Last week, I talked about my reflections on defending my PhD three years ago. I thought it could be interesting to try to pick out 3 habits that I'm still using today that I learned during my PhD.
To clarify, the 3 habits I'm going to discuss today were most certainly being used by me in the past, however the unique context of doing a PhD and the sheer amount of independent work required me to hone and develop skills to a new level.
I'll be honest, it was challenging to limit this to just 3 (let's say I have more that I'll share in the future), but once I made my list of all the skills I learned during my PhD, these 3 stood out as the most important habits I picked up doing a PhD.
Habit 1: The Benefits of Collaboration
This habit is one I talk about all the time because it has had the most profound affect on me as a person and as a professional.
I thought I had always been a decent collaborator - I spent ten years working in schools prior to pursuing a PhD and thus had always been working with others.
However, the skills I learned in truly collaborating with my peers and colleagues during my PhD was unlike anything I had every done before.
To me, collaboration is defined as working with others where the process and/or the product is better than I could have done as an individual.
Collaboration, in my opinion, is required when doing a graduate degree because the work is [often] complex and the process to extrapolate meaning/purpose/a product, etc. requires other people to help question, design, interpret, and finalize. And, I believe learning is a social process and doesn't happen in isolation so the relationships built and navigated during collaboration are also important.
Rebecca Edwards, the co-host of the How To Grad School podcast, and I collaborated on 3 published manuscripts (Davis et al., 2020; Edwards et al., 2020; Mittelmeier et al., 2018) during our time in grad school together. We jokingly refer to it as our shared PhD.
I think the countless hours we have spent together taking stats classes, digging through mounds of data, writing conference proposals, presenting together, and writing manuscripts has helped us transition to working on a podcast together immensely.
My understanding of collaborating is deeper, broader, and more dynamic than it was before my PhD and it has forever changed how I view working with others.
Habit 2: Project Management Skills
My project management skills were developed and honed during my PhD in ways that I never thought possible. Project management skills, for me, are the broad range of skills that you need to see a project through from conceptualization to completion. Or in other words, how I get things done!
In some moments during my PhD, I would write down how many projects I was working on and in years 3-5 of my PhD, the average was between 7 and 9 projects at a time. I wasn't always the lead on the project, but it required me to keep track of various meetings, make sure I was doing my part, and collaborate with others to stay on track.
This also included being the lead on my biggest project - my multi-paper dissertation that comprised 3 individual research studies. Each of these research studies started off usually as conference proposals, then conference presentations, and then manuscripts.
I needed to stay on top of all of these projects while prioritizing other projects I was working on at the same time.
Another example is that I once did a consulting project in a relatively short period of time and some of the feedback I received was that I completed the project. I was a bit taken aback because it never occured to me to not finish the project, but the team I was consulting for said that sometimes projects just don't get done.
Of course, my project management skills are highly influenced by what I learned about and used self-regulated learning, and I use these skills every day post-PhD.
Habit 3: Ideas, Challenges, and Curiosity
Continuing on from habit 2, the last habit that I developed during my PhD was how to embrace ideas, challenges, and curiosity and put it into practice.
Again, pre-PhD, I had a lot of experience with these three but I think the dogged determination I had to display working on a PhD have helped me to have more ideas around challenges and the curiosity to continue to move forward.
Challenges in particular, specifically challenges that can come up during work, receive a special kind of attention now. I think it's because self-regulated learning relies on challenges so much and helps me turn them into opportunities.
By reflecting and planning when I face a challenge at work, I'm often able to come up with better more diverse ideas (both alone and with others) on how to solve problems. I'm also able to have more confidence when problem-solving because I've had to work through so many problems in the five years of my PhD.
Finally, this is also a contributor to why self-employment post-PhD was the best fit for me - I wanted to be able to pursue projects that I was curious about. I didn't want to work on projects "just because" anymore. Now, I only take projects that I want to work on and that freedom grants me so much happiness, joy, and feelings of reward when I work with a team on those challenges.
That sums up the top 3 habits I learned during my PhD. Next week, I'll tackle the not-so-great habits I'm still trying to unlearn from my PhD.
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