I decided to start a regular section on my blog and got inspired by Fred Wilson who does the VC Cliche of the Week posts every week. Of course, I am going to write in a completely different issue. I don’t really know how many readers of this blog are graduate students but I thought it would be good have a post about my observations on PhD studies every week.
I feel I should first put some disclaimers here. What I am going to write will not really be cliches and I am not an expert on graduate studies nor I am an expert on being a PhD student. Actually, I don’t recommend anyone to try to be an expert on being a PhD student 
I just gave that name to my posts because I liked it. I will just try to write about some of my personal observations. Keep in mind that my observations will be coming from Electrical Engineering/Computer Science field so they may not apply to everyone. Moreover, everyone may be experiencing or observing something completely different based on where they study even if they are in the same field.
As these disclaimers are out of the way now I can continue with the fun part. Here goes the first post.
I have been thinking a lot lately on the balance between academic responsibilities and research project responsibilities of a PhD student. I can hear people saying: “Wait a minute, aren’t they the same thing?”. Well, may be or may be not. A PhD student usually works as a Research Assistant on a funded research project which pays the bills and helps the student afford a decent life. On the other hand, the student is responsible for doing scientific research and produce a dissertation thesis to contribute to his field of study. I call the dissertation responsibility an academic responsibility. It is not always the case that the research project and the dissertation concentration align.
When you are starting a research project, no one can guarantee that what you will do for the project will be a part of your thesis. Even if the project and your dissertation align to some degree, the responsibilities are still different. The research project forces you think about implementation at least %70 of the time whereas your academic responsibility forces you to think about novelty and scientific research at least %70. If you do the math at this point, you can see a clear problem of balance. The complexity of the situation increases if you have a research advisor/supervisor in addition to your academic advisor. This separates the person who you should satisfy with your adacemic progress, and the person who you should satisfy with your research project progress.
Sometimes the project that you are working on seems more exciting because you may like implementation more and enjoy it more when you see the output of your work in a shorter time. The academic responsibilities sometimes look harder to accomplish since it requires constant research to make progress and you may not get your results as soon. If you tend to shift the balance from one responsibility to the other, you may be reminded about the one that you are lacking progress.
I was once told that the only reason a PhD student works on a research project is because he is working on his/her dissertation. I was also once told that there is a day and a night in a whole day to work on the research project and dissertation. So, striking the balance between research project and academic responsibilities is an important part of the PhD process. I think if this is accomplished a smoother and more enjoyable PhD experience may be achieved.
[tags]PhD Cliche of the Week[/tags]
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