What It is Like to be A PhD Candidate
Okay normal people. If any of you curious about what it is like to be a PhD candidate, I will tell you. Frank and honest.
But first, what does PhD stand for?
Doctor of philosophy? Piled higher and deeper? Perfectly healthy dude (and dudette)? Or permanent head damage?
Call me what you want. But yes, I am a real PhD candidate, my subject is chemical engineering, my research focus is wastewater treatment. I'm probably two-third way to obtain my doctorate.
You have to become a PhD student by choice, and not by some fussy "loser go to hell" bet. Even if it is an intuition and not a long time will, it has to be by choice. You don't go to graduate school because you get drunk or because you just want to outsmart your ex-boyfriend and his annoying new girlfriend. And by choice means you are obliged to sell your soul to do whatever it takes to finally add "Dr." in front of your name.
Being a PhD student is by all means different to being a master student. I was a master student for a year, taking courses and doing some elementary experiments. While master students are not demanded to have original idea, a PhD student have to be original. You cannot read someone's research and then try to repeat the experiment with just a few different variables (thing most researchers do). You have to be novel. And that ..... will haunt you in your dream. It will be the story of your life, and you cannot make it just a mere story.
You can come to your adviser to report your failure and then discuss how to deal with that if you're a master student. If you're a PhD student, failure should be addressed first with all your mighty logical-reasonable efforts, and when they still fail, you need to find out why, what literature support that failure. You cannot come empty-handedly and having a chit-chat.
You are expected to be keen. All-nighter is normal, two or three in a row. Weekend is the day after your labmeeting or personal meeting, not Saturday or Sunday. Emails will come to you anytime, any moment, sometimes at 4 in the morning. You will spend 2-3 hours just to send email about your report to your adviser, thinking of the way to express your results and postulation without attacking your adviser's professional and personal opinion. Your email will be replied with one or two line(s), like "come to my office later", or "rewrite the paper draft as attached".
Time constraint is not yours to define, and not for normal people to define as well. As-soon-as-possible order from your adviser usually means within the day (or the hour), and you cannot demand the same thing. When your adviser says "soon", it means "maybe next week, maybe within this month". A suggestion means you have to do it, it is you adviser's polite way of asking you to do more experiments.
You have to put Google Alert for your research in order not to miss any important literature or to immediately know that your research is already published. The first webpage that you open in the morning is Science Direct or Scopus, and you read top 25 hottest articles to find some inspirations (or to envy the authors). Checking emails is the second. Then you open Twitter and send out morning greetings to everyone, pretending that your day is fine. Fineeeee. When you take a vacation, you have to make sure that your place is fully covered by internet because work emails can come anytime (and I mean ANYTIME). When your adviser is abroad you have to double your all-nighter shift because timezone difference will definitely kill you if you don't check your email every 5 minutes.
Get drunk together with your colleagues (fellow PhD candidates) is normal. You will talk about research, then you probably will flirt with each other. Beers in the communal fridge are a must. Strong black coffee in the morning will be your first drink. Sharing some scientifically accurate TV series like Bones is also one common thing. And then when you watch other series, you will begin to criticize how inaccurate they are. That DNA testing cannot be done in an hour, it has to be overnight. That a killer using liquid nitrogen without actually studying chemistry is too far-fetched, because it is very unstable and hard to handle. That acid, hydrochloric or hydrofluoric, will not dissolve human body and its bones into bits.
You will go on some fancy conferences, where you meet prominent speakers in your fields. Free trip to other countries, all expenses paid, but you have to work your ass off to write a paper and get the paper accepted to the conference before you fly there. Sometimes your name will be put behind your adviser's name, which means it will not appear anywhere when cited (yeah, you've got that et.al. part). Publication is a must, and that really takes up your time. Get your draft submitted to a journal can take years, because your adviser will expect the best. After being submitted, you can get rejected. After waiting for 6 months. If you get through, your draft will be reviewed by some other researchers and you can get jerks for reviewers. It means they will ask this and that, this and that, this and that. Then you can get rejected again because your revision is not accepted by the reviewers. And the circle of hell is repeated.
After you published some papers (the amount greatly depends on what your adviser says), maybe you can start writing your dissertation, defending it, and obtain your doctorate. Maybe.
And that's after, say, four years, normally. Five or six years is also normal. Sometimes seven.
Don't ever go to graduate school to follow your bliss. It has to be a choice, or you will end up feeling miserable, or you may quit halfway.
Am I happy? Sometimes. Do I regret my choice? Big NO. I find my life interesting, as always. But it is hard, I tell you.
So, anyone wants to follow my steps?
