When I was halfway through my Ph.D. I formulated a hypothesis: The proximate challenge that keeps you from graduating is that you have to write a thesis. But the ultimate challenge to getting your Ph.D. is this: You somehow have to learn to understand, deep down, that all your romantic notions about the Ph.D. are bunk, that you will be exactly the same person on the day after you get it that you were the day before, and that you need to stop waiting for the day when you feel like a god and just write something down and get on with life.
It may take you years to accept this, and it may drive you to drink, but after you get to that point you can graduate.
Only then will you be able to live with the fact that your thesis looks like crap to you. Your thesis will always look like crap to you. Either you will have figured out absolutely everything and your thesis will look incredibly boring to you, because you’ve moved on, or—vastly more likely—your thesis will look woefully incomplete because, geez, there is so much that you couldn’t figure out, and you’re just so stupid!
Or, most likely of all, you will think both of these things at the same time.
Similarly: Being the world’s foremost expert on a particular scientific problem is a lot less exciting in real life than it seems in the movies. In fact, being on the frontier of science feels like being totally, hopelessly lost and confused. Why this came as a surprise to me I’ll never know.
--mechanical_fish on Hacker News. Emphasis mine. source
--mechanical_fish on Hacker News. Emphasis mine. source
-- attr. Albert Einstein