The scariest thing about trying to finish a PhD is that essentially you are summarizing the hopes, dreams and struggles of four years into what should be a single, cohesive document. But anyone who's spent time in a lab based environment will be aware that the real story is what isn't written down. Your thesis is a summary of the practical results you ended up with, like the perfected version of a play, things which didn't work out have now been safely sanitized or justified with a carefully selected series of references. The REAL story behind a PhD is a lot less straight forward. It is more complex and in many cases a lot more interesting than what has been discussed in the sacred thesis.
The real story is everything that happened in between getting the results; the drama, the disagreements, the late-late nights and the tears. While examiners may not find the emotional journey of your PhD interesting it is rising above these challenges which will make you great at everything you will encounter in future. The additional advantage of this suffering is that if you continue down the course of an academic you will need your own...ahem...war stories. These will come in useful when giving pep-talks to your own post-graduate students, wild exaggerations and tailoring the time frames of your tales is considered acceptable and even necessary to maintain control and to allow your students to maintain a small amount of hope.
For your future reference the general outline of these stories is as follows:
So my general advice is to relish each day you suffer in the lab and preferably keep a diary styled record of it. Not only will this act as a form of stress relief you can also pull it down off your shelf when meetings with your future students take a turn for the worse. There will always be skeptical students who require some proof of the indignities you endured.
The real story is everything that happened in between getting the results; the drama, the disagreements, the late-late nights and the tears. While examiners may not find the emotional journey of your PhD interesting it is rising above these challenges which will make you great at everything you will encounter in future. The additional advantage of this suffering is that if you continue down the course of an academic you will need your own...ahem...war stories. These will come in useful when giving pep-talks to your own post-graduate students, wild exaggerations and tailoring the time frames of your tales is considered acceptable and even necessary to maintain control and to allow your students to maintain a small amount of hope.
For your future reference the general outline of these stories is as follows:
- [Encouragement: A necessary evil to bring your student back from the brink of packing their bags and heading out of your lab] You've done a lot of work! (Yeah right) And we might have the makings of a paper here! (False hope)
- [Walk down memory lane] I didn't have any results until [Insert point at which your post-grad student is currently at. eg. the final 6 months!] I had to repeat my experiments [Insert wildly exaggerated number. eg. 5000 times!]
- [Contrast: This is useful to confront your student with how bad things could have been and to make them feel guilty for being ungrateful as you are after all a brilliant, dedicated supervisor] You're lucky I'm so helpful! My supervisor didn't even know who I was until we published our 5th paper together!
- [Question: This makes the student feel like they have a choice in the matter, by this point they should be eating out of your hand] So... how does that sound?
- [The clincher: Should relinquish you from all blame and puts the ball firmly back in the court of your student] Great! Well that's settled! Come and see me when you have those results.
So my general advice is to relish each day you suffer in the lab and preferably keep a diary styled record of it. Not only will this act as a form of stress relief you can also pull it down off your shelf when meetings with your future students take a turn for the worse. There will always be skeptical students who require some proof of the indignities you endured.
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