PhD- Two Months Report

It has been two months since I started my PhD. Well two-ish. So why did I put a title called two-months report? Because I should’ve written this blog post a week ago when it was actually two months.

PhD is teaching me something new every single day. It is teaching me that all the knowledge I learned till this very day was just the tip of the iceberg. There is a whole bunch hidden under the sea. There's so much out there to learn. I am telling myself these words every single day: man, I need to study more.

But it's not just that.

I always thought PhD consist of reading and writing. Well, that's easy: I love reading and I love writing. So what’s to worry? I just never realized that I was skipping whole thinking part. And yes, that thinking process is pretty much the core of your PhD. You have to build a project, like from the zero. And you have to choose every brick very carefully. I have never thought it’s gonna be this difficult. I was a very creative kid. But, not anymore. I could really use that creativity right now.

So how is my PhD going?

It’s like a long nature walk on a beautiful path with a very nice person who is gently leading the way. But there are hills and holes everywhere and it's always raining.

I am not gonna talk about “doing a PhD is so hard in the middle of the pandemic”. Because I think PhD is more or less a solo trip. Of course, you can’t travel freely, meet your friends and attend in-person events due to the pandemic. But apart from that, you’re supposed to sit and type alone anyway whether there's a pandemic or not.

I consider myself one of the luckiest as a PhD student, from lots of points. Everything in my PhD is just like I imagined or even better. The most difficult thing to accept for me is that I cannot learn everything in one day. That doesn't mean that I study constantly. It means that there’s this idea in my head that I should be studying all the time. So when I give myself the whole weekend off, I feel like I am cheating. But I am working on balancing between work and social life.

Things that work for me right now are: taking long relaxing nature walks, finding good playlists and discovering delicious snacks for the late-night studying. Since it is not very complicated for me yet, my needs are fairly simple. But as time goes, I may come up with new updates.

2/36 is done.