- Myth 1: PhD is hard because doing it is very technical and complex!”
- Myth 2: A PhD degree requires a lot of intelligence and smartness. Holders of PhD are at the top of the intelligence pyramid.
Please note that the estimates of PhD dropouts varies from 60-70 percent. That is out of 100 students enrolling in PhD, only 30 to 40 reach the finish line. Dropouts from PhD programs belong to the category termed ABDs: “All But Dissertation”. Meaning PhD students who have completed all the formalities for the PhD including course work, comprehensive exam and proposal defense except the dissertation, which may still be a work in process or in the writing stage. In this post I describe why a PhD dissertation so difficult and so hard to complete!
- See also: Why PhD?
Myth: PhD is Hard because doing it is very technical and complex. Why PhD is Hard?
PhD is not hard because it is very technical or too complex or requires too much intelligence. It is hard because it requires commitment of several years of your life while the world around you seems to be moving forward; your colleagues would be climbing up on the career ladder with increasing income and improving lifestyle, while you will be subsisting on a stipend or you may even have to remain contented with a salary that is static or even less than what you were getting before you started your PhD. Also, typically you are at a stage in life when the probability of being caught in personal and family emergencies is high. Combination of these stresses create psychological barriers to the continuation of your PhD research as described here.
Perception of Others Moving Ahead of You
We were two colleagues who completed their masters at the same time from UT Austin. My friend joined a big electronic company that is famous for manufacturing microprocessors, and I decided to go for the PhD. As I was searching for an old functional car that I could afford on my scholarship stipend, my friend had bought an impressive SUV with his market based salary. To highlight the SUV’s 4-wheel drive features, he took our gang cross country over the hills around Lake Travis in Austin. The drive gives you the contrast I am trying to emphasize. As I was contemplating student housing, he had rented an attractive apartment. Then he bought the new sofa-set, dinning tables, beds etc worth thousands of dollars. On the other hand, I bought a sofa-set for some tens of dollars from a graduating student, who was leaving. Then he got married and was soon driving with his wife in his SUV. Around the same time, I also got married and started to live in the married student housing of UT Austin. Then, he proudly took me to show the twin condos that he had bought on a long term mortgage. Those were the days when property values had collapsed due to Savings and Loans crisis, and foreclosed condos and homes were available for grab at very attractive terms and it was easy for anyone to become the owner of a condo for a monthly payment slightly more than the rent one was paying for the apartment. A year or so later he had bought/constructed a brand new house where he moved. As I saw my friends climbing up from student housing, to apartments to the condos to brand new fabulous houses, Irfan Hyder was just a PhD student on a subsistence stipend from the university and struggling with his PhD not having any knowledge of how much further he had to go! It is this perceived peer pressure for “keeping up with the appearances” that makes the PhD student continuously evaluate his opportunity costs.
Perception of Not Knowing How Much Progress I have Made
The real pressure during PhD is this feeling of being stuck in a no-man’s land while others are moving ahead. To the student it typically feels like being stuck, with no end in sight. You see, a PhD becomes a PhD because there are no markers, no milestones, no idea of how close you are to the end point. By definition, Phd is about hoisting your flag in an uncharted territory, also referred to as making an “original” contribution. Had the territory been charted, it would have meant someone has already been there. That would have meant that the topic does not have the “originality” and that would be enough to doom your PhD, however, much effort you may have put in by that time.
Bachelors and Masters is easy. You start your bachelors knowing that you have to do these 40 courses. After each semester you know how many you have done, and how many more remain to be done. After one semester 35 remain to be done, after two semester the target has gone down to 30, then 25, then 20 and eventually you are ready to graduate. Even if there are setbacks, you still know where you stand. You can do the maths. However, in PhD you feel like being in desert with shifting sand dunes and no land markers. You may be travelling for days, but only in circles, not making any real headway. This unpredictability is what makes a PhD hard. Especially when others seem to be making so concrete headway. Interestingly enough, the end often comes to you as a surprise.
This typically happens on one fine day, when unexpectedly you find your supervisor announcing that he wants every thing to be wrapped up in a few months. It is over! This happened to me in early 1994, when my supervisor one day said, Mr Hyder I want you to be out of here by the end of this year. Now just wrap up whatever you have done. And, this came pretty much as a shock, as I had become accustomed to that student life during the preceding four years to an extent that I have forgotten there can be any other lifestyle. It is in this sense that I look at my PhD convocation ceremony as one of the biggest anti-climax time of my life: Getting only a piece of paper even though in an elegant ceremony. After so much effort and toil, after so many years, and after overcoming so many of the stresses, the end result is just a piece of paper! This was not a fitting finale accompanied by the huge crescendo of a full size orchestra that I was expecting.
Probability of Personal Emergencies
A very important factor in the high rate of PhD dropouts is that the probability of personal emergencies increases with the increasing age and responsibilities of a PhD student. Typically a student starts on the route to PhD around the age of 30. By that time students are often married with one or two children, or the first child is just around the corner, and your parents are often in the upper age bracket. Young children and older parents often get sick and this increases the stress over what has been described above. Moreover, with so much stress at home and with studies, probability of some slippage at work is very much probable, which may lead to job related problems creating additional financial pressures.
Then, there is this balancing act for the time that you allocate to your wife and children and your research. This especially becomes acute when you have finally managed to create a momentum after a long time and effort and you are making a steady progress that has motivated you to work for long hours. You are working late in your research lab or your research group. Then, one day you come home from a long day of hard research work, you are feeling a fulfillment of having made concrete progress that you can not describe, and at home you find your wife and kids waiting for the entire day for that long expected outing that somehow has slipped from your mind. You are looking forward to a couple of hours of relaxation, in which you simply want to do nothing. But, your wife and children can not understand your state and you are unable to make them understand and you become irritated because it is your fault that you forgot the date. Situation like these if not managed properly often leads to altercations, giving rise to yet another level of stress.
These factors combine together to make the probability of emergencies of a personal kind increase continuously as the PhD work progresses.
Psychological Barriers
Psychological factors and barriers often cause so much stress during the PhD that it is common for a PhD student to have at least one mild episode of a psychological nature. Of course, there are some who go through some severe kind of episodes also. It is here that the counseling and mentorship of the supervisor, help from your research group members and various support groups and support from family and loved ones is greatly helpful in overcoming this stress. Interesting part of this state is the understanding of the seasoned supervisors to this phenomenon who acknowledge this by correspondingly reducing the research pressure and give enough time for the student to recover from this phase.
My advice to students is not to prolong the PhD. Try to exploit fully the space you have right now and flatly go out, and complete the dissertation as soon as possible. In case, one or more such emergencies happen. Just scale down the amount of time you work for your PhD. But under no condition you should terminate it. If it gets too tough, allocate as few as just fifteen minutes of writing time every day. But, at all costs, persevere. Never let a day pass without writing. The effort in restarting your PhD after a break is not linearly, but exponentially related to the length of the break of your PhD work as shown in the figure. Therefore, writing and keeping momentum although at a low key level is must.
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| Loss in Momentum is exponentially related to break in your PhD Work |
- See also: How Literature Review of a PhD Dissertation Presents the State of the Art: Synthesis vs Listing
The figure here shows that a break of (say) three week can cause may be a loss of 2 units of momentum, break of five weeks may cause a loss of momentum of 9 units of momentum, but a break of 7 weeks may cause a loss of over 50 units of momentum. This depicts that the severity of the loss of momentum becomes more and more for every additional week of not working. A time then comes when it starts appearing impossible for the PhD student to resume work.
Myth: A PhD Holder is at the Top of the Intelligence Pyramid i.e. PhD requires a lot of intelligence
A PhD is more a function of perseverance than intelligence, and more a function of commitment than smartness. Although a foundational proficiency is required, but my experience of interacting with PhD candidates indicates that it is always the tortoise that wins the PhD race; hares often lose out because they are so smart, they have so many other things to do, and they get bored easily. The hare with its intellectual sprints and intellectual jumps is too smart to trudge along for the long haul; a capacity that is an essential requirement for completing the PhD marathon. I have seen many intelligent people simply ejecting out because for them spending years in a confined narrow space is not such an exciting proposition. Smart people often consider a narrow focus of the PhD specialization over such a long period of time as too boring and too devoid of excitement. They do not often have the patience to wait till the fun of research begins to start. In many cases they have more exciting possibilities open to them than to continue belaboring with a single minded commitment on their selected area of specialization.
- See also: Conclusion vs Assumption in Research Writing- Flipping the Thread of Argument in your PhD Thesis
So, you must understand that you do NOT need to be at the top of the intelligence pyramid to get a PhD. You just need to be a good student (with at least a B grade) and with a huge amount of commitment and perseverance to complete a PhD.
See My Other Posts on PhD:
- Motivation: Why PhD?
What is PhD?
- What does it Mean to Have a PhD: Myths of Specialization and Departmental Expertise
- What is the Difference between MS/MPhil Research and PhD Research
- Why PhD is Difficult to Complete and Why there are so many ABDs and PhD Dropouts
- How Progress of Research is related to the Mood and Psychology of a PhD Student
Starting with your PhD
- Dynamic Role of Abstract in Guiding the Flow of Writing of a PhD Dissertation
- How to Read a Research Paper and Extract Problem Statement and Thesis Statement
- How Literature Review of a PhD Dissertation Presents the State of the Art: Synthesis vs Listing
- What is a Problem Statement and its role in MS-PhD Research
- What is a Thesis Statement and its Role in PhD-MS Research
- What is meant by Rigor of PhD Research
- Dynamic Role of Abstract in Guiding the Flow of Writing of a PhD Dissertation
- Conclusion vs Assumption in Research Writing- Flipping the Thread of Argument in your PhD Thesis
- PhD is about Pursuit of Excellence. Pursuit of Excellence vs Guzara: How to teach excellence through everyday examples
- Myth: Impact Factor Measures Real Impact
- Pursuit of Excellence vs Guzara: How to teach excellence through everyday examples
- Discerning the Forest from the Trees – The Insights from my PhD Supervisor JC Browne
- A Formula is Worth a Thousand Pictures: Dijkstra vs Buzan’s Mind-Maps
- Fairness in Grading: A Lesson by the Great Dijkstra
- Lesser known dimensions of US Universities – Archives of history and literature
See Also:
- Why PhD?
- What does it Mean to be a PhD: Myths of specialization and departmental scope of expertise
- How Literature Review of a PhD Dissertation Presents the State of the Art: Synthesis vs Listing
- What is a Problem Statement and its role in MS-PhD Research
- What is a Thesis Statement and its Role in PhD-MS Research
- How to Read a Research Paper and Extract Problem Statement and Thesis Statement
- Conclusion vs Assumption in Research Writing- Flipping the Thread of Argument in your PhD Thesis
- Discerning the Forest from the Trees – The Insights from my PhD Supervisor JC Browne
- What is the Difference between MS/MPhil Research and PhD Research
- How Progress of Research is related to the Mood and Psychology of a PhD Student
- Am I ready for MPhil/PhD Research: Self Checklist
- How to Select an MPhil/PhD Research Topic
- Why PhD?
- A Formula is Worth a Thousand Pictures: Dijkstra vs Buzan’s Mind-Maps
- Pursuit of Excellence vs Guzara: How to teach excellence through everyday examples
- Why PhD is Difficult to Complete and Why there are so many ABDs and PhD Dropouts
- What does it Mean to Have a PhD: Myths of Specialization and Departmental Expertise
- Fairness in Grading: A Lesson by the Great Dijkstra
- Lesser known dimensions of US Universities – Archives of history and literature
- Myth: Impact Factor Measures Real Impact
- Myth: We are Backward because we Lag Behind in Science and Technology
- Beauty is Our Business – Mathematics, Excellence and the Great Dijkstra
- 5 Myths of Higher Education in Pakistan
- Myths of Schooling and Education: Resources
- 5 Myths of Higher Education in Pakistan
- Myth: There is a Mushrooming of HEIs in Pakistan
- Myth: Impact factor Measures Real Impact
- Beauty is our Business: Dijkstra and Mathematics
- Why Education and Why Higher Education: Leadership in Life and Society
- Myth: We are backward we Lag Behind in Science and Technology
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