Year 2 Reflection
When I started Year 2 of my doctoral program, I liken it to getting back in the water after almost drowning. The positive, of course, is that I didn’t drown. It’s nice to be alive, right? The flip side of that, of course, is that traumatic experiences like that shape and influence so much of who you are moving forward. While I agree that it’s a bit over the top to liken a rough year in a PhD program to a near-death experience, that doesn’t take away from the fact that memories tend to be laced with emotion. And whether you know it or not, there does seem to be a strong bias in our brains, wherein we remember our negative experiences more vividly than we do our positive ones.
Evolutionary psychologist think it’s a defense mechanism. After all, things that hurt us, or make us sad, periodically threaten our physical livelihood as well. Remembering those things, vividly, can help us stay alive. They keep us from mortal danger. Or at least that’s the thought.
Of course, I’m sure you can see how that has the potential to hinder, too.
Either way, the start of Year 2, I found myself wading back into the waters of doctoral education, after being told at the close of Year 1 I was at risk of being dismissed from my program. I had only one (1) semester to get my act together and show the program was better with me than it would be without me.
Shattered self-confidence.
Dwarfed self-esteem.
Confused.
Isolated.
Ashamed.
Ostracized.
Angry.
Disappointed.
You know, the irony of a PhD is you receive a stipend so you don’t have to work and you can, instead, “think”, but you never have any quality thinking time. Because the program is always go-go-go, I don’t usually have these opportunities for deeply introspective moments. But I knew, for sure, at the start of Year 2 that I was wading, again, in the waters that almost swallowed me a Year earlier… hoping and praying for something different, for no particular reason at all.
Things were different this time.
After a month or two in Fall 2018, I performed swimmingly on my exams, came up with a few decent research ideas, presented some work to some colleagues and got some exciting feedback… and the rest was history.
1 week became 1 month. 1 month became 1 semester. 1 semester became an academic year. And all of a sudden, I’m wondering where my Year 2 went.
If you’re expecting me to do an insightful commentary on what I did to turn my time in the program around, at the risk of being disappointed, you can stop reading now. I don’t think there’s anything I did, this year, that was different from what I did last year. If anything, I actually worked harder last year (probably 80 hours a week) and had lower performance, in both my coursework and my research.
I’ll write about some things I’ve been giving thought to throughout the year though.
Maybe they’ll be helpful for you.
MEASUREMENT MEASUREMENT MEASUREMENT
I think it’s one of the great pitfalls mankind faces: we love things that can be measured. Particularly as a highly motivated, highly analytical person, I want to be able to measure results. The truth is though, not everything in life can be measured. In fact, many of the most important things are especially difficult to measure, if they can be measured at all.
And a PhD is no different.
Shucks, I’m at the end of year 2. How many working papers do I have?
Anything submitted for publication?
Did I present at any conferences this year?
What did I add to my CV?
Do I have +10 armor? Or maybe +15 charisma? +5 hit points?
Sure I’m being facetious, but I’m not being that farfetched.
Even those moments where you’re growing and improving, you don’t always feel like that.
Case and point…
I’m grateful for how well funded my program is. I was working on a pretty massive research project, so we had some RA’s (research assistants) support the project to expedite the work. My task: I had to download 1600 photographs and get them cropped to use in a subsequent experiment we planned on running.
You can think of the experiment as a guessing game of sorts. Participants had to make a guess about the race of the person in the photograph. Simple enough, right? We had to get rid of any clues though, so we cropped the pictures so they all revealed the same amount of information (it’s always easier to guess when you have clues).
I cropped those photographs for weeks. WEEKS. The RA’s did, too. And then I realized we were cropping the photos incorrectly… in essence, almost everything we did was wrong. And we were almost done.
We had to start all over. And still make the deadline. Have you ever spent 14 hours in a day cropping photographs in Powerpoint? Ugh…
Now, the reason why I say this is progress is because I’ve learned enough about research to be able to spot errors in my own work. After looking over what I did, and what the RA’s did, I saw that it wouldn’t work for research purposes. And I didn’t need my advisor to point that out to me. I figured it out on my own. It didn’t feel like progress because it brought us back to square 1. Over a month of work… gone. Just like that.
I think what I’m learning is what’s even more important than how much progress you’re making is the notion of continually moving forward. I may not always be able to point to a grade, or exam, or paper to be able to measure my progress, but I can easily say, Year 2 brought me forward. I try and use that day over day and week over week.
How can I move forward?
You don’t have to know how much that is… just make sure you move forward. You’ll get where you’re going… eventually. I hope.
TRUST THE PROCESS
I don’t know if it’s because I’m a PhD student, or because I had a lackluster first year, but I just feel incredibly cynical now.
“How do I know these projects are going to go anywhere?”
“What if I don’t have any interesting research questions?”
“What if I have a really dope idea for my dissertation but I don’t find support for any of my hypotheses?”
“What if I run out of funding, because I’m going to do a 6th year?”
“What if I have to go on the job market with no research publications?”
“What if I get done with my PhD and I don’t know anything?”
“What if I don’t take the right stats courses I need for the research I want to do in my career?”
Just a whole bunch of random, distracting questions…
I remember coming back from my vacation to Spain, Portugal, and Morocco this past January and getting back the day before classes started. I was feeling social isolation around that ime, so I didn’t go to the church I usually attend, but I visited another ministry I’m pretty familiar with instead. They were only a few weeks into the year at this point, so they were talking about their theme for 2019: Trust the Process.
I like it.
I think there’s an uncanny tendency to focus on the destination. The destination is fine, but the destination, or ‘outcome’, isn’t always the most important thing. Sometimes it’s about the process. The steps. Everything that happens in between point A and point C.
It’s kind of like a math class.
Sometimes how you got the answer is more important than the actual answer. Why? Because we’re trying to produce patterns of thinking and behaving. In that sense, the process is ALWAYS more important than the outcome.
I think about a guy like Joseph whose brothers sold him into slavery. What a crappy situation. And after that, he gets a dope job working in the palace, only to be accused of adultery for curving Potiphar’s wife. And after that, he gets thrown in prison, and his jailmates get out and forget about him.
What a crazy process…
Or a guy like Moses who commit murder, and ran away because he was both a criminal and coward. Or how about when he had such little faith in himself that he insisted that God speak through Aaron instead, because of his speech impediment? What about when Pharaoh changed his mind about letting the Jews go, 10 times, after speaking with Moses?
Some process…
Speaking of coward, Peter was a coward and denied Jesus 3 times before the rooster crowed. Nevertheless, Jesus says Peter is the rock of the church. Peter would go on to preach a fire-filled sermon at Pentecost, and 3,000 got baptized. Further, he and Paul would go on to build a fruitful ministry to the Gentiles, of which you and I are certainly a beneficiary of.
Peter had some process…
On the topic of Paul, this guy was preaching the word in Philippi and he gets jumped and thrown in jail, only for an earthquake to happen, and the jailer (who was moments away from committing suicide, because he thought his prisoners had escaped) ends up converting and getting baptized. Who saw that coming?
Yes, it’s true, many of these accounts have a truly inspiring ending, or outcome, but even when things don’t go our way and we don’t get the outcome we’re looking for, we have to trust the process.
Trust that God is making something out of nothing.
Trust that even when things are confusing and don’t make sense, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a path forward.
Trust that even on your worst days, God is still working on your behalf.
Trust #GodsPlan
Trust the Process.
FOLLOW YOUR GUT
This is the one part of the piece where I’ll get a little technical. But I’ll liken it to artwork, as I’m increasingly trying to think of my research as art… and I don’t do that to be pretentious. I do that to be more creative.
I had a Theory Construction course this past semester. While I think a lot of that class was a waste, because we spent a lot more time than I would like reading the philosophy of science (ie. Ridiculously old and dense papers from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s trying to figure out how we know what we know), it was also really, really helpful for thinking about the process of producing science. What I gathered from that is in producing science, far too often we use other people’s research as a crutch. By that, I mean our work is actually a lot less interesting, because we’re trying to make it more similar to other forms of existing science.
Now, to be fair, there is some benefit to this. You know there’s a market and an audience for your work. You know your work will be familiar to those you share with. It’s certainly easier to make arguments when you build on what has been done.
Now, the downside is, far too often, we end up doing work that we’re not even interested in, because we’re trying to fit some predefined mold.
It’s like going to the museum and then going back home and trying to paint something that’s not the Mona Lisa but very, very similar to it. Now, mind you, you don’t even really like the Mona Lisa that much…
Or maybe you do like the Mona Lisa, but your particular work of art is lacking, completely, in originality, because you sat down in front of your canvas with the intention of producing something similar to the Mona Lisa, rather than producing something beautiful, which could turn into anything.
A PhD is hard, man. You have to be true to yourself. It’ll still be hard, but at least it will be easier.
Don’t be afraid to trust your gut. Your personal experiences, and intuitions, mean something. Your intuitions may not be right, but they’re coming from somewhere.
I love what one of the Professors in the department said…
“Everyone has opinions… I love having a PhD because I have the training to turn my opinions into testable ideas with empirically supported evidence.”
Trust. Your. Gut. It can lead you to very cool ideas… much better than what you would have come up with trying to follow in someone else’s footsteps.
Don’t be afraid to take risk.
Be true to yourself.
HOLD YOURSELF ACCOUNTABLE
My first year, I did almost no research. It was a huge bust, to be honest. One thing I started doing this year that I found great success with is I started tracking my research hours. It’s interesting because in my first semester, I was spending about 80 hours a week doing schoolwork, and almost none of that time was doing research. That was ALL coursework. As hard as I was busting my butt, all things considered, it was a very unproductive semester.
I mean, if you’re not doing research, what are you doing? Research is why you’re here.
I kind of liken it to someone who’s interested in starting a business, but they keep getting home from work after 9PM, so they never actually have time to work on their business. That’s a recipe for disaster. You can’t start a business if you’re spending all of your time working on someone else’s business. At that rate, you’ll never get anything started. I’ve tried to adopt that mentality with my coursework.
Coursework is me working for you, but research is me working for me.
The goal, of course, is to spend 100% of my time working for myself. In the interim, it’s a process getting there though, at least while I still have coursework to do. Fall 2018, I kept finding that the week would keep passing me by, and I wasn’t getting my research done (“HOW IS IT THURSDAY ALREADY?”). I started logging my research hours, so I could see how much or how little I was doing. For me, it was helpful. It was just the accountability I needed. And to be honest, that type of structure is probably good early on, given I have almost no idea what I’m doing.
I like a reflection like this because I tried, intentionally, to make it applicable to lots of different things. I’m not naïve to the fact that many of my non-academic counterparts have side hustles, passion projects, and businesses they’re trying to get off the ground. All of my comments for my year 2 reflection, perhaps especially this one, are applicable. It’s hard to pick up that foreign language, or start your free lancing, or start doing business development stuff, or start doing informational interviews without some accountability. For several months, I had an accountability partner, Keesha: I would share my tasks for the week, and at the end of the week, I let her know whether or not I got it done. She was working full time and doing a Masters part time as well, so she did the same, because she wasn’t getting stuff done, either. I think we both found it pretty productive. If you’re trying to be more productive, or get something off the ground, you have to hold yourself accountable. If you want to go the extra mile, find someone else to hold you accountable, too. Sure, it sounds ridiculous and cheesy, and maybe it’s a bit over the top, but are you trying to be more consistent, or nah?
Exactly.
I think that’ll do for now. More on artistry and being a creative this summer. I need some accountability with the blog, too, so let me know if you like to write and you want an accountability partner.
Nnamdi