Month: June 2018

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What Doesn’t Make It To THE Thesis

I recently attended a PhD seminar of a student at the Physics department. One interesting question that came up was: What didn’t make it to your thesis?

After deep thought and much analysis, I have realized this is such a good question. It let the candidate show other things he did and learnt in his PhD that didn’t make it to his thesis, because they may have been slightly irrelevant or might have been disregarded as not-important-enough.

But with this question, he could highlight this stuff because he still did those during his PhD (or more likely, he could highlight this stuff well if he’d been prepared for such a question to come up – this may not be your average kind of opponent-speak).

But hang on, is it just this stuff that doesn’t make it to your thesis?

When I was doing my Masters, we’d always joke about how everybody should write 2 theses: One the more formal, “required” document; the other, a document of “failures”: the questions that we asked, and what we tried in the lab, that then didn’t work out, and that we then dropped… which then obviously wouldn’t make it to the thesis. The kind of information that you jot down in the side margins of your lab notebook, along with angry and frustrated emoticons and hashtags and exclamation marks.

Jargon that only the person who owns the lab notebook may understand – And now I realize how I don’t make much useful or interesting notes in my lab notebook :'(

The kind of information that doesn’t make it anywhere.

Because that information is also useful, although it mostly just tells you what NOT to do (which is quite the time-saving information). But this kind of information doesn’t have much space in the scientific world. Like people in all other fields, we just want to make noise about the best work that we do, disregarding the important stepping stones that our failures were that got us there.

So yeah, a lot of stuff doesn’t make it to the thesis at any level (or any important document, for that matter – except may be some internal lab communication).

There’s also a lot of other stuff that doesn’t make it to the thesis: the hardwork and energy that you put in, how you picked yourself up after repeated failures, how your informal collaborations helped you (and the people around you)…

… Although if you end up doing really good work, the thesis can become a reflection of it.

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Fast Lessons

So for the last month, I have not been blogging much.

I’m a Muslim, and we recently ended our month of fasting, in which we don’t eat or drink from pre-dawn to a little after sunset. In Finland, particularly in Åbo, that makes about 20 hours. So while we are fasting, we often switch to this energy saving mode to get through the day with grace, while not completely going into some kind of hibernation mode (which we (most of us) do go into if we are on vacation).

So, for reasons mentioned above, I was not much into anything apart from food thoughts and how-to-get-through-the-day-while-keeping-some-lab-work-going techniques (and managing my sleep deprivation issues).

But all this down-time also helps you reflect on what you are doing, and why you are doing it, anywhere from life in general to specific PhD related stuff. And this year, Ramadan (that’s what the fasting month is called) taught me something that I think I’ll be needing much reminding of in the four years of my PhD:

That you think you cannot do it, but you can.

Whenever this thing came up about me (or us Muslims) not eating or drinking anything for 20 hours straight, people would mention how they cannot go through without food and water for this long. Even we, Muslims, who get this training repeatedly every year for 30 days, cannot think of going without food and water for this long when we are not fasting.

But when we are fasting, we do.

And this is quite strange for me, because now that Ramadan is coming in summers*, we always have this big worry on our minds about how we will get through it this time, specially without water (I, in particular, whine a lot about this one). It sometimes seems so hard, and at times, so impossible.

And yet, when we start fasting, we do. Every time. The whole month.

And this year, I realized, how we are always making assumptions and excuses about how we cannot do something, without really trying it out. We don’t take into account the fact that the human mind and body are very flexible and adaptable, and we become what we make out of ourselves.

 

In my PhD, I know that I’ll come across multiple instances when I’ll think I cannot do this anymore, or how I am not able to try any further with a particular experiment, or when taking the next step forward will seem like the most difficult thing to do.

But all that will just be stuff in my head unless I try and find out that I was able to do that all along (or not).

And that, when the start is difficult, it only becomes easier as you move forward.

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* Ramadan shifts by 10 days every year because we follow a Lunar calendar for this, which is 355 days long compared to the more-common 365-day solar calendar.