![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Reflections on being a PhD student (again)
Since my first year report is due in by tomorrow, I thought this was a good time to reflect on my experience as a part-time science PhD student. (Actually, I submitted my report before Christmas, because I had better things to do with my life than write my first year report while on holiday.)
First, a reminder that being a PhD student is So. Freaking. Hard. I mean, I'm finding it easier than the first time round, but that's because I'm 15 years older, have written a ton more words, and, having experienced two major depressive episodes, my brainweasel wrestling is world-class. Even so, it's very tiring, especially when the brainweasels come out to bite.
Second, quite a lot of brainweasels came out to bite over the first year report. For two reasons: one, my first attempt at my first first year report (Oxford, 2002) was sufficiently bad that my supervisor told me I couldn't submit it. (He was quite right. It was shit. Turns out you shouldn't do the bit of the project you hate while having your first major breakup from your first proper love affair. Being 22 sucks.) Second, when I did submit a proper first year report, the examiner asked a lot of pointed questions, which my supervisor brushed off. Those pointed questions surfaced again nearly three years later, in my PhD viva, which I failed. Fortunately, my supervisor this time was quite happy with my draft, and I shall be playing bloody close attention to what the examiners of my report say. I can take a fucking hint. However, I can't say that I could blithely ignore my history. It was certainly playing at the back of my mind, and took energy to deal with. That's mostly what I hate about the brainweasels. It's the wasted energy. And they often don't go away for long. Each individual weasel is fine. A constant stream of them is incredibly distracting. I mean, I'm really good at weasel-wrangling now. I'd just prefer not to have to do it so often.
Third, for me, doing a science PhD has some elements that are waaaay harder than doing an arts PhD. Mostly, it's the sense of near-constant failure. I'm getting this through programming, though I understand that anything where you have to do experiments also is really good at causing this. Throughout my undergrad, computing was unbelievably easy. I hardly ever wrote programs that didn't work first time. If they didn't, it was usually a trivial error (whoops, where's that semi-colon), and fixing that would cause it to compile, and then run Just Fine. I hardly ever made logic errors, because they led me through the exercises so gently. I only ever failed to write a working program for an assignment once. And before I got the marked copy back, I'd fixed my bug.
Now, I have to write Real Programs (TM). Obviously, I use StackOverflow, like everyone else, to find snippets that other people have written, and try to join these into a program that does what I want. However, I have to define what I want, and, if it doesn't seem to be happening, work out if that's a logic error, a problem with me not understanding my tools, or what. I've very rarely failed at things I've cared about. I've either not cared, or I've not failed. I still deal terribly with failure. Intellectually, I know this is a learning process, and that I will get better at it (and indeed I am). But it means I'm confronted with failure most days in my PhD. Quite a lot of my programmer friends got familiar with this aspect of programming before they even hit puberty, or before they left school.
This is really new to me. In my previous attempt at a PhD, I was taking techniques that I knew already, and applying them to something obscure that no-one gave a shit about. When I did apply techniques new to me, they were pretty simple pieces of mathematics, well-understood and explained to zillions of students in other disciplines. And no-one who read my thesis understood them anyway. Now, I'm using tools that are under active development, so they're not always fully documented. And, while I know a lot already, i can quickly program those bits, so that I can get more fundamentally stuck on the other stuff. So it feels like I'm constantly failing, even though what this really means is that I'm learning a lot.
Finally, some things are just quite hard and slow to do. I can read papers pretty fast. Apart from ones with lots of maths in. I'm still just much slower at those, because reading a maths paper is a fundamentally different discipline from reading anything else. Fortunately, I already knew from Terence Tao's blog that there's a particular skill to doing this, and it's one you have to learn as a grad student.
All of this is much easier to cope with now that I'm not in my early 20s, and know that it's not me, it's that I'm choosing to do something challenging. But it's not entirely unexpected that quite a lot of PhD students have mental health problems. Scaling the slopes of knowledge is hard, hard work.
First, a reminder that being a PhD student is So. Freaking. Hard. I mean, I'm finding it easier than the first time round, but that's because I'm 15 years older, have written a ton more words, and, having experienced two major depressive episodes, my brainweasel wrestling is world-class. Even so, it's very tiring, especially when the brainweasels come out to bite.
Second, quite a lot of brainweasels came out to bite over the first year report. For two reasons: one, my first attempt at my first first year report (Oxford, 2002) was sufficiently bad that my supervisor told me I couldn't submit it. (He was quite right. It was shit. Turns out you shouldn't do the bit of the project you hate while having your first major breakup from your first proper love affair. Being 22 sucks.) Second, when I did submit a proper first year report, the examiner asked a lot of pointed questions, which my supervisor brushed off. Those pointed questions surfaced again nearly three years later, in my PhD viva, which I failed. Fortunately, my supervisor this time was quite happy with my draft, and I shall be playing bloody close attention to what the examiners of my report say. I can take a fucking hint. However, I can't say that I could blithely ignore my history. It was certainly playing at the back of my mind, and took energy to deal with. That's mostly what I hate about the brainweasels. It's the wasted energy. And they often don't go away for long. Each individual weasel is fine. A constant stream of them is incredibly distracting. I mean, I'm really good at weasel-wrangling now. I'd just prefer not to have to do it so often.
Third, for me, doing a science PhD has some elements that are waaaay harder than doing an arts PhD. Mostly, it's the sense of near-constant failure. I'm getting this through programming, though I understand that anything where you have to do experiments also is really good at causing this. Throughout my undergrad, computing was unbelievably easy. I hardly ever wrote programs that didn't work first time. If they didn't, it was usually a trivial error (whoops, where's that semi-colon), and fixing that would cause it to compile, and then run Just Fine. I hardly ever made logic errors, because they led me through the exercises so gently. I only ever failed to write a working program for an assignment once. And before I got the marked copy back, I'd fixed my bug.
Now, I have to write Real Programs (TM). Obviously, I use StackOverflow, like everyone else, to find snippets that other people have written, and try to join these into a program that does what I want. However, I have to define what I want, and, if it doesn't seem to be happening, work out if that's a logic error, a problem with me not understanding my tools, or what. I've very rarely failed at things I've cared about. I've either not cared, or I've not failed. I still deal terribly with failure. Intellectually, I know this is a learning process, and that I will get better at it (and indeed I am). But it means I'm confronted with failure most days in my PhD. Quite a lot of my programmer friends got familiar with this aspect of programming before they even hit puberty, or before they left school.
This is really new to me. In my previous attempt at a PhD, I was taking techniques that I knew already, and applying them to something obscure that no-one gave a shit about. When I did apply techniques new to me, they were pretty simple pieces of mathematics, well-understood and explained to zillions of students in other disciplines. And no-one who read my thesis understood them anyway. Now, I'm using tools that are under active development, so they're not always fully documented. And, while I know a lot already, i can quickly program those bits, so that I can get more fundamentally stuck on the other stuff. So it feels like I'm constantly failing, even though what this really means is that I'm learning a lot.
Finally, some things are just quite hard and slow to do. I can read papers pretty fast. Apart from ones with lots of maths in. I'm still just much slower at those, because reading a maths paper is a fundamentally different discipline from reading anything else. Fortunately, I already knew from Terence Tao's blog that there's a particular skill to doing this, and it's one you have to learn as a grad student.
All of this is much easier to cope with now that I'm not in my early 20s, and know that it's not me, it's that I'm choosing to do something challenging. But it's not entirely unexpected that quite a lot of PhD students have mental health problems. Scaling the slopes of knowledge is hard, hard work.