally hitting me.

So to get through this journey and avoid actual burnout (not just cognitive but also emotional), I’ve realized that I need to recalibrate my mindset. My current expectations for progress are unrealistic. I’m quick to compare myself to others. I’m impatient. I feel pressure to produce visible achievements. I’m focused too much on the finish line.

To truly enjoy my PhD, I need to learn to bask in the process of learning and trying and failing and trying again. Because in research, there isn’t really a finish line. There’s always “future work” to do. I would like to attain a degree, but more than that, I want to become a good researcher. And a good researcher is more than awards and grants and publications. A good researcher is someone who asks insightful questions, who recognizes what gaps are worth addressing, and who is patient in refining work to a quality where it can be impactful. I’m sure there are other characteristics that I missed, but these are the few that came to mind.

I’m definitely far from being a “good researcher”. The good news is I have lots of time. This is where I bring up the cliche, “it’s a marathon, not a sprint”. I repeat this to myself on the days when I wake up full of adrenaline and anxiety.

Rather than fixate on what I’m outputting or not outputting, I want to shift to focus on who I would like to become, what skills I would like to refine, and what I would like to contribute to the field that I’m in. A good researcher embraces the process of learning, questioning, failing, and iterating. So for now, I’ll remind myself to be patient and to appreciate the small, incremental steps that shape me into who I hope to be.

Cheers,

Meryl