I did not think this would be the first post on this blog when I created it months ago [edit: it was half a year. How the time flies].
That is, funny enough, emblematic of the Ph.D. experience. There are so many things to do and too little time to do them, so plans go out the window and you just go with the flow.
When I decided to start this blog, I hoped to start documenting my Ph.D. journey as graduate school is, paradoxically, the most abstract career path out there. Paradoxical since for some, grad school is a way to buy time and gain more clarity before entering the work force. Yet for most cases, I think Ph.D. offers only more confusion about the world of science and discovery, bonused with heavy dose of self-doubt.
After three years, some of the murky water has become clearer (read: amid the chaos, I have found some personal pillars to cling onto), yet there is still much uncertainty around pushing the boundary of science and myself1. On this beautiful sunny Sunday morning, sitting with my close friend/fellow Ph.D. warrior, I’m jotting down some reflections on the last 3 years of Ph.D., in itself a grand task (but as a Ph.D. student I have learned not to shy away from those 💪)
“Build your army in three years, use it in one hour”
Vietnamese: “Nuôi quân ba năm, dùng một giờ”
This is an idiom in Vietnamese (which might have come from Chinese ancient wisdoms on war) that describes perfectly where I stand in my Ph.D. program today.
If there’s one thing I learn the hard way after these three years, building something new and complex means things never works. Don’t take it from me, take these wise words from an acclaimed scientist in the field:
Things never work until YOU make them work
Much as this seems to present a grim view of life, it is also an oddly freeing thought. We are all in this line of work to make something novel, to find new understandings, and making something new means encountering challenges no one has solved before (and hey there are a lot of smart people in the history of humankind). Having the right expectations for the difficulty of this task really helps me set realistic goals, learn to celebrate the small wins, and fully enjoy the moment when things started to come together which, in my current project, took exactly three years.
Last month saw the first batch of data collected from my microcavity (a set of micro-scale mirrors that help enable quantum experiments with light) in a cryostat (a fridge that cools down to 4 Kelvin). This is a project goal set from the-very-beginning of my Ph.D. but have seemed so elusive until now. The cavity is still far from producing novel data, but since I have learned to set the right expectations, I am so happy that it even worked at all.
The one hour when I could see the data after three years, I was shocked: I thought things never work. Indeed, these data were the result of the million times when things did not work. I cannot tell you how many times I shyly reported to my advisor that all I achieved the previous week was to reassemble the cavity for the 64th time with slightly different screws and somehow, somehow the signal disappeared.
Thankfully, the “somehow’s” gradually became “this is how’s”, and slowly I learned of all the unexpected problems never documented in any paper or even any 200-page thesis. Right up to the cooldown day, after 2 extra weeks of troubleshooting, I confidently told my lab mate on a Saturday morning that all the kinks have been worked out and I would be ready to cool down that afternoon. Low and behold, around noon, a tiny wire that controls the sample movement broke, a problem I did not even expect to happen. Cooldown was off the table, back to troubleshooting mode, and I got teased by my lab mate since who in us could ever be confident about something like that!
But after an extra day, the wire is fixed, and everything worked (to an extent)!
After three years, many readings and discussions, many SolidWorks designs, Lumerical simulations, reading many equipment manuals, learning from metal machining to soldering tiny wires to the myriad of nanoscale characterization equipment, finally all the little things work together at the same time. I made them work.
So, the three-year hard-earned lesson is this: scientific research is difficult, and you have to expect it as such. Patience is the virtue here.
This suddenly brings to mind the warning from a friend and mentor who exited his physics Ph.D. at Dartmouth to find a (very good) corporate job: Ph.D. is a long and really, really hard journey. It takes a lot of grit.
The funny thing about these warnings is that experiences are not to be described. They are to be, well, experienced. I have finally grasped what he meant only now after my own hardship.
This is why I tried my best, knowing how in vain it is ultimately, to warn people of how Ph.D. is not just the next step in schooling. It is a career in itself, and it’s tough. Maybe exactly how tough would warrant another blog post (and a few years of experiencing it yourself), here I just want to emphasize how helpful it is to have the right expectations: deep understanding comes with struggles, good careful work comes with time. More time than with anything else you might have done in your life.
The day the wires broke, and it was yet another week without cooling down, my advisor saw the sulk on my face and said: well, that’s why a Ph.D. takes 5+ years, not 3 months! It’s just normal!
Know your reasons, and keep the faith
One disheartening part about a Ph.D. program is that you will never know if you are doing enough.
There is a lot of authority and flexibility one would have over their own Ph.D.’s work. The problem is, with freedom comes uncertainty. Since you are not told what to do besides, well, try to do some good work and graduate, you might be perpetually wondering what good work looks like on a day-to-day basis.
Every day, you struggle with these questions:
How much time should you spend on your homework vs. your research?
How much time on expanding your knowledge and finding new ideas vs. hyper-focusing on you project to make it work?
How much time should you spend on trying to understand the subject matter well vs. just understanding enough to move on?
How much time, even, should you work in a day/a week?
There is no singular answer these questions, since everyone came to the Ph.D. program with a different background and different set of goals. In my first years, I found myself constantly comparing myself to other people around me in search of a reference. Should I be publishing by the third year? Going to a conference in my second year? Understanding quantum optics after the first group meeting? I found myself on edge as my peers started presenting at conferences, appearing on google scholar, writing papers. Is my timeline too slow? Is there any shortcut I can take to speed up?
Rationally, I know these comparisons are imperfect at best. One major external factor, for example, is the fact that many people join established groups that have ongoing projects where they can start contributing to right away. My group, on the other hand, is a newer group where I build my experiment from scratch mostly by myself. There are good rationales behind either choice, yet it’s easy to forget these circumstances when we’re only looking at the short-term outcomes.
Shallow, flashy metrics are unfortunately easier to judge than subtle but truly important progress. For example, you might think someone with three papers are better than with one. What you might not see, however, is that the person with one paper might have built everything from scratch and truly became an expert on every little detail of that experiment, while the other person might have inherited the setup from previous researchers and only knew how to operate the instruments. You might think more conferences is better, while it might simply speak to the culture of a group rather than the quality of the person’s work. You might think that graduating in 5 years is a success compared to 7 years; on this point, anyone having done grad school can confidently tell you that is simply not the case.
That is why it is important to remind yourself of your true goals, and what progress towards these goals look like. For me, doing a Ph.D. has never been about getting that degree (I honestly find being called “doctor” really awkward, I don’t know about you). I embarked on this journey because I love the challenge of understanding the difficult yet elegant theories in physics, because I want to become an expert albeit in a small part of physics, and I simply want to become more of a scientist (more of what that means to come in a future blog post, hopefully).
The manifestations of these goals are obviously not limited to publishing or winning awards. It manifests when I am able to explain concisely and clearly to an undergraduate student something I did not understand myself a year ago. It is when I can offer some useful perspective to my colleague when they discuss a new idea with me. It is the realization that I finally understand what is happening in my experiment, even when it is just how to solder the wires better or choose the better screw material. Expertise is, after all, knowledge very specific to a particular subject only those who have experiences in would know.
Under the constraint of time and unrealistic comparisons to others, it is easy to want to take shortcuts. You might fool yourself into believing that you understand something while you don’t. You might overlook the loopholes in the theory in a hurry to reach a conclusion. Even if you do not mean to, the easiest (and most dangerous) person to fool is yourself.
It therefore takes patience, courage, and a strong commitment to the scientific method that helps us move forward in the right direction, to see the signal within the noise.
And honestly, sometimes it is pure faith. Faith that even when nothing seems to go right, good things will come when you persevere with integrity.
As of now, I truly believe they do.
Enough from me and more from people who know what they’re talking about: an inspiring short interview + an essay of wisdoms from two Nobel laureates to follow up:
Steven Weinberg’s Four Golden Lessons
Paul Nurse’s “best advice when I was a young scientist”:
Let’s keep failing forward, my fellow Ph.D. warriors.
-Thi
Since the prior is so difficult, I have found it helpful to focus on the latter.