Put Philosophy back in Ph.D.

 

Most Ph.D. graduates in their job interviews are asked what set of skills do they have? How many programming language do they know? How many publications do they have? and so on. Yeah, it is totally important to have the required set of skills to get a job or accomplish a project, you definitely need it. But as a Ph.D. holder, and especially as a researcher I believe there is one more essential trait you need to have, the ability to think logically and creatively. Coz, research is not only about how to implement an idea or execute a program, but also more about how you generate ideas and how logically they are correct. Reading other’s research paper should not only motivate you to reproduce their work, but it should also motivate you to think how they have thought, why they have come up with that idea. So, having a thought-process where you can actually read the mindset of researcher is more important, I think so.

Ph.D. though is an official degree, it is not like a graduate degree where you get the degree after passing some evaluation exam, Ph.D. is about evaluating your thoughts and how you process your thought. In undergrad level, you learn skills you memorize stuffs, and you try to reproduce other’s work. That’s fine and that’s essential too, you first need to know how to swim before you teach other to swim, so skill is totally essential. However, people are making Ph.D. like other diplomas, they are learning some set of skills, producing results and paper and getting degree, which is not a wrong track but still misses the soul of having Ph.D. Personally I think, in Ph.D. we unlearn most of our knowledge and focus on a micro-truth, we start doubting what we have learnt before, and begin our journey of independent learning. Like someone said, “After Bachelor’s we think we know lot of stuffs, after master’s we kind of get confused whether we actually know or not then I Ph.D. we become sure that we don’t know anything”, literally speaking we might know something, but we come to know that there are lots of confusion in what we learn. Actually, the more we keep on understanding the theories, the more confused we become, coz with more knowledge we get, we will stumble upon more and more queries and finally we will reach the point where the most authors and thinker don’t reach up to, more and more dimensions keep on opening, and the journey to truth becomes endless, though at making points we keep on reaching many milestone. It’s because there is no absolute truth, truth today will someday need to be modified relatively with time, and the only thing that doesn’t change is change. Many great thinkers and researchers’ idea need to be changed or modified for good, and the fitness of this good is very relative. ‘Atom was one day the smallest particle but not today, and black holes were not real few years back’, here I didn’t mean we should not believe in what we have achieved today, we need, we should, and we must. Science means to know something, so finding truth is baton-rally, we are here to contribute what we know today, what we can do today and what we can think till today. In the end, all is about the memory we will have, based on what we could find today.

So, in broader sense, we need to have all required skills to implement our idea, but it’s the idea and thought that makes how reliable, robust and accurate experiments we are going to produce. We can learn a certification course, a mathematics equations but more important is to have a creative mind. It’s like the soul of research, and rest of the experience and skill is the physical form of research.

Lastly congratulation on completion of your formal academic journey, having Ph.D. is the best in achievement in academic life, it’s great to be a philosopher, and one with an official one makes better.