The roads into my PhD..

Like I said in my last post, I am currently looking for a job as I have recently submitted my PhD thesis (I still cannot believe it entirely...) Today, I spent pretty much the whole day looking into job advertisements, recruitment companies websites and thus spotting possible future employers. At the same time I wrote a list of skills and assets I gained, mostly from my PhD, such that I can fix and update my CV, also I spent quite some time surfing in Linkedin..

Linkedin became quite useful as it quickly helped me remembering and learning about a lot of possible employers. At the same time, however, it diverted my attention to the forums of questions and answers that are constantly going on as part of the groups that one can take part.. I am myself part of quite a few groups that I joined for one reason or another.. from time to time, and more often than I would wish, I receive, in my email box, these questions and these debates and frequently realize they are redundant. The same questions and issues are raised several times and go on forever.. I reckon that is because they are indeed prevalent within the population and important matters to be discussed of course.. In particular, there is this question about "Why did you do your PhD" or "shall I hide my PhD in my next job application" of course these questions are posed directly to people who have done PhD's but who are very much willing to leave academia for good...

Reading all this, I could not help it but rethink on my entire decision of first having thought of doing a PhD and secondly having done it, or most of it.. (not 100% finished but confident enough that I will pass my dissertation exam.. hopefully... mixed feelings here)..

At the same time I came across this blog article from a guy I know and I discovered today is doing a PhD himself.. (sorry I didnt know about that).. Besides the article being really well written I think it explains very well why most people, who have a scientific background, are dragged into this kind of life.. aka PhD/research servant forced to get accustomed to a tyrant supervisor who has no respect for the fact that his students is a human being with personal aspirations and instead simply sees a brain on a stick... as very well characterized by Jorge Cham (PhD comics says it all)...

But Ok.. I am diverting a little bit from the message I wanted to convey today which was basically to explain how I came to do a PhD... So basically and to cut a fairly long story, it was when I was in the final stages of my undergrad degree that the word PhD reached my vocabulary.. I was undertaking my final year research project and quite successfully, I not only set up an entire new lab, as I performed good research, later appreciated by my supervisors and pretty much all the scholars around. On top of that I still did some teaching and master students supervision.. all in all it was a great achievement and I got the best mark ever achieved for this discipline, 19 out of 20! During this time I was heavily persuaded into pursuing a PhD not only by the academics around me, including my professors, but as well by the job market.. Before I just wanted to finish my degree and get a job, that's it. A cousin of mine had done a PhD some time ago and struggled to get a job due to over qualification, so I knew that should be something to avoid.. but somehow I went straight to it... After applying for a few research technician jobs without success, it seemed right to do a PhD, specially because it was very easy to get it.. Also, the job positions that seemed right for me at that time, they all required a PhD or extensive research experience, thus again, the PhD appeared to be the right and only thing to do..

Yet, I thought ok.. I can do a PhD BUT I should be in a project that is, in some way, linked to industry or involving industry partners, because, in fact, I never thought or planed to becoming an academic. Thus, I looked into this possibility and luckily and happily found the ideal PhD project for me. Unfortunately, the good things end here. 6 months later and my PhD project had to cease because the company I was collaborating with, and which was subsidizing the research, was in serious struggle to keep things up as the economic crisis spreaded all over Europe (we were in 2008). Consequently, my funding was cut and I was left with two options: give up and look for another project in a different place, essentially start it over from the PhD hunting point, or continue in the same place but changing the topic and the domain a little bit and doing a purely academic PhD just like the majority of people do.

I must say that by then I was already quite disappointed with many things regarding the PhD, and perhaps I should have quitted and tried to find a normal job and forget the entire PhD thing altogether... but me being me, giving up was not something that could be accepted, I do not accept defeat, ever, therefore my decision was to continue. That is, I did the most academic PhD one can ever plan, have two journal publications, can perhaps have 2 or three more, yet the things went so badly that at present I don't know whether I can be bother... I know one thing though.. I am going to leave this "world" and use whatever skills I achieved to be starting it, even if from scratch, in a different world. That was what I always wanted, so not giving up the dream! Say, it just got a little bit delayed...

One day I am going to write a post about the do and donts and my personal experience during the PhD, but I am going to leave it to another time, as this post is far too long already.. Thus for now I keep searching for a suitable career for the "after PhD life".