Five articles about PhD students

These articles were originally posted on Quora.com and reposted without change and with permission granted for the first four on 16 August, 2022, and the last on Nov 20, 2022. They are in no particular order except that the last two articles are on a slightly different topic.


Is getting a PhD intellectually difficult?

Stephen Westland, Professor at University of Leeds (2003–present)

I have supervised a lot of PhD students over the last 25 years and currently supervise a group of 15 PhD students at the University of Leeds in UK.

I like one of the other answers that starts by saying that intelligence is neither necessary nor sufficient to obtain a PhD. Broadly speaking I agree with this. But there is a minimal level of intelligence that is required.

I know that intelligence is hard to define and even harder to measure but I have experienced a small number of PhD students who don’t seem to have the ability to understand (or maintain an understanding of) difficult concepts over a period of time.

With these students we go around in circles explaining the same ideas over and over again with little change in observed behaviour.

Some of those students have found it really hard to complete their PhD. But the level of intelligence required to obtain a PhD is not as high as one might think. And I think there are other factors that are more important in practice given that the student has that minimal level of intellectual ability required.

So let’s put intellectual ability aside and look at what else affects success assuming a student has that necessary intellectual ability. Here is my list of factors with the most important first.

Good Mental Health

I increasingly see students these days (PhD students I supervise, PhD students I observe and Masters students I observe) who have poor mental health.

It is, perhaps, the single most important factor that can make students struggle to succeed in their studies. When I was young and doing my PhD in the 80s I wasn’t aware of any poor mental health. Maybe I was looking in the wrong places. But I think it is more likely that things have changed, that life is a lot more stressful these days for many reasons, and that the prevalence of mental health problems has increased.

In my opinion, many universities need to increase the support that they offer in this important area. [Of course, physical health is also important and serious physical health problems can be really debilitating.]

GRIT

You can find lots about GRIT on the internet. In fact, it was one of my PhD students who introduced me to this idea.

GRIT is passion and perseverance for long-term and meaningful goals. Successful PhD students don’t give up. They may go through bad patches like everyone else but they have the internal resources (and perhaps the external support) to come through and keep going. They are determined and resilient.

Confidence / Resilience

Arguably this is part of GRIT. But I list it separately because it is so important.

Everyone experiences setbacks and rejections.

Some of you might have seen the professor who publicly listed all his failures (jobs he didn’t get, papers that were rejected) rather than his successes.

I have a long list of failures myself. There is a famous story (I don’t know if it is true) of the guy who founded KFC who approached many many banks for financial support for his fried-chicken business before finally getting a yes. Whether it is true or not, I like the idea of someone who keeps presenting their ideas and keeps getting rejected but each time they present they have the same confidence as on day one. I have a mug with the caption - success is the ability to go from one failure to the next without loss of enthusiasm.

You need a lot of resilience to do this which is why I list it in addition to GRIT.

Curiosity

This is my favourite attribute that I look for in PhD students and, even more so, in post-docs.

Curiosity means they always want to know more and they want to know why.

This drives them on to dig deep, for example, into their data and see things that perhaps even I cannot see. It drives them to learn new skills and constantly move forward.

I like to give the analogy of surfing (not that I can do that in real life) and always staying on the wave as technology and ideas move forward.

Curiosity also extends to asking questions about your own results and could be a factor in helping a student to change tack because sometimes that is the right thing to do.

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence helps to ensure a good relationship with your peers and with your supervisor. I have known students who become derailed because of stuff going on with their inter-personal relationships.

Work Ethic

Of course, there are times when you have to work really really hard. But it’s not 24/7. Quality is more important than quantity and it’s not how many hours you spend but what you do in those hours. But, at times, some very hard work is required. How much tends to vary with the stage of the PhD (obviously it is very intense during the writing phase).

Honesty

Honesty is important. Students need to be open when they don’t understand something and not hide this. They need to be honest with themselves too.


What do professors look for while selecting PhD students?

Ben Y. Zhao, Professor of CS @ Univ. of Chicago 2022

I thought the existing answers already covered this fairly well… But to answer the A2As, I’ll see if I can add something.

From a practical perspective, graduate admissions varies significantly across departments. Some departments have a central committee that takes fairly little input from faculty, and generates an incoming pool with the “best” students. Faculty then choose/get matched with students from that pool. Other departments have more transparency and less centralized control, where many faculty can give direct and specific input to the committee.

As for what each faculty looks for, obviously it varies quite a bit. Many don’t see grad admissions as a key priority, and they are happy to choose from the pool of incoming students once the admissions process is through. Others, including myself, actively engage in the process to try to find the best student applicant from a larger pool of submitted applications.

My personal take on specific criteria, in order from “absolutely critical” to “would be nice to have”:

  1. They have to be able to communicate. I can’t work with students who don’t/can’t share their ideas with me in a clear way. So I try to make sure that students I target can both speak their ideas (students too shy to even speak present a problem) and organize their thoughts in a clear and lucid manner (this is nontrivial for most undergraduates). Language skills are also important. Students must be able to present ideas clearly in English, regardless of their native language. Note that clearly does not mean fancy, SAT words, just clear and simple vocabulary will suffice.
  2. They are willing to learn. Often I see students who, by virtue of their past successes, have an overinflated sense of themselves. They are often very stubborn and close-minded to the point of not listening to ideas that contradict their own.
  3. They have to have something that drives them, whether you call it passion, desire, competitiveness, ambition. I want students who want a PhD badly enough that they are willing to make sacrifices as necessary. Sometimes that means skipping a weekend hiking trip to finish up a project, and sometimes it means working late into the night for a big paper deadline.
  4. Related to #2, they should not be too sensitive to failure. Lots of young adults define themselves by what they think others think of them. So failure weighs heavily on them. But every PhD has ups and downs, and no one is immune. A student who can separate failures from their self-esteem, and whose ego is not easily bruised, will do better.
  5. Students need to be able to work with others. I always work with 3–4 students on each project and our lab is very collaborative and social. Someone who has trouble getting along with others will not do well in my lab.
  6. Finally, this one is just a bonus, but a fun personality and ability to appreciate snarky jokes are great. I have a pretty dry/sarcastic sense of humor, and a PhD student who can tolerate or even enjoy it will have more fun in my lab.

What is something you want your students to know?

Ben Y. Zhao, Professor of CS @ Univ. of Chicago2022

I’m answering this in the context of my PhD students. And of course in the field of computer science. Here are some things I usually say to my first years shortly after they arrive on campus.

I want them to know:


What is the difference between great PhD students and good PhD students?

David Karger, karger@mit.edu

In short, I would say that the difference between great and good is creativity.

A Ph.D. is a certification that you are able to do research. Research (in science and engineering) is a well defined process where you formulate a hypothesis, design an experiment, assess the results, and through them evaluate the hypothesis. The process can be routinized and therefore can be learned. You can hire any “good” PhD and tell them “I need you to find out whether additive X causes cancer in rats” or “I need you to tell me which color packaging convinces people to buy the most food” or some equivalent in other fields. They’ll follow the routine process and in a few months they will give you an answer.

What distinguishes a great PhD is their creativity in finding impactful and interesting hypotheses and their creativity in coming up with effective experiments to test hypotheses that are hard to test. Any good PhD can answer questions; the great ones surprise you with the questions they ask and/or the answers that result.


What characterizes an excellent PhD thesis?

Saeed Doroudiani, saeed.doroudiani@alumni.utoronto.ca

Novelty characterizes an acceptable (excellent?) PhD thesis. A PhD research must significantly be novel and include new ideas. Most PhD candidates claim that their research subjects are new, while they are actually replicating works of other researchers with some small changes in forms and organization, contents remain almost the same. A PhD research with 90% replication of prior works and only 10% added material is not a novel one.

The other character of a good PhD thesis is having good organization.

It must be clear and concise. Presenting clearly the results of a research in a shorter document is strength of that thesis. Some PhD theses that I have reviewed clearly show that the author tried to intentionally make it longer with vague organization to mislead and confuse the reviewer, actually to trick the examiners.

The writing of the thesis must be clear and correct.

Excellent? Who knows. These are characteristics required by a PhD thesis, as I observe. The influence of a research on the related field of science and arts determines its quality. It is almost impossible to evaluate the real significance of a PhD thesis at the time of publication, but it is not hard to examine its novelty. It may take years or decades till it reveals its values and influence that can be evaluated in a typical ranking.