Taking a short break from data quantification in the lab on a holiday, I came across this old article on Science called "The Never-Ending Ph.D." The article painfully (for me) unveils some very real emotions that I'm sure many PhD students share. Even having the best experiences with the best advisors, most can't escape this aspect of a science labwork based PhD.
At my previous committee meeting, one of my committee members jokingly asked if this was my thesis defense because I had so much data. I took it as a compliment because I had switched labs just three year ago, so all of the data and ideas were generated in the past two years, not to mention that I had to generate preliminary data from scratch and learn how to analyze single cell RNA sequencing data using R Studio. I told the exciting news to my husband, who had also just completed his PhD in Biology and Biophysics not too long ago. "So when are you defending?" he said. Then it was the realization that I didn't even bring up the conversation during the commitee meeting even after that committee member's encouraging comment.
The truth is, just like the article stated, there is no criteria for when defense and graudation are supposed to happen - it is a case by case scenario. Unlike MD-PhD students (the closest I can think of to a PhD), who are encouraged to graduate by their 5th year in the lab (at least at my school), PhD students stay in the lab for any time between 5-8 years. In my experience, 5 years is definitely not the average - it is more like the minimum.
So what IS the sign indicating that you are ready to graduate? What is that one last experiment that you are striving for? My answer is "It is up to you, for the most part." After a few years of working in the lab, PhD students should be able to look at all the (good-quality) data that they have and think about how to turn these hopefully related data into coherent stories. How you want to wrap up the stories determines when your last experiment will be. "How do I decide when I should wrap up my story and experiments?" you asked. I am not the most qualified person to answer this since I am still trying to figure that out myself; but I have talked to many PhDs and I have summarized the two questions that you can consider to answer that question.
The first question is "What are you going to do after your PhD?" For someone who's career goal is to get a postdoc and become a PI, it is obvious that they want to learn and achieve as much as they can during their PhD because that directly benefits their next career. However, for someone who wants to go into non-academic positions, is staying longer and finishing that 5th paper or publishing a Science/Nature/Cell paper really necessary and helpful for their career trajectory?
The second question is "Have you demonstrated capability to think like a scientist?" This is THE most important goal of doing a PhD, in my opinion. After all, PhD is still a form a education, no matter how independent students become in the end. Many say doing science is a logical process. I agree with that; however, I would also add that science is mysterious, and being successful at it as a PhD student often relies on a bit of good luck. As PhD students, we can decide how productive we are and how much we work, but we can't decide how promising th project is. If you have worked on many projects, but most of them ended up producing data against your hypotheses and were not publishable, have you failed as a scientist and trainee? If during the process of troubleshooting experiments and reproposing hypotheses, you have learned how to form a testable question, how to design a study plan and how to interpret data, have you gotten closer to becoming a real scientist? Obviously, reality is much more complicated than these two examples, but I think that whether a student has demontrated competency and independence is a really important question that all PhD students and advisors should think about separately from the number of publications.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk today. Now it is time for me to go back to work.
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