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.