Comment by bennettnate5
1 day ago
Incidentally, this describes what I believe to be the great difficulty of PhD research. You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it, which tends to result in significant scope creep as you realize just how much there is that already does you want to do. Having exhausted your initial energy and excitement for the project, you have to force yourself the remaining 20-30% of he way to the finish line to get that work to a publishable state.
Day 1: We aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of an existing industrial catalyst in a novel application that has not seen commercial usage, potentially lowering cost of production of precursors for essential medications
Day 400: Having thoroughly described a universal theory of everything, we set out to build an experimental apparatus in orbit at a Lagrange point capable of detecting a universal particle which acts a mediator for all observable forces in the known universe.
Mine was more:
Day 1: we aim to demonstrate the role of myosin II in the initiation of adhesions in migrating fibroblasts
Day 1047: we aim to get one preparation of fibroblasts to express GFP-myosin and survive long enough to film, just one, come on, please, twenty cells is enough, is that too much to ask
That’s how I do side projects.
I think this is the definition of side projects.
Like, if you stay focused, is it even really a side project?
Which is why my 2d top down sprite-based rpg now has a 3d procedural animation engine, a procedural 3d character generator with automagic rigging, a population simulator that would put Europa Universalis to shame if I ever get around to finishing it (ha!) a pixel art editor, a 2d procedural animation engine using active ragdolls.........
You might wonder why a 2d game needs 3d procedural animation, well...
The scope creeps in mysterious ways
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Damn, that's an incredible amount of progress in just 400 days
Notice: "We set out to build..."
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That is the power of AI.
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Hahaha so well said, can relate during my thesis
This comment is screaming out fot 3 or 4 panels and some stick figures.
Lmao accurate
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Oh man I feel that in my bones.
Any advice on how to mitigate this?
I worked at a chair for 12 years - in that time I've seen a lot of PhD students go through this.
If it helps anything at all: It's normal. At this point, you've already proven you're smart and knowledgeable. Now, the universe wants to see if you can also finish what you've started. That's the main thing a PhD proves: That you can take an incredibly interesting topic and then do all the boring stuff that they need you to do to be formally compliant with arbitrary rules.
Focus on finishing. Reduce the scope as much as possible again. Down to your core message (or 3-4 core messages, I guess, for paper-based dissertations).
Listen to the feedback you get from your advisor.
You got this!
This is spot on. My dad was a professor and had dozens of PhDs. The only thing differentiating them (as I remember him telling me) was the resolve to keep work as /tiny/ as possible. Who is remember for his/her PhD? Only the smallest cream of the crop. He even made good fun of worthless thesis by (then) well known professors. It’s not about your PhD.
When I did my MSc thesis he told me it was a pretty good PhD. (Before giving me a months work in corrections.) I didn’t understand back then, but I understand now. It was small, replicatable and novel (still is)! Just replicate three times and be done with it. You’ve proven your mastery. Now start something serious.
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Technical feedback yes, but always reject any career feedback from your advisor since the data shows it's unlikely a good model for future career success
> Focus on finishing. Reduce the scope as much as possible again.
in my field this would be terrible advice. instead you need to be doing something that your audience actually will give a shit about.
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It's been a long long time since I was the academic research world - but isn't 3 published papers pretty much the expectation for a PhD quantity of research?
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Switch back and forth between trying and reviewing. Often it can be good to just try before reviewing, to get your feet wet. Don't spend too much time. Then when reviewing you're going to understand it more. Repeat this process.
But there's some things to remember that are incredibly important
As soon as you start treating papers as "this is fact" you tend to overly generalize the results. But the details dominate so you just kill your own creativity. You kill your own ideas before you know they're right or wrong. More importantly you don't know how right or how wrong.
Your bullet points explain most of the replication crisis, from my perspective.
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My choice is to not do a PhD and just invest as much or as little effort in the topic as you like
For me, it wasn't so much about mitigating this cycle as much as recognizing that the grit of pushing through that last 20-30% is actually a valuable life skill that the PhD could teach me to do, and that projects that I felt like I would never want to touch again actually started to become interesting again after I had left them for a year or so.
It seems almost inevitable...
Acknowledge it is normal? Attempt to buy deeper into the delusion ("Yeah my work is awesome and unique!"). Use stimulants to force enthusiastic days every once in awhile?
Find a brand new hire who wants to get tenure. Getting a PhD through in 4 years is catnip for tenure at most universities (stateside). We then dropped off my dissertation in the middle of NSF funding week. I paid for it during orals (4 hours), but they all signed within a few days without comment.
Uhh... unless you plan to stay in academia? Then, this is a terrible idea.
This, all while battling the increasingly heavy burden of regret towards having started a PhD in the first place.
The majority of PhD candidates deal with this because the point of a PhD is to prove you can to “normal science” [1] which boils down to “how do I make this system go from 1% observable to 1.001% observable” which is just a gate for being in the academic career field.
You’ll almost never see a PhD thesis that has anything particularly interesting, novel or directly applicable to the sciences.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science
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> You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it
This is definitely the wrong way of going about a research project, and I have rarely seen anyone approach research projects this way. You should read two or at most three papers and build upon them. You only do a deep review of the research literature later in the project, once you have some results and you have started writing them down.
The usual justification is that if you don't do at least a breadth-first literature review, you can get burned by missing a paper that already does substantially what you do in your work. I've heard of extreme case where it happens a week before someone goes to defend their dissertation!
Excuse my naivety, but isn't it good if the same results get proofed in slightly different ways? This is effectively a replication, but instead of just the appliance of the experiments, you also replicate the thought process by having a slightly different approach.
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Unless you're already an expert in the topic a literature search is literally step 1 since you have to check if your idea has already been done before.
That's where your supervisor comes in. In most cases, they should be an expert in the field, and guide you towards a useful and novel problem.
Moreover, I am not suggesting you don't look at other papers at all. But google scholar and some quick skimming of abstracts and papers you find should suffice to check if someone has already done the work. If you start fully reading more than a handful of papers, your ideas are already locked in by what others have done, and it becomes way harder to produce something novel.