After roughly 2 years of joining my Ph.D. advisor's lab, I advanced to Doctoral candidacy on Friday, 05/10 i.e. I successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis proposal, and answered relevant questions (dubbed "the orals") posed by a 5-member committee without sounding too flustered. I think I've finally managed to collect my thoughts on how I feel, and on my performance. This could prove useful for freshman Ph.D. students (or Masters students with a Ph.D. in mind) who might be overwhelmed with the mammoth journey of graduating with a Ph.D. I am at the half-way stage at the moment, and here are a few reflections from my experience as a Ph.D. student so far:
- Advancing to candidacy is a nice feeling as I am one step closer to graduating with a Ph.D. I spent the whole of the Spring semester fussing over this day - and it was very gratifying to have my efforts pay off.
- It also means that my academic journey has just begun - now that I have defended my thesis proposal, getting the work done in time [read: the next 2 years] is of paramount importance.
- I had an informal written exam week with my 5-member committee three weeks before my orals. Because my thesis chapters incorporate concepts from Biology, Evolution, Statistics and Programming, the questions I was asked spanned a wide spectrum and helped identify my weak areas. Now that I think of it, I feel I should have taken a mini-written exam a few months after joining the lab - it would have likely sharpened my understanding of the system I study well ahead of time. It would have given me more time to think about the bigger picture in terms of where my system sits in the context of other systems.
- I realized that the way one presents his/her work to one's Ph.D. committee is very different from the way one presents to a general audience, when I gave a practice talk a week ahead of my orals to my advisor and my peers. Their feedback was invaluable. Following their advice, I employed parallel writing - mentioned the knowns and the unknowns regarding each of my thesis projects, had my hypotheses, dataset and goals listed clearly on separate slides, dabbled in Powerpoint to make stuff appear/disappear and eliminated/reduced slides with TMI (Too Much Information). From 40 slides during the prep-talk, I was finally down to 20, and it was a lot cleaner.
- I had a 20 minute time-slot to present my proposal (This is committee-dependent. In any case, you do not want to talk about your content for more than 20-30 minutes. Anything beyond that is TMI), so I practised what precisely I wanted to convey in every slide 3-4 times over.
- The fact that I was over-prepared for the orals really helped. I was able to expect follow up questions from almost every slide and had back-up slides ready. While answering questions, using one of those 'I'm glad you asked' slides convinced me that the session was going well. As a result, I did not feel that I was being grilled - in fact it was a pretty smooth affair.
- As far as Science goes, I am curious and information-thirsty by nature. I think that was one of the main reasons I was able to get thus far. And it will have a big role to play eventually in my graduating with a Ph.D. and more importantly, in my future career as a Scientist.
