It’s that time of the year🎃when students are deciding if to apply for #PhDpositions👻
Even though #Academia is far from perfect:doing a #PhD is valuable.
It develops unique & important skills that will stay with you forever
These PhD skills are totally☹️not discussed enough👇
1. Ability to work interdependently🔁(independently & with others).
Doing a PhD requires individual planning, as well as collaborating and working within teams. The ability to dive really deep into both these areas *simultaneously* is one of the defining features of a PhD.
2. Self-motivation & drive
Doing a PhD can also be hard & frustrating😮💨. You'll sometimes find yourself working alone, with no clear goals on the project, and no end in sight.
Making it work somehow nurtures your ability to motivate yourself when faced with hard situations.
3. Versatility & adaptability
When starting, you don't know where your PhD will take you. You'll have to be adaptable, and change & refine your ideas over and over again, until you find a hypothesis that you are happy with pursuing.
4. Resilience
But even after you find a golden idea💡you are excited about, it will almost certainly not work from the first go!
Sometimes not even from the second, nor third, nor tenth. You'll need to keep trying, troubleshoot & think about the problem in different ways.
5. Ability to learn quickly
During a PhD, you learn a lot📚. Mostly by yourself & mostly from scratch. This means your PhD will also teach you how to learn. Always being ready to learn new things keeps your brain fresh & helps you be happier. It's one of the greatest gift.
6. Problem solving
A PhD involves by definition solving a hard problem. Hadn't it been hard, it wouldn't be (unsolved) science, and it wouldn't take you 4+ years to do it.
Methodically formulating & dissecting the problem you are faced with are domain-independent skills.
7. Ability to synthesize
A PhD means pushing the boundary of knowledge. This automatically means you need to know what knowledge means, such that you can push it forward. This further means you need to understand a huge body of knowledge and extract its essence.
8. Decision-making
During your PhD, you'll face many crossroads. For most of them, there'll be no correct path. Still: you'll have to choose which path to proceed on & you'll bear the full responsibility of your choices.
This continuously trains your decision-making muscles.
‼️Now, by no means is this to read that these skills are unique to people doing a PhD. These are life-long skills that various people nurture in various ways & to various degrees.
Doing a PhD is not at all necessary to gain such skills. But,in many instances,it can be sufficient
#AcademicTwitter is wonderful about sharing #PhDstudent advices.
Here however,I'm not offering advice on whether to do a PhD or not. It's your own journey & a personal decision to take.
Rather, I am highlighting PhD reasoning & mindset skills that are not sadly discussed enough
Informing yourself about:
1. The scientific topic of your PhD & its impact
2. The broad implications in terms of skill development of your PhD journey
will only help you decide better.
Most important is though: there's no correct decision!
Happy Halloween y'all 🎃
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.