Every day we read about the amazing discoveries in various branches of arts, engineering and science that are supposed to change the world and make it a better place. We see these as developed by “PhDs” or “academics”, who we perceive as incredibly gifted superhumans – they developed this new quantum computer or new AI algorithms so they must be, right?
As an academic myself, I don’t think you need to be superhuman to achieve academic success and contribute towards solving some of the global challenges faced by our, and future generations. By creating the Motivated Academic, we want to make sure that you’ve got realistic expectations of your PhD and academic career, and you maintain a sustainable level of motivation throughout your career!
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Expectations of PhD students
When reading science news and scientific journals, you’ve probably come across some breakthrough ideas that inspired you to pursue a scientific degree yourself. You aspire to achieve academic success.
You’ve perhaps noted that these pieces are usually written in a way that does not reflect the entire development process that the team of PhDs and researchers had to go through. The articles tend to report the final version of academic development.
What does this mean? You don’t get to read about multiple failures and iterations over months or even years of the project duration until the solution actually worked. And the route to academic success is full of trial and error.
As you don’t often see the full picture in the literature you read, you may think that you need to be super smart or even a genius to develop such solutions in your research in order to build a successful academic career.
This kind of thinking and perception puts a lot of pressure, especially on young and aspiring PhDs and scientists such as yourself.
Reality of academic success
As with all new undertakings, we often start our research degrees aiming high and being highly motivated.
As we go along, however, we tend to realise that some things don’t always go as we initially planned. Some of our equipment breaks, code doesn’t work the way we want or cannot be validated because data isn’t readily available.
You may also find it challenging to juggle problem-solving, running experiments or coding, disseminating your research, rejection(s) of your articles and many other activities that researchers usually are responsible for, and start doubting in your abilities.
Some also say that ‘if you don’t struggle during your PhD, you’re doing something wrong’. These negative aspects and uncertainty of exploratory research, unfortunately, drain our motivation – sometimes to the extent that some may even lose interest in their beloved research area!
I’ve written another post on how to deal with common challenges during PhD. Check it out!
But let me tell you this. Failure is an important part of your career development and achieving academic success. Whether you like it or not (probably not!), we tend to learn more from failures. This is because we usually reflect on what we did wrong rather than on what we did right – this is just our nature. We tend to avoid mistakes. And this is key to achieving academic success. You need to make mistakes in order to learn!
Why did I decide to do a PhD?
So how was it in my case? When I was young(er), I wasn’t much interested in school and education – I preferred to play volleyball and videogames with my peers. I definitely wasn’t motivated to learn the school curriculum and felt that I wasn’t bright enough to succeed! I was, however, curious about how different processes work and how do they interact.
It was until my high school when I really got interested in chemistry and environmental issues, and decided that I wanted to dedicate my career towards solving them. With the guidance of my chemistry teacher, I undertook two extracurricular projects around waste recycling and incineration. These helped me to realise that doing research appealed to me. I wasn’t entirely clear what such a path entailed at that time and what academic success meant, though.
Graduating with a Bachelor’s and two Master’s degrees related to energy and process engineering led me to undertake a PhD programme in clean energy and decarbonisation. Although I enjoyed taught degrees, the joy of doing a PhD and driving my own project was disproportionally higher. I knew that I must enjoy what I do to achieve academic success.
My struggles on my way to academic success
At the beginning of my PhD degree, I thought that I will develop the best technology for CO2 capture that will change the world and solve the issue. This excitement quickly went away when I started reading the literature and discussing it with my peers.
At that point, I realised that other researchers tried to make this technology happen since the 90s’, and they haven’t succeeded – it was just too expensive and, without incentives, the industry wasn’t that much interested.
By the end of the first year of my PhD degree, I thought that it was it and that I wouldn’t achieve what I wanted and won’t build a successful academic career. However, having learnt that techn