The 'Doctor of Philosophy' rigmarole

“We are delighted to offer you admission with fellowship to the doctoral program in the Department of Engineering Science at Oxford University”, read the admit. Three years of fantasizing about graduate school had been neatly translated into a single sheet of paper. I read it over and over to make sure it was real. My advisor called the next morning to say: “The man you chose to work with is known to have mood swings, and along with the dull weather, we have a dreadful combination. You might want to reconsider going there”. I patiently waited for the next admission offer to come along. In this article, I hope to give you some insight into, and debunk some popular myths about the inner workings of the PhD program; they fail to mention these aspects on College confidential. While most of the references here are explained in an electrical engineering context, they can be extended to include all disciplines. Getting admission into school, while certainly complicated, is not as strenuous as finding your groove and settling down in the program.

The first person you meet when you arrive at school is hopefully your predestined or potential advisor. The first half hour pseudo-interview type meeting should give you a vague idea about how the person works. An interesting question that comes up often is to rate your programming ability on a scale of one through ten. You can then be reasonably sure that you are going to be given broken code/nearly complete code to sort out for your first few months as a graduate student. Trial one is if and when the advisor assigns you to a senior doctoral student in their group. Any student in the program has his/her own agenda (girlfriend/boyfriend, research proposals, thesis, and coursework, given priority in that order). No student has the bandwidth to mentor a new entrant. Also, it is unfair to expect a senior student to give reports to the professor and gauge the research potential of a debutante.

This so-called trial phase is actually detrimental to both advisor and student. It requires prodigious skill to evaluate the research abilities of a person when he/she is also taking three courses and teaching a class. On the part of the student, if he/she is writing code to assist another graduate student, it is difficult to assess lab culture and the scope of work done by other team members. In my opinion, a simple one hour test is all that is required to evaluate a new student. If you are admitted into engineering/sciences, a reasonable background in higher applied mathematics is assumed. Assigning one an open ended research problem in the related field and observing their thought process as he/she works through it is all that is required to judge if he/she is worthy of a place in the lab. This process takes much less time and is a far more efficient way of filtering out students/advisors.

My friend came up with an amusing analogy to explain how to filter out advisors. According to him, it is better to ‘date’ potential candidates, find one whose working style appeals to you, and settle down with them. You may or may not be pleased with a predetermined advisor. Note that once the commitment is made, unlike in an actual relationship, it is very difficult and often impossible to sever ties. If you make the wrong choice, therefore, you will end up being bitter and disappointed for the five year duration.

Often times, even the most reasonable professor cannot guarantee you a paid research position because of a lack of grant money. Most (not all) universities like to ensure that their PhD students don’t lose funding; the department will then give you a teaching assistantship. This translates to a stipend and a tuition remission, in exchange for assisting a professor in teaching an undergraduate class. Your professor will obviously demand that his research takes precedence over teaching. Two economic considerations now come into play. From a macro-level financial perspective, you are able to live comfortably because of the TA stipend and so you have some responsibility towards the teaching commitment. Also, in any university,  if not for the tuition paid by undergraduates, graduate students cannot be financed, so you might want to do your job diligently.

If one studied in the same academic system, he/she begins to empathize deeply with the plight of the undergraduates. The result is some extraordinary effort put into preparing notes for exams and holding review sessions. If this is you and you are part of a group of TAs (who don’t share the same work ethic), you also have to contend with the teaching hierarchy, all for wanting to do your job well. A word of advice is to find a group of students who share a common set of values on teaching ethics and morality. Most people in the outside world will not recognize your dilemma; you will need an understanding audience to validate your efforts.  One thing that rings clearly is if a professor insists that teaching should take a backseat, then his/her place (with all due respect) is in a national research institute, not a university.

The two main hurdles in a PhD student’s life are the screening exam (an oral/written exam that determines whether you are qualified for graduate study) and the proposal or prelims where a student outlines his tentative research goals. The time frame after you cross the first stage is what I think of as a self-finding sabbatical. You are allowed to go out, attend conferences, and contemplate possible research directions. It is essential that the advisor meets up with you regularly to assess your ideas and fine-tune them. When you are in this phase and have little direction, there is a constant temptation to mimic the methods of existing state-of-the-art algorithms and propose to better the results. One thing to remember is that the primary goal of doctoral study is to introduce a new direction/new method in a direction. A substantial proposal should fall into either category to have significant impact.

Several factors might set you back in this crucial step in the program. A possible distraction can come in the form of coursework. It can be safely assumed that any course material can be absorbed by a student in this advanced stage of the doctoral program at his/her own pace. Enrolling in a course means doing assignments and taking exams, all of which take you away from spending time crystallizing your research proposal. Another distraction (this happens mostly in large groups) is if you are called upon to grade/teach your advisor’s class or mentor an intern. Note that both can stand in the way of you formulating a stellar, yet feasible proposal. Often, a misdirected goal statement leads to problems further down the value chain. A foreseeable disaster is when your statement was not profound enough and you have to search for new problems in the remainder of your study. The most common problem when you are defending your thesis is if you cannot fully substantiate the claims you made during your proposal. Your committee will be forced to sign you out of school (maybe because you have been in the program too long). Anyone is likely to feel miserable in such circumstances, because five years of hard work led to insufficient/incomplete results.

The next step in the program is writing the dissertation. It is very crucial that your writing is in keeping with what you outlined in the proposal. If the professor asks you to assist with different projects, not necessarily according to your proposal, but merely as a stopgap to replace another student, you will have difficulty stringing together a coherent dissertation. Sixty percent of publications in engineering and sciences are badly written. These can include verbose paper titles, misleading abstracts, and poorly reported results. Most professors forget to teach students to write; it is in fact as important to present research in a conducive manner, as it is to conduct high-impact research. A common error is to mention prior work not directly related to your idea, as a way to meet page length requirements. More blasphemous ones include grandiose abstracts and inappropriately labelled diagrams/charts. There is long-lasting damage done when you cannot write well; the proposals you write in industry and the papers you co-author as a professor are likely to suffer.

Any graduate student can come up with algorithms, program reasonably well and write decent papers. You come into school with an extraordinary skill set; your advisor is responsible for honing the talent you inherently possess. The most important life-lesson learnt during doctoral study, contrary to what most people think, is imbibing the advisor’s work ethic and learning to formulate and solve an open-ended problem. If you are being comfort-zoned at any time during school, your mentor is not pushing you enough. To raise you to truly reach your maximum potential means to make you endure significant torture. I will never forget the time when my advisor made me go through sixty (yes, you read the number right) draft revisions of a single abstract. Although it was arduous, it helped me appreciate the finer nuances of technical writing. Another former advisor of mine held weekly one-on-one meetings with his thirty students, at the age of sixty four. Such extraordinary work ethic is very likely to inspire the same in you.

Let’s now move on to the social scenario. A good rule of thumb is to make friends outside your research group to whom you can confide frustrations/happiness about best-paper awards. It will also be wise not to attend parties where the only topics people are discussing are their most recent publications or teaching responsibilities. Never take anything on Facebook too seriously. All too often, there is a tendency to compare your life to those outside of school. Their fancy cars, lavish lifestyle, and exotic travels will do nothing to boost your morale. You cannot afford this on a stipend, but the positive side-effect of a low salary is remarkable creative satisfaction. A very common stereotype in engineering and the sciences is that people do not possess great looks. The sole eye candy student is admitted once in four years, and much to the dismay of all the single men and women, is betrothed or in a committed relationship. One suggestion is to look outside your specific area (maybe in the humanities or social sciences?). You are likely to have a more balanced relationship, with a new and enhanced perspective, with someone who doesn’t have the same educational background as you.

The one thing every admissions counselor tells you is that you should have relevant research and teaching experience in a narrow focus, to get admission into graduate school. This is untrue, and leads you up a winding garden path. Once you have focused on one specific research area, you are likely to want to continue/better the work in the same field. This will restrict your choice of advisors greatly. The best approach is to find a broad area of interest and take all the courses that you can in that area during your undergraduate study. Contrary to what counselors say, you can get into most top graduate programs with just a good GPA and little to no research experience. When you come in with no prior, you start afresh and are open to examining all the possibilities presented to you. If you do have some research experience, open your mind, and if possible embrace and acknowledge that there can be varying work environments. I know that this can be very difficult; one grave mistake to avoid is to benchmark your current circumstances against your previous research experience. This could make you very unhappy; it is always ideal to enter school with the mindset of a newcomer.

It has taken me two and a half years filled with sleepless nights, intermittent bouts of severe sickness, and a wide variety of setbacks to put together this narrative. I hope that it will help a few new and continuing doctoral students to make the right choices, along their course of study. There is no place closer to paradise than graduate school if you can find a group of friends with a similar mindset and outlook, and a supportive and enthusiastic advisor. Imagine where you are right now when you are reading this; in my mind, you are at the threshold of an infinite corridor of amazing possibilities, some which might enable you to write a stellar thesis in the next decade!

The Oxford acceptance letter now lies in a jasmine scented box along with other treasured correspondences, as a pleasant memory of what could have been.

The marriage story

All words marked with asterisk are explained in the footnote below.

Indian women hear the word marriage from a very young age. The notions of this institution change with time; the definition, however, changes dramatically when you are called upon to enter it yourself.

I will start with a few anecdotes about the groom selection process in my community, or should I say species? My examples are based on close friends who are going through the arduous process of filtering potential matches. A word about the procedure: your parents sign you up on a community matrimonial website (translate: online parent-approved dating). Eligibility parameters include (but are not restricted to) post graduate degrees from reputed universities, six figure salaries, “homely” attitude, matching horoscope*, and great looks. Not required, but nice to have are: knowledge of classical music, rituals and festivals, and culinary skills. With this, we have just converted what I naively thought was a compatibility-based decision to a parameter-centric ranking algorithm with varying weights attached to different viability factors. Let us add another layer to the process and say that most meetings are on Skype; an elder may determine an auspicious time for this conversation.

My friend was a doctoral student in solid-state Physics at Stanford. Her parents decided to put her through the Skype test a week before she defended her thesis. So great was her mother’s relief that she had found a potential groom who was also a doctoral candidate. While the exact details of the conversation are probably content for a separate article, one of the more contentious points the man touched on was a possible superiority complex on the part of the girl, because of her Stanford affiliation. As she told me this, I began to comprehend the futility of the entire setup. For anyone who has contemplated a PhD in any field, it is one of the most underrated pursuits where one puts his/her love of research over a lucrative industry salary, to work for a whimsical advisor. There is really no question of feeling superior attached to  doctoral studies. Forget contemplating marriage, I am not sure I would even want to “get to know” someone this narrow-minded. Needless to say, their conversation went nowhere, much to the despair of her parents.

Speaking for myself, my parents have always feared that everyone in my community will have a certain negative bias towards me since I received all my higher education abroad. People label you as arrogant, self-obsessed, or Americanized just because of where you studied. I have had many a pointless conversation with my grandmother when she told me not to apply to MIT/Caltech because finding a groom in the same league would be close to impossible. The parents of my community's intelligentsia will reject a girl who cannot move to the same country/state the son is working in. While it is considered acceptable to earn a good salary, it is preferred that the girl’s salary be marginally lesser so as not to create an ego clash. Mentioning a PhD/being enrolled in one almost equals being an outcast because then, the girl will be “more” educated than the MBA/MS, banker/engineer son. This generalization was made because most people in my community find themselves in these professions.

One thing evades my comprehension: why should a marriage come in the way of any woman’s pursuits (academic or professional). Should not university attendance/career prospects be determined purely on merit? What if a marriage with someone is certain to thwart everything a woman has worked for all her life? Let us extend the discussion to include women of all castes in India. Suppose a woman A is considering an advanced degree/starting a company/stem cell research. Telling her that she must not try to do it because of marital prospects is equivalent to killing all her passions. If a potential groom has trouble accepting the ideals that the woman espouses, I wonder how a marriage can last purely on society-related constraints like cast or financial status. At the highest meta level, if I were allowed to extend the superficiality in thought process to  more general day-to-day living scenarios, imagine the decisions I will have to be party to throughout my life by being married to such a person. This contradicts the opinions of educated women that marriage should be an extension of who they are and what they stand for.

The next important aspect in the marriage rigmarole is the actual wedding. Most weddings are extravaganzas sponsored entirely by the bride’s parents, in exchange for the parameter-matched groom. These include fancy, over-the-top receptions in lavish hotels and expensive wedding gifts. A friend’s father was told that he had to find a marriage hall fitting the status of the Apple engineer groom and accommodate the relatives in a five star hotel. The result was the dilution of a lifetime of savings on a two-day phenomenon likely to be remembered only by the egotistical friends/relatives. It is time to step back and analyze what went on here: so much attention was focussed on the wedding that people might have missed the crucial point of the marriage that has to survive the test of time. I don’t see anyone checking in to find out if both bride and groom are actually contented within the institution.

So I am going to make a request: to all the educated, ambitious women, find yourself a man who will appreciate you for your eccentricities and quirks, whatever they may be. If you have a crazy goal, there is a whole cynical world with tremendous negative energies outside to eat at your potential. You want to come back to somebody who inspires you, a man who truly pushes you to bring out your best. Changing to meet someone’s requirements is terrible; if you want to make any life-altering change in your personality, it should be inspired by you. If you can find a man who will listen to you when you come up with ideas to change the world and not laugh at you, but help you implement it, you have found your true emotional and intellectual equal.

This note is not an indictment of any individual. I know that most men might find the views accusatory, however, the above-mentioned system exists. Instead of taking this personally, it would do well to change the way you think and be more accommodating and inclusive. To all the progressive men who believe in finding equals for partners, I have a request to you too. As much as you find happiness being in corporate meetings or surrounded by academic papers, it will be nice if you can step out once in a while and show yourselves to women who appreciate your company. Contrary to popular perception, most women find the possible introvertedness rather appealing. By stepping out, thus, you are doing the women, and most importantly yourself a world of good. Think about the happy time you can discuss Tolstoy/Maupassant over breakfast with your significant other without being judged as pretentious.

Then, we can talk about marriage as being a liberating institution, for all involved.



* horoscope - a forecast of a person's future, typically including a delineation of character and circumstances, based on the relative positions of the stars and planets at the time of that person's birth.