One year into my PhD – learning, unlearning, and the way forward

One year ago I embarked on a journey which I thought I would never want to – pursuing a PhD. In the past year I had the opportunity to develop my skills, thoughts, and perspectives in a way in which I would not have expected them to one year back. This article is to share my experiences from the past year and summarise some of my learnings.

How it started

Around March 2023, while working on my master’s thesis at Universiteit Utrecht , I was thinking about what to do after obtaining my degree. I had many aspirations and even more options for which route to take, so choosing the path forward was clearly a (privileged) struggle. With my passion to be active in youth and energy-related discourses next to my ‘formal profession’, I was in a state of uncertainty, lack of clarity, and confusion.

After a few weeks, I felt that pursuing a PhD would be the logical next step. I applied to a few positions in the Netherlands and I soon had the fortune to have been selected as a PhD candidate at Eindhoven University of Technology in the TIS (Technology, Innovation & Society) Group, working under the supervision of prof. Floor Alkemade and prof. Heleen de Coninck .

My research supports energy system integration in the Dutch offshore wind transition from a policy perspective. My particular role in my research project is to look at the stakeholder and policy feedback dynamics which can emerge during the transition process, and to build an understanding of which policy sequencing strategies can help facilitate the transition.

The Journey

While the topic may sound clear and understandable, I had to essentially start from scratch and construct a PhD research around it. In the first few weeks, I was, frankly speaking, quite confused. I talked to many different stakeholders, and tried to get a hold of everything and everyone. So rather than trying to clarify things, I wanted to embrace the chaos. Each consecutive step in the process made things more and more unclear. My ideas and passion fluctuated between one extreme to the other, which would lead to a completely different research design. The more people I talked to the more ideas I gathered, and around January the confusion reached its peak. During that time my supervisors kept advising me to keep diving into the literature, so I did.

Systematically and chaotically I tried to read as many papers as I could. More papers led to more citations to look at, so my snowballing attempt turned the literature into an avalanche. I was buried underneath transitions research, political theories, policy research, just transitions literature, systems thinking, feedback literature, and so forth. However, even though I was drowning in literature, I felt that my readings somewhat followed a logical pattern. All the different strands of literature seemed to be connected, at least to some extent.

The themes which kept reappearing and which form the foundation of my research are the fields of policy feedbacks and sequencing, systems thinking, transitions research, political theories, and lock-in. People who are researching in those fields will immediately recognise the intrinsic connection between most of those strands of literature, whereas for others the connection is rather opaque. This, however, presents a unique entry point for my research.

After having developed the theoretical construct in winter and spring this year, summer was dedicated to the empirical part of it. Fortunately, reaching out to stakeholders and interview partners wasn’t that big of a challenge, because I could make use of the network of my research programme and my own. Obviously, some sectors were harder or impossible to get a hold onto, but this is just part of any research project. The empirical part (which is still ongoing) allows me to clarify my research direction and test some of theories (and vice versa).

One year into my research I therefore have a better understanding of the pain and leverage points in the energy transition in the Dutch North Sea, some of which I anticipated at the beginning, whereas for many others I did not.

Looking back at what I have learned

Today, marking one year into my research, I feel that this is a good time to reflect on the journey, what I have learned, and some of the highlights. Here, I have summarised the most important ones.

Read, read, read!

Reading is one of the most important components of ANY kind of research project you are active in, but I think for your personal life too. As someone working in a certain field you need to be aware of the discourses and debates and learn from them. The original or new thoughts which you may have had may not be so novel after all, and many people have already reflected and written about it. Reading also teaches you to argue and think in a structured, logical, and coherent way, which not only improves your writing but your thinking too. Personally, I really believe that my (critical) thinking and writing improved profoundly in the past year, and reading annals of papers was a key contribution to that,

Listen to your supervisor(s), to some extent.

While it sometimes may feel that way, you are not alone in your research journey. Most PhD researchers have a supervising team which they can fall back on (I am aware that for some the supervision is just catastrophic), and I am one of the lucky ones who gets support from their supervisors. Supervisors can relate to their own PhD journeys and they know the challenges, therefore this is an important opportunity to learn from them. Therefore you should actively listen to them. However, something which I struggled with at the beginning, is that not all advice has to be implemented. It is still your research and sometimes you even have to go so far to purposefully reject what they say, because you try to create something new. There is obviously a fine line to draw, but it is crucial to critically reflect on your supervisors’ critique.

Working on a research project takes time.

We live in a day and age where we try to accelerate everything in our lives. Most processes get accelerated through technologies, more stuff needs to fit into an ever tighter day, and we want to get answers now, not later in the future. Such a mentality is toxic for research (and for life as well). Some ideas just take time to develop while the literature and empirical results are fermenting in your brain. Many topics can often only be understood after having spent a certain amount of time on it. You need to read what is out there and reflect on it in a proper way in order to fully understand it. Taking mental shortcuts in research is not only futile but dangerous too because it degrades your outcomes.

Research is an intrinsically social endeavour.

I used to see research as a process where atomised researchers develop their great ideas in dark and isolated rooms. This perception proved to be completely faulty. In the past years but more so through my PhD I learned that developing new ideas and researching topics is a social undertaking. By that I mean that researchers work in teams and they are constantly interacting in group settings. Most novel ideas are not develop because one person thought about it being by themselves, but rather because many people shared and discussed their views. Social and human aspects are central to any successful research project and my experience thus far is that outstanding researchers shine in their interactions with others.

Use Artificial Intelligence with great care.

AI is currently the big hype and most sectors are and will be affected, academia too. AI can help with many things, such as summarising documents or checking your writing. However, AI can create the fallacy that you have a good understanding of a topic, which can be detrimental for scientific thought. AI should not replace going through the pain of reading complex and difficult papers, which is a skill which you are learning in your PhD. Being critical means engaging with topics, not looking at their simplified versions. I see AI as a good walking stick in some situations. But people who learn how to walk shouldn’t rely on walking sticks.

Let me know what you think!

I have to emphasise that those are only my thoughts and perspectives and different PhDs will have very different experiences and learnings to share. Writing and thinking about my writing and thinking experience has helped me understand the process and appreciate it even further.

Which experiences did you encounter in your PhD or professional journey? Did something unexpected come up? Let me know what you think or experienced!