How my PhD program has changed me

I started my PhD program with lots of energy. I loved my topic, I felt that I was going to learn a lot, my workmates were warm and welcoming; everything was great! But all of that is gone now.

I learned a lot over this time, yes, but nothing technical. I learned how to defend my ideas and how to organize myself. One of my supervisors moved overseas in my second year and I was left with a supervisor who was a mess with his classes, his company, and his graduate students. As a consequence, he lost the idea of what my research was about and I have been supervising myself for a long time now. My warm workmates were not as kind as I thought they were and I have seen how they have stabbed each other in the backs and tried to make others fail. After a couple of years, I found myself completely alone and fighting for survival.

Regardless of what many people might think, universities are one of the most politicized entities, and I always despised politics at the workplace. I learned how to be careful when talking to people because you don’t know who that person is friends with and how saying certain things will play for or against you. I learned my lessons from past mistakes and now I feel I am always hiding something when I speak. It’s not who I am.

Before I started my program, I loved to go out, have a drink with friends, and enjoy good company. Now, I love to be by myself at home, relax, and stay away from the world. I feel I need to breathe the calm of just being alone because my everyday life feels chaotic and dark. Now, I only see my friends once every few months and I only speak with my friends back home twice a year. I have become the opposite of who I was and I don’t feel comfortable with it.

A PhD program has taken everything from me: my time, my energy, my motivation, and even some friendships. I am not the person who I used to be and I am not saying this as if I were regretting it. Quite the opposite… I feel I am growing a lot as a person by working hard on my own goals.

There are many other things that I didn’t mention such as how difficult it is to accept and learn from feedback, but I will write about my experience on that in another post.

Oihane Cereceda is a PhD student in Engineering. This story was published on April 25, 2018, on Oihane’s blog, My story in a blog (available here), and has been republished here with permission.