VIB-RUG Department of Molecular Biomedical Research

Molecular ImmunoBiotechnology Unit

How to be a PhD student                  [;-)]

Well done! You got your first (or upper second). You successfully eked out the long, hot summer months fantasising about your research career. You started your PhD studentship a few months ago. And about now reality is creeping in.

 Lying on the beach you imagined yourself, no doubt, clutching test tubes in your tight little fist in the style of a B-movie; "Don't worry Mayor, we'll have an antidote to the dread alien toxin tobeornot 2B by morning. Or you saw yourself as a Frankenstein figure, at odds with the scientific community, but (inevitably) brilliant. Or you saw yourself as impossibly glamorous, with tousled hair, working in bow tie and tails or a little black number between cocktails and a late show. Or perhaps you saw yourself as a poor drab little thing, working all the hours the good Lord gives, with no reward, and no money.

 Consider that latter possibility carefully. Because that, my child, whatever the fantasy, is the reality--as. I trust, you are now learning. You will also have learnt by now that the British PhD system is a total nonsense. You are not there to be trained. Your supervisor does not want to see any intellectual development. You are there to be slave labour. Your supervisor just needs you to generate results that she or he can pin to an abstract for that "critical" conference in Hawaii.

 It generally takes two months before the average research student, no matter how profound their personality disorder, realises there is no glamour and no future in doing a PhD. The pay, which looked modest, but better than the undergraduate grant, turns out to be completely lousy. The myth that the sheer honour of doing a PhD is sufficient reward is wearing thin. Chats with your elders and betters will have told you that you will have to pack more research into the next three years than you could manage in the following 20. You should also, by now, have realised that you are a despised subspecies of the laboratory world. Nothing you do will ever be good enough. Worse yet, you will have heard all the horror stories. If you have a nervous breakdown, they sack you; if your supervisor has a nervous breakdown, ditto. But there are ways in which you might just survive. Read on carefully.

 First, the PhD student does not only require the ability to turn "suspension of disbelief" into an art form beyond the illusory skills of our most eminent Shakespearean actors; he or she must also retain the ability to remain as cynical and as hard-bitten as Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. This ability to deceive oneself and one's audience completely, while remaining in touch with harsh reality is, of course, the reason why most students become barking mad and continue the pain by applying for postdoctoral positions at universities. Some extreme cases end up as lecturers. Secondly, you must bear firmly in mind that you are on the thin end of a research team's thin budget. Your project has to be cheap, but must also look impressive. In short, your project has to be utterly meaningless but seem to be at the cutting edge of science. You have to kid yourself. You have to hypnotise yourself. You have to talk yourself into a state of religious fervour. You have to get yourself into that peculiar state of mind where you can go to an issue of Nature and read a paper entitled "Glucose is an essential cofactor for function of the glucose porter in vitro" from top to bottom and think "Wow" and then aim for similar lofty heights. Never, ever, for one second, must you allow yourself the luxury of thinking "So what?".

 So when your grandmother asks you casually at tea how your studies are going, it is essential that you tell her in the minutest detail exactly how you are purifying that membrane protein involved in bacterial killing and how this is going to produce a cure for cancer any second now. If granny nods off you are home and dry. You have proved you believe that what you are doing is important. If, however, grandma asks you pertinent questions such as, "Do you have some interesting hobbies/ friends? - or worse - "Do they pay you for that?", then you have failed and you might as well pack your bags and quietly leave the university. Of course, the really critical test comes when you can talk to your bank manager and his eyes become that unique blend of boredom and cash register.

Finally, you have managed to kid yourself into working all hours of the day and night doing something which, to anybody sane and in touch with reality, is useless, albeit cheap and reduces the dole queue by one. But, at the same time, you can only survive the vagaries and pitfalls of PhD life, and the appalling day-to-day hysterical politics within your research group/department by keeping a firm grip on reality. You have to convince yourself that "Well, there is more to life than the lab" while maintaining the huge lie. Frankly, you need a diverting hobby. Drugs are out. They are too expensive unless you are a particularly innovative organic chemist and sex can interfere with the old lab routine. So I recommend to my students that they take up odd-jobbing, such as painting, decorating, general housework and gardening, to divert their minds from work.

 This seems to have been of immense benefit to most of them although some, I admit, never quite manage to get my frying pan quite clean.

 Simon P. Wolff . New Scientist. 1 992. 1824: 49

[;-)]

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