Why it is hard to stay motivated in a PhD program

Completing a PhD can be one of the most difficult tasks in your life due to the fact in many cases it's simply impossible to keep yourself motivated to do the task. Here's why:

• Research is hard. It is hard to come up with something even marginally novel. It is very hard to adhere to the high standards for theoretical/logical strength of your arguments and empirical rigor of your field work. You have to work very hard, sometimes 7 days a week to adhere to those standards.
• Despite the fact that those standards are high, they are often ambiguous and subjective. It is not uncommon to receive completely orthogonal evaluations of your work. Some people will say that what your wrote doesn't offer any valuable contributions and lacks the rigor. Others will say it is great work and should be published immediately. I once wrote a paper that my adviser thought was worthless - it did not offer anything new. I sent the paper to a well-known journal and the senior editor told me it was very interesting and she will publish it immediately. The bottom line is that no matter what you do, you will be criticized.
  
• Despite the high standards that most researchers try to adhere, deeply inside you understand that most of the research produced in your field is really worthless. Deeply inside you understand that much of research is highly regarded only because it is produced by people who have a lot of power in your field. Nobody really reads those papers outside of your field, so there's no market validation of their value. The only people who read those papers are the ones who have to read and cite those "ingenious" papers if they want to get their own stuff published. So you start to doubt yourself and the field as a whole. If the most respected people in your field produce worthless crap, how can you produce something valuable?
• Despite the fact that you have to work hard and deal with lack of any intrinsic motivation, you have to live with no extrinsic motivation as well. You are paid peanuts for what you do. You are worth as much as a minimum wage laborer. Even if you succeed in completing your PhD degree, you will not be paid millions for your work. Most likely, you will end up with an average paying job, just like millions of other people.
  

In the light of these issues, one cannot help but ask himself or herself: "Why am I doing this?". Sometimes I think that in order to be successful in academia, you have to be somewhat of an arrogant imbecile. A person with deep intellectual and emotional understanding of these factors will never complete his or her PhD. So if you wonder why so many professors are arrogant and self-centric, this can give you a possible explanation. People who are not like that do not survive.

Bill Gates on Education

Today I watched a TV interview with Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft. In this interview he mostly talked about his work at Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The show host asked him what he thought was the toughest mountain to climb for the foundation. His response went something like this: "Fighting AIDS is tough. Resolving financial problems in poor countries is also tough. But the biggest challenge we are facing is changing education". Than he elaborated on his last statement by saying that education often involves a lot of political agendas as well as conservatism that is engraved in people's minds. He said that resistance to change in education is common to all countries, whether it is China or United States.

Dissertation strategies: One page per day

There's no general recipe for writing a dissertation. But there's one useful strategy of mechanical nature. Just get into the habit of writing one page per day. Don't worry if your writing is of poor quality - you can edit later. Don't worry if you are not sure how this fits into your dissertation. Just write one page per day. In a few months you may have enough stuff to put together a very rough draft. Of course, you will have to throw away a lot of those pages. But you may end up using some of them too. Moreover, this one page per day habit may benefit you psychologically. You will feel that, at least, you are doing something every day. I think it gives you an illusion/feeling of some kind of progress.

Taboos in Academia

Most professors will never admit that:

1. They are wrong
2. They don't understand something

Motivation in Academia

From the perspective of extrinsic motivation, academia can be the most demotivating place to work in.

It's not uncommon for newly hired faculty members to get paid more than faculty who has been with the department for many years. This is the kind of reward you get for giving your whole life to the school.

PhD students experience this too. In fact, it's even worse in their case. Unlike professors, doctoral students do not get annual pay raises, so the difference is often even more drastic. I remember when I joined the PhD program, I was making twice as much as doctoral students who had been with the department for 3-4 years. The irony here is that a senior doctoral student not only deserves to get paid more by most human standards, he or she has a much greater objective need for money. After spending several years in the program most PhD students are usually broke and in desperate need for money. After I spend several years in the program, I discovered that new PhD students were paid 50% more than I was making....

So I've been on the serving as well as receiving end of this wonderful motivation scheme. Does miracles to your motivation and loyalty to the department!

On research

Academic research is hard, boring, and useless.

Why schools do not hire their own graduates

Most graduate programs (with the exception of such schools as Harvard) do not hire their own PhD graduates as tenure-track professors. A common justification of this unofficial rule is that schools want to prevent "academic inbreeding". Gathering people with different academic backgrounds in one department, they argue, is likely to produce better synergies. Another justification of this unofficial rule is that a newly minted assistant professor will always be perceived as a "dumb PhD student" by other faculty members if he continues working for the same department he got his or her PhD from.

One can argue that this noble purpose of creating better synergies and improving well-being of newly minted professors is really a mask for some much more earthly and pragmatic causes.

First, by the time someone gets his or her PhD degree he may have a lot of hate towards professors in the department and simply may not want to continue working with them. I rarely meet a PhD graduate who doesn't hate his or her committee members and the department as a whole.

Second, given the scarcity of tenure-track positions, a second-tier school can easily hire someone from a top-tier school as a tenure-track faculty member. So there's no point in hiring their own graduates when they can easily hire someone much shinier.

Academic Hypcrisy

This article from the Chronicle of higher education is a good example of academic stupidity and/or hypocrisy.

The article starts out by making a case that many PhD students, despite spending years in grad school, have very bleak employment prospects:

It is the best of times and worst of times to start a science career in the United States.

Researchers today have access to powerful new tools and techniques — such as rapid gene sequencers and giant telescopes — that have accelerated the pace of discovery beyond the imagination of previous generations.

But for many of today's graduate students, the future could not look much bleaker.

They see long periods of training, a shortage of academic jobs, and intense competition for research grants looming ahead of them. "They get a sense that this is a really frustrating career path," says Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health.

And then they propose some "solutions" to the problem:

Mr. Walker says that American graduate programs train students to be superb researchers. But they need to do more, he argues. Departments and students must recognize that the majority of science doctorate recipients no longer become professors, and that realization should cause a shift in the culture and practice of graduate education. "There's a mismatch between the opportunities available to students as they complete their work and their expectations and the nature of their training along the way."

Graduate programs, he says, need to help students learn how to be nimble — to work at the junctions of disciplines, to collaborate as part of a team, and to be able to move from one topic to another. All of these skills, he says, are becoming increasingly important as careers evolve, both within and outside academe

I have a much simpler solution:

• Do not recruit so many doctoral students
  
• Do not lie to prospective doctoral students about their employment prospects
  

If there are no jobs for PhD holders, then stop recruiting so many PhD students!!! This sounds like the most logical solution. But they won't stop. They need cheap labor to churn out research papers. And to get an educated and smart person working for them for minimum wage, they need to lie about employment prospects.

How many people would agree to join a PhD program if they are told openly: "Look, you gonna spend 6 years forking 50-70 hours a week for less then minimum wage and then you are likely to have very bleak employment prospects". You have to be insane to agree to that kind of a deal. So schools will continue lying (or simply avoiding this subject).

Being a doctoral student is not the worst thing in the world...

If you think that being a doctoral student is a frustrating, depressing, and exhausting experience, wait until you start your job search. This is when all the real "fun" begins...

Tenure is not Heaven

One of our PhD program coordinators used to tell incoming PhD students:

"There are three reasons to be a professor: June, July, and August!"

He was implying that if you become a tenured professor you will have a lot of free time on your hands to do whatever you want.

I don't think this is true. If you become a tenured professor, you still have a lot of things to do, such as conducting/supervising research, committee work, teaching etc. Many tenured professors do manage to slack off (e.g. coming to work 3 times a week, taking the entire summer off, etc.). However, this is done at the expense of their responsibilities. Therefore, if you are a responsible person, I doubt you really have that much time on your hands to do whatever you want.