What even is a PhD?

This week was relatively uneventful. Probably because it was only three days long. Despite the short length, it was a very productive week for me, PhD-wise. As we settle into our life in Australia I suspect I will have more and more to say about the reason we moved here: the work I'm doing. Since 'doing a PhD' tells you absolutely nothing about what I'm actually doing, I figured it was time for a post about what a PhD is, and what it means to be 'doing' one. Buckle up - turns out I have lots to say about PhDs.

Before I go any further, I would like to preface this post by acknowledging that academia is a ridiculous and often unnecessarily convoluted place. There are lots of exceptions to rules and 'x is y but y isn't always x', situations. Not to mention the jargon and barriers to entry are more present than anyone is willing to admit. I like learning, I don't really like the system in which a lot of formal learning has to take place. And I definitely don't endorse a lot of what happens under the guise of 'rigorous academic standards'. Anyway. Another rant for another day.

Okay, so what is a PhD? In the world of pretentious and judgey academia, PhD stands for Doctor of Philosophy. Its commonly called a Doctorate, and its widely accepted as the highest level of formal education you can attain. There are other, less common 'Doctor of ...' titles (eg. PsychD = doctor of psychology, EdD = doctor of education, etc), but if you force a ranking, PhD would be on top. If you ever meet someone who cares deeply about this completely made up and inconsequential ranking, slap them and tell them to get a hobby. (For a real world example of this kind of pedantry, google Jill Biden doctorate. She has an EdD and got flack for it because ~ItS nOt A rEaL pHd GuYs~).

My PhD is in the field of psychology. When its done, I will be able to say I have my Doctor of Philosophy (aka PhD) in psychology, and use Dr. as my honourific instead of Ms. or Mrs. I will NOT be a clinical psychologist (therapist) or psychiatrist (physician). I will be a researcher. There are some clinical psychologists that are Drs/have PhDs in clinical psychology, but its not a requirement. Psychiatrists are Drs, but because of their medical degree, not a PhD (unless they have separately gotten a PhD). Yes, it is unnecessarily confusing. Can't say I didn't warn you.

Back to what a PhD is. Theoretically, the goal of a PhD is to push the bounds of collective human knowledge. Essentially, to discover or learn something new that we, as a species, don't know yet. Here is a handy illustration that demonstrates this. I know that this sounds very grandiose - To discover something yet unknown! The reality is usually far less exciting. Turns out most of the things we don't know yet are not big, grand things like new fields of science or art. They are tiny, seemingly inconsequential details. A specific part of a small field of study for a population that is within a subtopic of an area you may have heard about. I mentioned my PhD is in psychology. That is a big field I'm sure most of you have heard of. Within psychology, I'm looking at sleep deprivation and decision making (both sub-areas of psychology, that have an even smaller area of overlap) of shift workers (because shift work results in a specific type of sleep deprivation), specifically paramedics (the population I'm looking at), with a focus on work performance & stress response. Even more confused? Don't worry, I am too. And I do it every day.

Why do PhDs end up being detailed and specific? Because, as it turns out, discovering a brand new thing is hard. Really hard. And most of the time, very, very dull. You have to really drill down the specifics before you can figure out what/where to find the new knowledge. This is the researchy-est part of the research. It is where you see experiments (if you are the physical sciences - biology, chemistry, physics), clinical trials (in medicine & pharmacy), and studies (in social sciences - psychology, sociology, economics, etc). To get to new knowledge you have to use all the background knowledge for your topic to come up with a new idea/theory/hypothesis, then test it to see if it works. Whether or not an idea 'works', the resulting information is what you can use to generate new knowledge. This part of the PhD is usually called your 'Project', and is the most tangible to talk about because it involves actually doing stuff eg. running chemical reactions, making people try things and then measuring their abilities, giving people surveys, etc.

I should add that the intense specificity of PhDs is what makes them hard to talk about to a general audience. They are so narrowly focused, there is a ton of background information you need to know before you get to a point where you actually understand what a person is studying. As soon as you start to talk in generalities and common language, its very easy to lose the thread of what the PhD is looking at. Taking my PhD as the example again, you guys all probably know what decision making and sleep deprivation are, but if I start talking about heuristic use and circadian rhythm disruption, things start to get murkier. Of course I can present an overview in broad terms, but as soon as anyone asks me a question about it (eg. How do you measure decision making?), it becomes hard to answer without ending up deep in a sub-sub-sub area (eg. Probabilistic modelling via Bayesian theory).

Now that we have talked about the theoretical, lets talk about the actual aka what do I do all day. Right now, I read. A lot. Because of the aforementioned specificity, you have to learn a lot of the background material and existing work before you are even close to the precipice of knowledge. And new materials and work are constantly being published. You can't really learn this material in a classroom format because it is so individual for each project. This is part of what doing a PhD is all about: teaching you how to gather & assimilate information outside of a formal structured course. Every day I try to read at least one paper**. Usually I end up reading 3-5. This sounds silly to explicitly state, but after I read, I think about things. I think about how what I just read fits into what I already know, and how that changes/doesn't change my ideas for my PhD project. I use all the background information + the capabilities of the university facility + a bunch of other logistical things to develop a study that will look at one new thing. This sounds straight forward, but is actually really challenging. Again, this goes back to why PhD's are so specific. Building a project that gathers information about something new in a measurable way involves making a lot of decisions based on the specifics of the topic.

Back to what my days look like, I usually break up my reading by making project plans and learning how to use research & measurement tools (eg. how to use EEGs to measure sleep quality, figuring out software used to run decision making games, etc). I have weekly meetings with my supervisor, who essentially oversees and guides my work. And there are regular meetings of all of the grad students under my supervisor (commonly called our Group) where people will present things they are working on, papers they are getting ready to submit, etc. I also have to find time to complete 120 hours of self-guided professional development activities over the next three years. When I'm further in my PhD, I will spend a lot of time writing. Because after I'm through the data collection phase of my project, I have to write & submit a bunch of papers, and write a thesis - essentially a mini-novel on exactly what I did & why, what the results were and what that means for the field.

You may or may not know, but PhD students are known for bring perpetually stressed and weird about their projects. They are stressed because a PhD is a lot of work on a tight timeline. A bunch of that work is the awkward fumbling of trying to figure out what is meaningful and what is not. There is a lot of redundancy and false starts where you spend lots of time on energy on something only to discover the next day that it doesn't matter because that thing you thought was crucial wasn't important at all (this has already happened to me in the 6ish weeks I have been working on my project. It will happen many more times before I'm done). And because you are working towards new knowledge, you don't know what direction is the 'right' direction to be looking in until after its too late. To paraphrase something my dad said to me when I was younger, there are no textbooks for PhD work because you are the textbook. Then there is the fact that PhD students are chronically underpaid. Yes, every PhD student I know has a scholarship. But based on the hours you put in, you are lucky if you are making minimum wage. I took a 2/3rds pay cut + loss of pension & benefits to do this PhD. As for why many don't like talking about their work, its because they are essentially living it. You spend so much time and mental energy thinking about your topic, it starts to feel inescapable. The last thing you want to do in your free time is talk about the thing you most need a break from.

So why do it? I suppose every PhD has a different reason, but for me, its about the love of learning. I can deal with the crappy pay, the pretentious people, the ridiculous institutional hoop jumping if it means I get to be constantly learning (and hopefully mastering) new things. Especially if those things happen to be in my areas of interest: paramedics, decision making, work performance, physiological stress. For those who are curious if I ever have doubts about the decision to do a PhD, that would be a resounding yes. Constantly, all the time, since before I even applied. For me, what tipped the scales is that while I think the whole 'PhD' thing is neat, its the work, the actual project itself, that I am in it for. This is the work I want to do.

**By papers, I mean academic papers. These are written by researchers and submitted to academic journals were they are peer reviewed by other academics. If they are deemed to be credible, original, and relevant to the field, they are published for other academics (and others) to read. Most of them are very dry and pretty hard to understand unless they are in your own or a related field.