By Leonie Schittenhelm
https://pixabay.com/en/sign-detour-road-closed-roadblock-1167333/
The first time I heard the title of the latest issue of the REACT print magazine, I was in the middle of what one could call a scientific crisis. After my first year progression review had been successfully passed I had finally made a breakthrough in an experiment I had been optimising and tinkering with for months. I was confident and ready to work hard to acquire as many samples as I possibly could. And then, in an unexpected turn so common in science, something came up and everything slowly grinded to – what it felt like for me at the time – a halt.
It felt like none of my experiments worked and like everyone else was speeding up, while I was slowing down. In flew the call for submissions for the newest issue of REACT magazine and remember thinking: Endurance. That’s exactly what I need. So after Emma’s brilliant list of not leaving your lab mates out in the rain after you finish your PhD from last week, here some thoughts about how to get through your PhD in the first place.
1. Courage
Doing your PhD will require a lot of new things that seem scary and new. Talking in front of a room full of people who know way more about the thing you’re talking about than you. Coming up with your own ideas for experiments and suggesting them to your supervisors. Going up to that seminar speaker and asking a question about their work. Usually the scariest things also seem the most worth it – and I can promise you, everything gets less scary after having done it a couple of times!
2. Organisation
Can’t really get around that – you need to know where your data is, how you got it and if all consents ethical approvals were in place. Especially if stuff starts going wrong, having all your things organised will help you figure out where the problem might be coming from.
3. Compassion
Everyone knows the almost mythical PhD horror stories of students who come in at 11am and leave at 3pm, who don’t care about their science and who invariably fail. I had considered putting ‘high work ethic’ on this list, but as I thought about it, I realised every single PhD student I know is incredibly hard-working already, sometimes at great personal cost. So instead, an urge to be compassionate both towards yourself and your fellow students. You are working hard and you are doing your best, everything else will fall into place.
4. Endurance
Stuff will be going wrong. And then it will go wrong again. It might actually never work out. And that is absolutely okay. You are here to learn, and as they say: you need to break some eggs to make an omelette. Thinking back to my personal scientific ‘crisis’ last year, I have to say, I’m not sure where I would be now without it. While frustrating and exhausting, it drove me to talk to more different people than I had in the 6 months leading up to this point combined. It made me bolder in trying out some of my own ideas and – maybe most importantly – it gave me to courage to fail at something until I figured it out.
Let us know what qualities you find most helpful in doing your PhD in the comments!