Last September it became clear that it was time to think about wrapping up my PhD and start thinking about what life might look like after it. As an undergrad, people are often faced with a lot of doubts and uncertainty when they are approaching the end, but it is usually quite clear when the end is near. However, as a PhD student, the end comes about more as a mutual agreement between you and your advisor that (1) you have done enough to graduate and (2) that you actually want to graduate. After all, a PhD is really a personal journey that varies wildly across disciplines, schools, and individuals so the end (as well as the start and everything in between) is largely what you make of it. This makes for a strange tradeoff. To some extent you do have more flexibility about when you finish than in undergrad, but at the same time you can be pushed out earlier or later than you’d like due to factors out of your control.

Once I realized I’d finally be leaving school, some mild existential dread started to set in. After undergrad, although I’d explored some options in industry through internships, I had never seriously considered leaving school. In undergrad, my goal was mainly just to learn as much random stuff as possible, and I found engaging with research the ideal way to do so. With the help of a number of very supportive research mentors and collaborators, I was fortunate to get to play with a range of problems in areas such as biomedical signal processing, earthquake detection, and power systems optimization. Comparing this freedom with the more rigid lifestyle I associated with 9-5 jobs, I figured that continuing with the research lifestyle would be a good source of entertainment. I didn’t really know what I wanted to work on, and my decision making process wasn’t particularly nuanced: I liked school, I liked learning things, and I liked the freedom academic exploration allowed. I am aware that I am fortunate to have grown up in circumstances that permitted such an attitude: if I had to immediately support members of my family or climb out of poverty, this type of thinking would likely have been impossible.

When I started my PhD, I found that while life as a researcher does give you a lot of freedom to explore, a PhD isn’t just about learning completely random things. Ultimately, the goal is to develop a research agenda and expertise in a specific topic. For some, this search is a function of trying a large number of things and finally converging on something that they find inspiring. While this approach sounds compelling as it makes research life feel like a quest for personal discovery, for me it was somewhat of the opposite. Coming out of undergrad, I was honestly quite easily excited by pretty much everything, so once I found an area with enough room for innovation and some friendly people to work with, I was hooked. What I worked on didn’t matter to me as much as the feeling that I could try a bunch of things, explore my curiosity, and talk about these ideas with other like-minded people.

Once I got settled in, life as a PhD student was mostly just as unstructured as I was hoping for. It had its ups and downs, but I did enjoy the relative freedom to let my mind wander and set my own schedule. It was not without stress, but for a while it was also quite comfortable. As a researcher you do have similar challenges as with any other job: a pressure to work hard, the pressure to communicate and advocate for your work, and the stress associated with overcoming your own self doubts and insecurities. At the same time, your work does tend to have a liberating feeling of irrelevance. Generally, you aren’t performing open heart surgery or deploying systems that are going to immediately be in the hands of millions of people, so there isn’t as much short-term concern about the impact of your work.

I enjoyed this for a while, but eventually I found that this liberating feeling also led to a strange sort of burn out. I could usually communicate what the point of my work was academically, but started to lose motivation because I lost sight of how this work tied into the real world outside of academia. Once this burnout hit its peak, luckily I was also at the point where there was a general agreement that I had done enough work to finish up my PhD.