Doing PhD is indeed one lifetime experience
for every PhD candidate. But what is interesting is that every PhD tale has its
both unique and comparable narratives. As it is notorious for, PhD comes with
lot of challenges and hurdles. Before even trying to start answering the
research question that you yourself propose, you need to answer and walk
through a trail of many questions. First answer them and satisfy your soul. And
get convinced. The very first and foremost question is to ask if you really
want to do a PhD. Are you a PhD material? Can you devote your next 5 years
studying? Can you make your PhD studies both your friends and family? Most
importantly, does it align with your life’s goal??? And once you examine the
depth of your intent and interest in doing a PhD, then comes rolling the never
ending list of deciding the school, your advisor, thesis topic, and further on.
For me, the director of computer science from an ok not a great university, owning a bioinformatics lab called me and
interviewed me. He then later offered me a PhD position which I joined. This meant, I already had my advisor when
I started my PhD. When I joined his lab, I was expected to take over the
project of a former graduating PhD student in our lab. I heard it is very common
in biology community to first take over projects from previous PhD students in
your lab and then only think what you yourself want to do. For that, I had to
fully understand his whole software written in C and develop its web
application. This would help its users to be able to access and run it on web on our servers.
So, my first year was spent in understanding that software and building its
web-server. It was indeed, a very useful learning experience. I developed the
online tool and wrote a conference paper as first author.
Having understood the software so well, I
started taking up services where our collaborators wanted to use that tool. And
on side I was also digging its various projects that it had been used for, in
past. I found one of our collaborators projects and its result sitting in our
computers for last two years. The results looked so promising and representing
one unique feature of that tool, unnoticed till then. I polished that feature
of that tool and further analyzed those results. Eventually after prolonged
efforts of bringing together all the past collaborators on that project to
provide me with more details, I finally wrote a paper and got it published. It
is always advised to take care of the low hanging fruit first. It was hard to
get all the authors back to their 2 years old project and review a long
research paper. That paper had absolutely different angle than for what they used that
tool before. Reminding busy professors and struggling new post-docs for reviewing
the paper I wrote was a tough job by itself for a naïve, immature PhD student.
No comments:
Post a Comment