The ,X, Y and Z on the path to higher learning
That path leads to self-discovery, as personal struggle is often viewed years later as an integral part of personal transformation. Zhao Xu reports from New York.
Asked about his change of mentality as a one-time PhD student, Fei Long, a senior staff engineer with Google, refers to a line graph depicting changes over time on two axes, x and y. A few years after he graduated from Purdue University in Indiana in 2006 majoring in electrical and computer engineering, Fei came across the graph on phdcomics.com, a website reputed for its whimsical illustrations that gently poke fun at the world of academia.
The two variables shown on it are the time and the scale of a person’s ambition. The x-axis begins at the point when he or she embarks on the journey to gain a PhD. Here self-expectation is at its zenith, with possibilities almost boundless, a Nobel Prize being one of them.
However, as the initial months of the first school year roll by, for many a student those aspirations, shown on the y-axis, rapidly diminish, and the quest for a Nobel Prize turns into a wish to be a revolutionary in one’s chosen field. Achieving the former implies coming up with discoveries or ideas that send waves across the oceans and down the ages, while achieving the latter merely implies making breakthroughs in a specific field of research.
A bit of luck here and there can, of course, influence where you land up. But for many people, there’s a marked difference between the two: in one case you take on the status of a god, in the latter you are destined to remain a mere mortal.
Yet as the first year draws to a close, for many who have unwittingly let their ego move into overdrive, anything less than being a revolutionary does not bear thinking about — until this student is halfway through the second year.
At that point on the y axis aspiration has been reduced to landing a job at a top university. Here one cannot help but detect a whiff of pragmatism: for the first time, lofty dreams have been swamped by mundane ambition. A respected job with a venerable institution will do, thank you very much.
On the graph, this descent into reality over three or four years is precipitous, even if, mercifully, it does not end in a crash but a soft landing, during which expectations gently taper off.
Now, in year four of studies, the modest hope of landing a job has given way to the hope of getting a gig at a conference in some rural backwater where, if you’re lucky, the food of choice during dinner breaks will be pepperoni pizza.
“The chart really gives a handle to understanding the mental journey undertaken by many PhD students, me included, although it may have failed to reflect the sheer delight most of us took in learning,” Fei says.
“It has been almost 20 years since I first got enrolled in a PhD program in the US, long enough to change a lot of things. But students who have come from China pursuing a dream in one of this country’s prestigious educational institutions have still got to ride the emotional pendulum propelled by the dual force of selfaffirmation and self-doubt. It’s a rite of passage, something that many of us look back on years later with feelings of gratitude.”
Another one who has been through this all is Sun Tao, who last September became an associate professor at the University of Virginia, after having studied material science and engineering at Northwestern University in Illinois. After obtaining his PhD at Northwestern he worked as a staff scientist at Argonne National Laboratory in the town of Lemont, Illinois, for several years.
“Having spent six years at Tsinghua University in Beijing, I didn’t feel an overwhelming pressure with academic work,” Sun says, calling his alma mater “one of the world’s best in science study and research”.
But having a solid foundation does not necessarily mean a smooth transition. For a brief period in the US, Sun says, he struggled with English. But the ultimate challenge came from having to adjust to a new way of learning, whereby students are required to take the lead in identifying problems and solving them.
“I started to do research on my own two months after I entered Northwestern. You’re expected to dive right in not only because this is what you set out to become: an independent research scientist. The nature and depth of a PhD student’s work means that by the time of his or her graduation, the student is likely to command more knowledge in his or her chosen area of research than the professor. Therefore, a student must have the willingness to probe deeper on his or her own, although instruction from the professor, especially in the initial period, is crucial.
“Because of the lack of similar training during their undergraduate years, some Chinese students prove to be ill-prepared.”
For students of social sciences, independence is often reflected in the level of critical thinking, says Li Fei, also a Purdue graduate, who was majored in both political science and industrial engineering.
“I thought I was going to spend my very first class feverishly scribbling down notes,” Li says. “Instead we were asked to critique the reading materials we’d been handed. But no authentic view could be formed without a wide sampling of facts and opinions. Extensive reading, in both volume and scope, was not particularly emphasized by the curriculum I adopted in China, before entering Purdue.”
However, being an independent learner and investigator should not diminish the importance of the student-teacher relationship, Sun says.
“It’s extremely important for teachers to know the research progress of their students as well as anything that hinders such progress. Apart from offering advise, a professor could refer a student to a peer deemed more capable of providing guidance in a specific research area.”
In the past, Chinese students were not known for being very forthcoming when it came to communicating with their teachers. This could have put some of them at a disadvantage, especially when the student was under the tutelage of a big-name professor and had to fight for his or her precious time, time divided between research and intense socializing and travel, including attending the numerous conferences held all over the world.
“Don’t expect a full-hour one-on-one discussion in the privacy of his or her office,” Sun says. “Instead, seek every opportunity to keep the professor informed of what you are doing. Stop him or her in the corridor, exchange a few words before the seminar begins. Try not to frustrate your professor by first keeping your
self out of view for a long time and then suddenly telling him or her that for one reason or another you’re about to give up.”
The complicated love-hate relationship between PhD candidates and their academic adviser is well chronicled. Although cases of students accusing their professors of exploitation and manipulation tantamount to mental bullying are uncommon, these days any complaints that do happen to surface get a lot of attention in social media.
“Students are in no position to argue with their professors,” says a PhD candidate studying physics at the University of Minnesota who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“It’s up to a student’s academic adviser, ie, his professor, to decide whether a student is qualified to stand in front of the thesis defense committee. Sometimes friction is caused by the failure of a professor who does not have a hands-on approach to the research being carried out by his or her student, to follow the latter’s train of thought.
“It’s really a pain to have a professor who does little more than pile pressure on a poor student who’s stranded in his or her research. It’s even worse to have someone who imposes on you a research topic that you have little interest in or one that you believe won’t lead you anywhere.”
Sun takes a more eclectic view. “When it comes to choosing a focused area of research, it would be naive for a student to hope for a level of freedom unobtainable even by their teachers. These days a professor receives funding, a large part of which goes to the training of his or her PhD students, from multiple sources, many with strings attached. This means that the research projects have to be oriented toward certain requirements. In other words, you can’t just do whatever you want.
“Judging by my own experience, when a student says ‘This is boring’, very often he or she means ‘This is too hard’. Unwittingly blurring the difference between the two suggests a lack of commitment.
“Within the first two years of his or her PhD studies a student will invariably find him or herself caught in an academic dark tunnel that needs to be negotiated, and at the end of which some will emerge a qualified PhD student. Think of it as a butterfly’s struggle to push its way through the tiny opening of the cocoon.”
For many who have gone through this metamorphosis, the payback often comes in the form of a research paper being published in an academic journal such as Nature or Science Magazine.
“On average, a PhD candidate needs to publish 3-4 papers before graduating,” says the University of Minnesota physics student, who describes his life as “revolving around the writing and publishing of papers”.
“They (the papers) effectively dictate my mood. Being in one’s third year of PhD study without having ever published any paper would cause tremendous mental stress.”
Even Yan Ning, professor of molecular biology at Princeton University in New Jersey and one of China’s most celebrated scientists, felt such pressure while doing her own PhD at Princeton, after studying at Tsinghua.
“Things didn’t go very well for the first two years. And it wasn’t helped by the fact that a fellow Chinese student who worked in the same laboratory as me was advancing rapidly and had published several papers, as both sole author and co-author.”
That was before “something suddenly clicked and everything was put right,” says Yan, who last year was elected a foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences and who looked back at her personal struggle with the warning that “self-doubt kills your potential”.
Then there is the pressing deadline of graduation, upon which — or even one or two years before which — important choices must be made.
“It’s academia versus industry,” says the University of Minnesota PhD candidate. He had been taking lessons in the university’s department of computer science and now envisions himself as “a programmer or a data engineer” in the near future.
“The plus side (of entering the industry) is that, first, you get paid more handsomely and, second, you spare yourself the grueling years you have to endure as you progress toward tenure — a permanent job contract with a university — and professorship.
“The competition for a teaching position with a top-rated university is white hot. Many who are eyeing such a position would have to wait out the many years in between doing postdoctoral research with various groups, hoping to build up connections in a relatively small circle. The uncertainty could be gnawing. And even if you are successful, there’s no let-up in the pressure before you gain tenure.”
Economic incentives have always played a role. Before the 2008 financial crisis, many electronic engineering-students took math lessons and switched to financial engineering, before knocking on the door of one of those financial companies on the US East Coast.
Others change majors or take additional causes simply because the number of jobs on the market is limited for what they have started with. This was especially true for Chinese biology students who came to the US a decade ago to pursue their study, with the hope of landing a job upon graduating.
This phenomenon was partly caused by an imbalance of information that seemed to exist between China and the US back then: while biology topped the wish-list for China’s brightest high-school graduates, here in the US, the front-line of biological research with some of the world’s best-known bio-companies, supply far outpaced demand.
Li the Purdue graduate acknowledges that it is a lot easier for a student to change majors in the US than in China, even at very advanced stages of learning.
“At the administrative level the mechanism is there to help those who change their mind. Moreover, the way some subjects are approached and taught in the US helps to bridge worlds that are traditionally apart, such as art and science studies.
“The study of mathematical modeling in political science allowed me to go into industrial engineering for a second master’s degree.”
Zhang Hao, a PhD student in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, agrees. “Here in the US, political science study has been greatly influenced by the introGreater duction into the area of various scientific methods. There’s a strong tendency to conduct quantitative analysis in research, which requires training in data science.”
However, Zhang says he has no intention of pursuing a career other than an academic one.
“This has a lot to do with departmental cultures. MIT ranks among the top 10 in political science study in the US, and here the professors expect you to one day become their colleague.”
Sun says that compared with an industry job or the position of a staff scientist, which he held at the Argonne National Laboratory, the professorship in a university provides the opportunity for wielding more power.
“Research done for industry inevitably has to take into account the commercial interests of the company. Consequently, most are geared toward application, ie, applied research. On the other hand, scientists at a national laboratory or university would usually dedicate a big chunk of their time and resources to basic research aimed at pushing the boundaries of science.
“Between themselves, a national laboratory scientist need not worry too much about money matters, while a university professor has the task of procuring funding to cover all expenses for the research and training of his or her PhD students, which is why he or she is called the boss. And once that is in hand, he or she enjoys broad latitude in deciding whatever research is to be carried out in the team.”
freedom always comes with greater responsibility, in the fulfillment of which personal characteristics such as charm are often as important as academic credentials.
The Princeton professor Yan, whose achievements at a relatively young age and easy grace have made her a household name in China, says that on top of academic freedom, professorship guarantees identity, without which none of her fame would have existed.
“You are your own boss, and your sense of accomplishment is fueled by your insatiable need for truth and your persistent drive to meet that need. In addition, your name in published papers entitles you to your work. With industry, you work as the member of a team and generally assume less responsibility. You may also make big contributions but are unlikely to be remembered for that.”
Fei Long, who has resorted to the graph cited at the start of this article as an illustration of his own mental journey, calls the entire experience humbling. “The more you learn, the more you are confronted with your own limitation. However, to clearly see one’s potential is one thing, and to come to terms with it is another. For anyone who had made a personal commitment to expand the scope of human knowledge, to drastically adjust one’s self-expectation and to re-prioritize within two or three years is emotionally demanding, even painful. For some, it could have repercussions for many years to come.
“But all this hasn’t stopped the Purdue years from being my fondest memories. The impact of the education I received there is enduring, seeping into every aspect of my life. Both the problem-solving method and the self-knowledge I gained during those years have allowed me to engage more meaningfully and productively with a career and the life that has followed.
“The pains I endured were growing pains, something I have learned to embrace and feel thankful for.”
And if you listen to Zhang of MIT, prolonged inner struggle is an inbuilt part of the eternal quest for knowledge.
“With science, one can only be proven totally wrong or partially right. A person without a strong, unwavering heart cannot engage for long with cutting-edge science,” he says.
While pushing consistently into the unknown requires monumental drive, to think five or 10 years ahead one also needs to sustain mighty loneliness.
“You need to get to know yourself before picking a direction,” Yan says. “Industry or academia: you’ve got to be true to yourself and feel comfortable in your own skin. When you’ve made the right decision, you just know it.”
Sun sees learning as a lifelong endeavor that is likely to be affected by the major educational and career choices one makes, but will not be terminated by any of them.
“The discovery of one’s genuine academic interest requires a long, tortuous search, during which one may falter and even get sidetracked. For those who are into serious academic study, anything short of real passion simply would not do.”
Within the first two years of his or her PhD studies a student will invariably find him or herself caught in an academic dark tunnel that needs to be negotiated, and at the end of which some will emerge a qualified PhD student. Think of it as a butterfly’s struggle to push its way through the tiny opening of the cocoon.” Sun Tao, associate professor at the University of Virginia