The PhD Dilemma

Sir Isaac Newton, the father of classic mechanics, once said: “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants”. This sentence carries the base of any good research, that consists of building upon the work of other people that already did something in the field, in a constant improvement process. Not by chance, the first chapter of many PhD theses is completely dedicated to a literature survey, interestingly also called “state of the art”.

Nevertheless, this comes with a problem. At the beginning of the thesis, we are too immature to deeply understand the literature, even if we have a good background on the research topic. At the end of the PhD contract, re-reading the literature to write the thesis, we realize how much more we could have achieved if we could understand it from the beginning.

But, the dilemma is: we only really understand what we should do and how to do it after trying and failing many times. Therefore, it would be impossible to understand the literature at the first read, and, at the end of the thesis, we have no time to do the work all over again. It is only after some years of experience that a researcher can be confident enough to say he masters a given topic, if this moment ever comes at all.

Perhaps the only way out of this repressive cycle is to understand what a PhD is all about. It is not about learning everything about a topic, because this is impossible. It is most definitely not about writing a thesis that nobody is really going to read. The one and only goal of a PhD, in my opinion, is to set your feet on the ground, to show how little you know about the thing you know the most in the world, and to teach you how to think when you have an extremely difficult problem to solve. It looks pretty harsh, and it is.

When I look back to the beginning of my PhD, I realize that I didn’t achieve everything I wanted with my research, because my expectations were incompatible with reality. Nevertheless, after going through those three years of hard work, I know I’m a completely different person than before. I feel that my capacity to solve problems has increased tremendously, and I learned how to manage my time and resources in a way I wouldn’t be able to do without this experience.

More than that, I learned to value what is really important, and not to get stuck in peripheral roadblocks. About that, I want to finish with a quote from a scientist called George Kimball: “There is a further difficulty with the finding of ‘best’ solutions. All too frequently when a ‘best’ solution to a problem has been found, someone comes along and finds a still better solution simply by point out the existence of a hitherto unsuspected variable. In my experience, when a moderately good solution to a problem has been found, it is seldom worthwhile to spend much time trying to convert this into the ‘best’ solution. The time is much better spent in real research…”.