PhD - it's like dating, only harder

Some things are best left to Shah Rukh Khan. To purse lips, stare inspirationally at the horizon, extend hands in slow motion to an upbeat background score at the end of a victorious movie - are things you think you would do when you get done with your PhD. In reality, it’s much more numbing…and nothing remotely musical. The same emotional anesthetic feeling that probably descends on soldiers in the trenches when they first realize that the guns have all gone silent.

Doing PhD is like chasing a mirage - every milestone comes with the sinking realization that the oasis is further out. You first clear the entrance exam thinking that you’re now in the program, only to realize that you now have to clear a grueling year of coursework before even qualifying to start on your research. You clear that hurdle and think that the worst is over, but then end up spending month after month just coming up with a palatable research topic. You have to burrow out of an avalanche of papers written by hundreds of people, trying to find that sliver of academia that is still waiting for you to base your thesis on. 

After all, PhD is a bit like borrowing the whole recipe of butter chicken, adding a couple of new spices; maybe chopping the chicken a bit differently, and then calling it your special butter chicken. Half the trick is to figure out how to cook the original recipe, the other quarter is to figure out which ingredients to add, and recook the meal. And the final quarter is to hope that you’re lucky enough for the whole thing to be edible!

You start off with the butter chicken, only to realize that your model keeps collapsing like a pack of cards and your codes are actively rebelling and conspiring against you. When they aren’t, the results seem like hieroglyphics, nowhere close to what you wanted them to be. You are at this all day, and soon it gets to you. You yawn, you nod off, spy on acquaintances over social media, watch another episode of that addictive web series naively thinking that twenty more minutes couldn’t hurt – and then again reluctantly get back to the dull monotony of research papers and econometric softwares. You shovel up the results, and arrive at your supervisor’s door, hoping they will be suitably impressed. Instead as the meeting proceeds, you transition from being confident to hopeful, to argumentative, to pleading, and then to just give up and wistfully watch months of work flushed down the figurative drain.

Two, even three years pass by, and one day you suddenly wake up to the panic-stricken realization that you’ve not even managed to complete your first paper, let alone the three required by the program. Menacing emails and reminders start cropping up, as you frenetically try to find some semblance of results, that will allow you to move to writing your paper, and moving on to the next topic. The irony is that even when there is hardly any time, time seems limitless in PhD – there’s no concept of semesters and exams to bind you to a firm schedule. So, everything happens over the timelines of weeks and months; almost like being in a high-speed, adrenaline-pumping race – albeit between tortoises.

Once your research starts firming up, in the pursuit of getting published, you become a regular in the conference circuit. You land up in exotic locations for highfaluting conferences, grab your name-tag and identify your speaking slot on the schedule board. You realize that you’re the fourth speaker of the second sub-session, on the third day, which will be running in parallel with four other sessions in the afternoon. Miles away from the keynote address in the first hour of the first day, where celebrity academics give their adulatory talks; you are instead presenting to a handful of bored co-presenters in a small room, engaged in a pointless discussion about an abstract equation on your ninth power point slide. You frustratingly gorge on oily lunches, cheap coffee, stale cookies, and a ‘fun, gala dinner’ night where you clumsily try a ham-fisted attempt at being informal with other socially stunted academics like you.

You start sending your papers to journals in an effort to get them published. The journal takes anywhere between two to over six months to revert. If you’re lucky, your paper gets outright accepted…or rejected. However more likely that not, two anonymous referees will essentially tear up your work into bits, and ask for the ransom of going back to the drawing board before you can resubmit. You take it all apart, redo it, send it back and turns out it still gets rejected. And then you start over again with another journal, lower in the league tables.

It’s like dating, only harder; like Hedgehog Day, only spread over months and years.

It was never meant to be this hard. People come up to me and admiringly say how dedicated I am, to spend over half a decade on this, and the truth is – no one signed up for ‘this’. Yes, it was always meant to be an exhausting trek, but not a life-threatening vertical climb to some Himalayan peak. You realize that over the years, parts of you have chipped off. The more positive, cheerful, slimmer, sociable, and fun you, before embarking on this journey, now almost seems like a different person. Your friends have largely forgotten you, and those that are still in touch, dread asking you how your PhD is coming along. You forget how it is to socialize, to flirt, to romance...to even have a bath that doesn't involve equations buzzing in your head.

You lose out on self-confidence, because this journey has everyone constantly questioning and belittling your work. After all, the cornerstone of academia is that everyone critics everyone else’s work, so positive reinforcement is rare to come by. Many doctoral students end up suffering from depression and mental health issues, silently crying out while running on the hamster wheel. Eventually, many end up dropping off that wheel in exhaustion.

And so, when you don that graduation gown at the end of it all, there’s a sense of disbelief that it’s all over. You refuse to believe it. You think there will be a glitch in the paperwork somewhere, that someone has muddled your name with someone else’s, that somehow the roster might forget you’re on it, that someone from the end of the crowd suddenly jumps up, and yells that they don’t believe in your model, and the whole thesis needs to be redone. It takes a moment after collecting the certificate, for it to sink in, that its finally over.

And then you act deranged. You jump up and down with your batchmates. You get into a frenzy clicking pictures from every imaginable angle. You pose with your gown in different poses, once with the hat on, once off, once throwing it in the air, sitting, standing, crouching, pouting – channeling the inner porn star in you.

At the end of all of this – my advice to incoming PhD students? Practice the boomerang effect of Instagram fame – the one that allows you to make mini videos that play on loop. Because at some point at the end of this Lord-of-the-Rings-esque journey, you will want to do the cliché of jumping up while throwing your graduation hat in the air, and making a looped video of it.

Practice that from now – because that’s not as easy as it sounds!