About research for PhD students
What is PhD about?
PhD is more about discovering than solving problems. Problems, which are intriguing and novel.
Top researchers often say they're not necessarily smarter than many other scientists, but they think more about the problems (or the origins of the problems) instead of their solutions.
Discovering problems requires creativity, experience, but most importantly, motivation. While elaboration is undoubtedly crucial and makes up the bulk of the actual work, there are more or less well-defined methodologies for it.
In contrast, creativity is much less understood and, therefore, more challenging to teach.
Creativity often emerges through observation and implicit learning, with your advisor serving as a model.
Initially, your advisor provides the first set of problems, and as you progress, you collaboratively define problems.
Ideally, by the end, you should be capable of defining problems independently - a main goal of your PhD.
The other objective of PhD is to develop effective communication skills.
This means presenting your ideas concisely and clearly, with enthusiasm, so that people (experts and non-experts alike) can easily understand why the problems you are working on are both important and interesting.
This is a very important skill that is often overlooked.
Good communication is essential for convincing others to collaborate, fund your research, and accept/read your research papers.
It also improves your overall cognitive skills.
Am I talented enough for PhD?
Some students think they are not smart enough for PhD. "Smart" or "gifted" are oversimplifications of human cognitive capabilities that cannot be measured along one dimension.
Also, cognitive performance improves over time with enough work and motivation, therefore perseverance and willingness to learn are much more important than "gift".
Of course, there are certainly less motivated people who learn faster than you, and maybe you have to work more than they do.
But this is not bad, and can be quite advantageous in fact; you learn to struggle and cultivate perseverance which is crucial in research:
sooner or later everybody will face hard problems, hence called research, and people who are not trained to struggle will be more likely to give up.
Similar to talent, perseverance is partly innate and partly acquired, yet it is much more important (along with passion).
Still, people tend to have an inherent bias towards talent, possibly because it is more convenient to attribute our failures or lack of effort to something that we don't understand and seemingly out of our control.
The key isn't about your level of talent; it's more about the unique combination of skills that shapes your professional identity.
Talent and skill are not the same. Skill is acquired by effort, while talent accelerates the development of skills.
Collaborating with others helps you recognize your unique skill set.
Internships and post-docs, and working with a variety of people, are not only useful because of networking, but to know yourself better.
The aim is always to complement, not compete with, those you work with - to possess skills and expertise they may lack.
Working with others stands as one of the best ways to discover who you are.
How can I be creative?
Creativity is often overmystified and regarded as something that you either have or do not, just like innate talent.
In fact, creativity is learnable if you are motivated, and it is just remixing of different knowledge pieces (e.g., techniques, theories, theorems, etc) to create something useful for a community.
You do not need to come up with something extraordinary in order to be creative, and nothing seems extraordinary if you have the right pieces you can build from.
Consider yourself as a neuron that reads the output of other neurons and generates a new, albeit typically straightforward, combination or transformation of them.
The emphasis is on the input and not really on the combination, which tends to follow learnable patterns.
You need a sufficiently diverse and large set of building blocks (perhaps from different fields) along with some good examples to follow.
Therefore, it's essential to read as many high-quality papers and books as you can!
No one begins with brilliant ideas out of thin air, and you cannot think only of great contributions.
These also require luck that you have to prepare for, as Pasteur said1.
Along your PhD journey, you develop an "inner compass" that guides you in discarding unpromising ideas, of which you will have many more than good ones.
You train yourself in recognizing worthy ideas -- ones that are recognized by others as novel and they are as simple as possible.
Many creative scientists believe what sets them apart from others is their ability to tell the difference between good and bad ideas faster, so they avoid
wasting too much time exploring dead ends. Having good ideas does not make you special; it's the ability to recognize and elaborate them that does.
In fact, everyone has both bad and good ideas, but some people can't tell them apart until they've already spent a lot of time on the not-so-good ones.
That's why you should not only read but also review research papers, and do brainstorming with others!
Sometimes, ideas that initially appear less promising turn out to be very brilliant from a different perspective or when applied to a different problem.
Is PhD right for me?
Nobody knows that PhD is for you, not even your advisor.
While certainty is elusive, there may be signs that suggest a PhD could be the right path for you.
When you are always curious and consistently interested in reasons and the 'why',
or when your questions and problems linger in your thoughts even under the shower, on the weekends, and before falling asleep or upon waking up -
all these indications suggest that you may have a sufficient passion for research (with all its drawbacks).
If you find joy in the discovery of understanding something that was previously unclear to you, it's also a sign that pursuing a PhD might be a good fit.
This insight can hit you anytime when reading a paper, preparing for an exam, or even while solving daily life problems.
Not only do you seek solutions, but you also like analyzing problems.
You are intrigued by understanding why some solutions are better or worse — exploring the origins of the problem itself.
Though passion provides the necessary direction and emotional momentum, it alone is probably not enough to complete your PhD.
Your passion should also persist over time. Research is usually filled with frustration, and learning to handle it over the long term is necessary.
Perseverance, therefore, becomes crucial, demanding that you remain purposeful, don't give up, and always find a way to work things out.
For example, quite a few people abandon research just because they are not a good match with their advisor.
However, if you are firmly determined, then you will find your way to do research (perhaps with another advisor).
Perseverance alone is not enough either.
Instead of persisting just because we finish whatever we start, we must learn when to step back or change direction to provide ourselves with more opportunities.
Fortunately, neuroplasticity enables us to develop not only creativity but also grit to some degree2.
One way is through others: if you want to be more passionate and persevere, consider joining a research group with that culture.
When you collaborate with passionate people, their enthusiasm can boost yours. If everybody is working hard around you, that becomes your habit too.
You can also grow perseverance and passion from within.
Although it is always more self-assuring to do things that we are good at and always stick to our prior knowledge,
it will not necessarily enhance our perseverance. If you focus on what you cannot do or don't know rather than what you know,
and deliberately practice/learn to improve, then your perseverance also strengthens3.
Many internally motivated people prefer working on projects where they can learn something new, whether it's a theory, a tool, or a proof.
Otherwise, research would be quite boring. This works well if you find learning rewarding because you are motivated enough.
Besides being passionate and persevering about learning, I think it's totally fine if you don't have a clear idea of why you want to pursue a PhD.
Maybe PhD (or research) is not important per se, it is potentially only a good enough path toward more general concerns that you may not know yet.
Its sole purpose is likely to give you direction rather than being your ultimate concern.
Why do I feel so frustrated about my PhD?
First of all, frustration is not all bad.
It's a result of our brain continually predicting the future, and when these predictions are uncertain, it leads to anxiety.
Motivation arises exactly to overcome this anxiety, pushing us forward4.
However, frustration is like a double-edged sword – it can stimulate but also hinder beyond a certain point.
To understand why, we first have to understand when our brain makes less certain predictions.
Everything we do, including research, is driven by motivation.
This motivation, in turn, comes from more general concerns of our lives, such as a being wealthy, desire for recognition, or simply love for learning.
Motivation arises when we feel frustrated because our concerns aren't being met.
These concerns can bring either external rewards to us like social recognition, being loved, esteemed, wealthy.
"External" means that these rewards are not under our control, but rather depend on others' actions or opinions.
For example, if the number of published papers and citations is rewarding to you, you may be seeking approval from others.
Ditto if you consider a PhD as evidence of your abilities, or you're doing your parents' PhD5.
Conversely, your concerns can have internal rewards such as doing something out of pure love, regardless of what others think.
Some individuals find the value in publications not (only) for external recognition but for feedback on their learning progress toward solving broader research problems.
They are not necessarily eager for esteem or recognition, but rather for the joy of problem-solving.
In other words, research as a process is intrinsically rewarding for them, and because of that, they have a control over the reward.
Most people value both internal and external rewards, but to different degrees.
Which rewards we value more is influenced by many factors like our education, childhood experiences, genetics, age, and more6.
Why is control so important? Naturally, your brain tends to make less certain predictions when the reward of your actions is up to external factors because you have less control over it.
What drives people crazy is not the failure to get the reward but the uncertainty about getting it.
We like what we have got used to, no matter whether it is good or bad for us.
If you value your achievement (or "success") based on what others think or do, then you are externally motivated and your happiness is beyond your control.
However, if your valuation does not depend on external conditions, then you are internally motivated and your happiness is more within your control.
If there are no externally centered values tied to your motivation, you don't question your abilities or compare yourself to others.
Consider solving a challenging problem just for the fun of it; you might experience frustration if you fail, similar to a child frustrated over a puzzle, but crucially, this frustration is within your control.
You can adaptively change your conditions, such as the problem you are working on, to overcome frustration while still enjoying the internal reward of pure curiosity.
Research and frustration go hand in hand; you are supposed to work on hard problems, therefore you struggle a lot.
However, excessive struggle gives rise to feeling of insecurity that you are not good enough, if you rely on external rewards too much because you have low self-confidence.
The lower your self-confidence, the sooner you may seek approval from others that can produce even more frustration.
Finding internal rewards and being internally motivated is therefore crucial in research, providing resilience against frustrations.
For example, you can always view struggling as learning, if you are curious enough.
Curiosity turns problems into learning chances, because no matter what challenges come our way, we can always learn from our failures.
With this mindset, true enjoyment will stem exactly from struggle, and the effort itself will give value to the reward.
If you don't struggle, you don't do your research well, because it does not challenge you.
It may give you the pleasure of solving problems and the sense of security, but not enjoyment.
However, focusing only on internal rewards that are detached from others is not the best strategy either.
External concerns are unavoidable to some degree;
as social beings, we naturally desire others' approval, social usefulness, and competition. These factors often improved our survival odds more than anything else in the past.
Although external rewards tend to cause larger frustration they also produce stronger motivation exactly because they cannot be changed so easily.
Therefore, the key lies in finding the right combination of concerns that counterbalance each other such that the total frustration serves as motivation without overwhelming7.
This optimal balance of concerns, which depends on your personality and situation, results in a 'flow' state, where your abilities align with challenges, and every failure becomes an opportunity for development rather than evidence of incompetence.
The happiest people know when to adapt their concerns to their circumstances, not just the other way around.
In summary, akin to other desires, overwhelming frustration may suggest passion for what research provides, rather than a love for research for its own sake.
While perseverance is crucial to overcome frustration, too much of it can delay understanding your true concerns and self-integration.
Therefore, it's always good to scrutinize your passion and honestly reveal what you truly love, even though practicing self-honesty can be quite challenging.
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