Thoughts towards the end of a PhD

On what doing science feels like

Much has been written and discussed about metascience, how good we are at funding science, whether we should fund it at all and so on, with much of the discourse having become political. This is my take on what it feels like to actually DO science, towards the end of my PhD. Firstly, for those who wanna know what my work is about, you can read the piece below:

When I started doing my PhD, I thought it was going to mainly be a test of my intelligence, resourcefulness, originality and ability for sustained and hard work. And it was all those things, of course. But much, much more than that, I have found that it was a test of other qualities that are not only relatively scarcer, but also maybe underdiscussed, at least when one is an undergraduate. Those qualities I would summarize as follows: Resilience. The resilience to deal with the inevitable strings of failures and disappointments that naturally come with venturing into the unknown. Persistence. One thinks they learn persistence by working for 6 months here and there in a lab during their undergraduate times, but PhD-level science takes much longer than that. Not only does one have to stick to the same problem(s) for years, but countless experiments need to be repeated, analyses redone with slight variations, up until one ends up dreaming of certain plots, or algorithms, or experimental steps. Then there is Courage. This comes in many forms. But one of them is the courage to attempt to tackle problems that involve a certain degree of risk, followed by the fortitude to deal with the consequences when risky things do not turn out the way you hoped they would. Then there is the courage to admit when your data is not quite as perfect as you would like it to be and instead of avoiding it or moving to easier problems, carefully avoiding the “thorny” points, attacking the real issues head on. Related, there is also the courage to admit to oneself when one was wrong and made mistakes, followed hopefully by the ability to learn from these. And, perhaps the hardest of it all, the Courage to stare Nature in its face, unyielding and impersonal as it is, armed only with what not so long in the future, other PhD students will think of as rudimentary tools of unravelling that which Nature is stubbornly hiding from us. It is this unyielding, almost cruel quality of Nature that has taught me the most important lesson of all: Humility.

I carry the hope that some of the findings from my work shall burn for a little while longer than my own, fragile flame.

“How many men in a thousand million, he asked himself, reach Z after all? Surely the leader of a forlorn hope may ask himself that, and answer, without treachery to the expedition behind him, “One perhaps”. One in a generation. Is he to be blamed then he is not the one? provided he has toiled honestly, given to the best of his power, till he has no more left to give? And his fame lasts how long? It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years? The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare. His own little light would shine, not very brightly, for a year or two, and would then be merged into a bigger light, and that into a bigger still.”

(Virginia Woolf – To the Lighthouse)

With the knowledge and acceptance that venturing into truly new knowledge territory is a state of constant drowning.

“Most men will not swim before they are able to.” Is that not witty? Naturally, they won't swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they won’t think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.”

(Hermann Hesse – Der Steppenwolf)

And with the hope that I learned, from my mentor Iñigo, to recover from the drowning and just enjoy the scientific discovery process.

"What is dead may never die, but rises again, harder and stronger"

(G.R.R Martin – A Song of Ice and Fire)