My friends and family back home are sometimes confused by what it is I actually do. It’s not at all their fault; a PhD is a bit of a mysterious thing, to the point where I think even us students can be confused by what it is we really do, and what the point of it all really is. Despite this, I tend to think a PhD itself is not necessarily all that special, and this deification of the process is what leads our friends and relatives to politely nod their heads and smile through their confusion when you tell them you’re a PhD student.

A PhD student is no more than an apprentice scientist, like an apprentice carpenter or blacksmith. I’ll now push up my glasses and arrogantly quote the Cambridge dictionary, which defines an apprentice as:

“Someone who has agreed to work for a skilled person for a particular period of time and often for low payment, in order to learn that person’s skills”

The goal, then, is to learn the skills of a scientist, a researcher, a scholar. An expert in whatever field it is they have chosen, but also an expert in the process of research itself. Wikipedia describes a scientist as “a person who researches to advance knowledge in the area of the natural sciences.” To research, to advance.

In practice, your apprenticeship starts small. As a computational biologist, my first year was structured around small, relatively simple tasks which I could perform to familiarise myself with the simulation models and coding skills relating to my specific project. Most of my first year went this way; I’d meet with my supervisor, he’d tell me what needed to be done, I’d run along and try my best to accomplish them or teach myself what I needed to know, and we’d meet again to repeat. You do the easy legwork that needs to be done, and learn in the process.

But as you continue, you sink more into the realm of your field, your métier. Perhaps, even, you start to have your own ideas. What if I tried, for instance, repeating this experiment at different temperatures? What does the literature say about that? And alongside the work you’ve been assigned, you explore your own experiments and ideas. Most of them won’t necessarily work. But you start to use a bit of intellectual freedom to explore, and see if you can come up with anything new that fits under the umbrella of your project. 

A good student does what they’re assigned: they keep good notes, deliver results, report on their difficulties. A great student does all of that while also exploring their curiosities and trying to form new connections. Both of these students will be successful.

A poor student will give too much into their curiosities at the expense of the work that they need to do. This is a hard urge to resist.

My PhD supervisor told me that the role of the scientist is to ask good questions. A simple thing which is actually extremely difficult to do. All the time, we’re surrounded by all this noise, all of these papers and data and work by others, and you need both a firm enough grip on your subject matter and a good handle on your intuition to decide; what’s actually important? What has been overlooked, or understated? What have we all been overlooking?

A rather annoying sentiment has pervaded the field of science since, I think, not long after we began investigating the natural world. That we know everything now, and that all the important discoveries have already been made. Spend enough time immersed in science and it becomes rather obvious, or so I think, that the opposite is true. In the grand scheme of things, we really don’t know anything. So many whys still need answering. At the same time, however, an awful lot of discoveries of fundamentally middling to earth-moving importance have been made, and the role of the scientist is to develop their intuition enough to figure out what to ignore, and what to focus on.

And this intuition is what you should ideally start developing during your PhD. I’m writing this to myself, mostly, since I often get caught up in a whirlwind of things I feel I should be doing, and lose sight of what’s supposed to really be happening. An apprentice, nothing more, honing their intuition, controlling curiosity, cutting through the noise until the essentials remain.