From the Path to PhD
Get a companion for your journey
A job in academia is a job to learn: best practices, proper research conduct, pushing the state of the art forward. The millennia-old metaphor of a road symbolizes this journey. It is something you can tackle on your own. But as the adage goes:
if you want to go fast go alone. if you want to go far go together.
To be a pioneer in your field, a narrow focus seems to be the straightforward answer. However, to be good at X, you need to care much more about anything but X, you probably thought.
With the scalpel of scientific inquiry and brutally honest self-reflection and self-criticism, I am about to open up about my struggles on my path to my Ph.D. On this meandering path full of dead-ends and wrong turns, my goal is to give you a glimpse and challenge your view on what it takes to be a good scientist.
Mistakes will be plenty, but so will be advice. Advice I learned from respectable fellow Ph.D. students, supervisors, researchers, and wiser people.
What does await you?
Self-reflection, books, tools, tricks, philosophy, science, and philosophy of science.
Who am I?
I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Tübingen and part of the ELLIS and IMPRS-IS doctoral programs. For my B.Sc. and M.Sc., I studied electrical engineering at the Budapest University of Technology, specializing in control engineering and intelligent systems. For my research, visit my Google Scholar or my blog.
My desire to be better and to become a good scientist drives me to explore the philosophy of science, productivity advice, and tricks of the academic trade.
Who should read this?
B.Sc./M.Sc. students
As an undergraduate student, I had no idea what research looked like. If you are considering proceeding on the path of research, you might get a glimpse of what it looks like and learn from the mistakes I made.
Fellow Ph.D. students
Even if you could avoid all the problems I am dissecting in my newsletter, I hope the advice I gathered from wiser people will be of use.
First-generation academics
As a first-generation academic, I am still learning the unwritten rules of academia through a lot of mistakes (I expect more to come). Hopefully, you will be spared if you stick with me.
Knowledge sector professionals
Having the means to accomplish a scientific task (let it be data analysis or consulting about a relevant topic) should not be the goal; it should be understanding. When I go deep into the fallacies and philosophy of any scientific undertaking, it might help you to crack the superficial shell of your endeavor to find a mother-of-pearl.
Why should you trust my advice?
Inspired by the same-themed video of world-class barista James Hoffman, I need to forego the question you probably ponder.
I will be totally transparent: you might not, at least not, without a grain of salt. My self-reflection on what went wrong might reach a different conclusion than you would due to different situations. I even expect my beliefs to change.
What I write about are mostly not my own ideas; I am only reinterpreting them for my own circumstances. And since they came from people who have trodden the path before, I am confident that even if our destinations differ, we have the same compass.
Why subscribe?
Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update.
Stay up-to-date
You won’t have to worry about missing anything. Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox.
