finding an endpoint for your phd - part 1
Finding an endpoint for your PhD (agreed upon between you and your advisor), is one of the last major hurdles to overcome before finishing your PhD. This two-part blog entry is inspired by a recent comment that was left on this blog, which got me thinking about my own experience with this:
Speaking of anything related to leaving the lab can be a touchy subject, so how do you go about it? First of all, every project (and by extension, body of work) should in theory be started with an endpoint in mind (but the subject of goal-oriented projects vs. fishing expeditions deserves to be dealt with in a separate post). But of course, endpoints may change as the research progresses and more possibilities are either uncovered or eliminated. That’s just part of the game and also what makes it so difficult to set an endpoint.
But as time goes, you may find diminishing returns (i.e. training and research) from your time in the lab and then, all of a sudden, determining an endpoint becomes a more tangible inevitibility. Two major considerations need to be made: (1) how to wrap up the research and (2) how to get your PI on board. Let’s talk about how to wrap up the research. Even a month before the decision was made to wrap up my PhD, I still had about a million experiments that I could do and three or four more papers that I could potentially write. I think the thing you need to remember when weighing the pros and cons of finishing your Phd is that the grad school experience is filled with millions of possible experiments that can be done, each the foundation of Nature paper, but how many of them actually pan out? In my experience, the answer was none. In your experience, perhaps 1, perhaps 2–which are still long odds. Is the risk of spending another year for few returns worth the chance for hit it big on those long odds? Of course, your risk depends on the work up to that point. But I don’t know how objective, as graduate students, we can be in determining how realistic it is that the next set of experiments will land the coveted Nature paper. Sadly, sometimes I don’t think that even one’s advisor is capable of providing that objective view (another reason not to put off your thesis committee meeting)–actually from mine and other peoples experience, this might actually be most of the time.
I ended up publishing a few papers from my PhD research. But, the ultimately published work for my last, big paper–my flagship paper–in its final form was actually finished over a year before I even started writing up the paper. The problem: I had a some really exciting and possibly high impact findings that could have comprised a solid paper as-is, which I decided nonetheless to buildup with some follow up experiments. The bigger problem (which you may or may not have): it was obvious to me there was no real logistical support for the project. And yet I pressed on because of the potential impact that of those last few experiments. Well, a year later, the experiments hadn’t worked and the ever looming specter of getting scooped (on what I did have) continued to grow, which ultimately convinced me to write up and submit what I had finished before I continued with the follow-up experiments.
From my own experience and talking to a number of graduate students who have gone through, I think you just know when it is time to wrap things up. There are always more experiments to be done, so the first step to finding that endpoint is to commit to finishing up the PhD. Assuming that you have had the realization that it’s time to wrap things up, committing to it will drive you to define what exactly needs to get done and then a plan for how to do it–which is the next step.
So you’ve come to the realization that it’s time to finish your PhD, you’ve committed yourself to finishing the PhD and have developed a plan. You are good to go. Wait a minute… Oh yes, one last, small detail–your advisor has to agree.
How to get your advisor onboard in Part 2.
