how to get a PhD when you aren't a goal-oriented person

This afternoon I found myself in a conversation where, once again, I described myself as not terribly goal-oriented. Nearly every time this comes up people express surprise—how can I not be goal oriented and yet have a PhD—isn't that achievement only possible if one is driven to achieve a fairly major goal? The answer is that, no, that is not the only way to get that degree. Certainly many who have one are goal oriented and used that goal as the driving force for all of the work that is required, but not me.

In my case I went to University because I loved learning and had so much fun in high school that I wanted it to continue. For me there was never a question of "what kind of job will this degree get you later?", but only the question of "what cool things do I wish to study now?". The beauty of my approach is that one gets to ask that question over and over again, each time one registers for a new term, and each time the answers will be slightly different. What got me to move on from undergraduate classes to graduate school was the discovery that someone would pay me to be a student. This sounded much better than paying to spend my time learning things, so I completed my Bachelor's degree and enrolled first as a Master's student, and later as a PhD student. Once I enrolled in graduate school I did work towards completing the degree, but not because I was driven by the goal of obtaining the degree, but because when someone else is paying for my education it comes with a certain obligation of actually doing well in my classes (with the Masters) and the research (both Master's and PhD). Besides, both programs came with a limited-time offer on their funding—the rules of the game were clear—your funding runs out after a certain number of years and you have a choice—get the degree by then, or go without. I may not be goal oriented, but I do have a fairly strongly developed sense of responsibility, and if my part of the bargain for the "free" education is to complete the degree, well, yes, I do have what it takes to do it.

My Dream Location

The August Scientiae Carnival asks “what is going on in your life right now? What will be happening in six months or a year from now? What are your goals? Are you looking forward to the next year, or dreading it?”. This is a good time to be asking these questions of myself, since I have only six months remaining of my 1.5 year contract. I am starting to see jobs advertised with January start times, and have been re-vamping my CV and sending out applications and letters of enquiry. I’ve also been looking into the process of applying for funding, with the thought that while it is certainly easier to simply accept a job that is already funded, if I were to do my own funding application I would be able to work in a place of my own choosing doing a tasks that I want to do.

Where do I want to be in six months time? If I could have *everything* I want in life, I’d want to be doing research at a University located in a large town (or small city in the mountains). Someplace with a moderate to cold climate, and a winter where it not only snows, but the snow stays on the ground all winter. I’d want there to be plenty of hiking and cross-country ski trails in easy access from my home. I’d want an indoor rock-climbing gym at the Uni, located reasonably near my office. I’d want there to be a locally active branch of either the SCA or some other Medieval Reenactment organization that hosts camping events in the summer and has lots of music/singing/dancing at their winter events. I’d want my research to involve both field work and laboratory work and involve interesting metamorphic rocks that are pretty and have lots of information to convey. Does anyone know where this dream location is?

Try and try again

Over the past couple of months I’ve been doing a fair bit of travel for conferences, short course, and writing workshop. Each meeting has been inspirational; each has resulted in additions to the list of things I want to accomplish in terms of research, data analysis, and writing papers for publication. However, the time I spend out of town for each of these meetings, combined with sight-seeing and exploring each new city ± time spent with friends at each location has meant that despite my inclination towards these tasks, the actual number of hours spent engaged in accomplishing them is distressingly low.

This is partially due to the amount of time it takes to arrange the logistics of travel—booking flights, arranging accommodation, packing, etc. and to the amount of time the travel itself takes up. Alas, my computer does not lend itself to in-flight use which so many fellow travelers accomplish—my computer has a battery which holds a charge long enough to properly shut down in case of a power-failure, but not for long enough to be worth turning the computer on unless I have somewhere I can obtain a steady stream of fresh electricity to keep the computer happy. For those of us flying budget airlines, this is not yet an option on flights. Likewise, returning home from a week spent elsewhere results in many urgent small tasks that need doing promptly after my return, all of which add up to not much progress being made on the above mentioned tasks inspired by the meetings.

Fortunately, other than one short trip during the week next week to finally meet in person the people with whom I collaborated on a paper a few years back, I’ve no trips planed until the end of the month. Therefore I state publicly here before you all that my goal is to not only get my next experiment downloaded, polished and ready for my scheduled microprobe analysis next week, but to also finish up at least one of the papers in progress and send it off to my erstwhile advisor for comment before submitting it. Readers who have been following my posts for a while might feel compelled to point out that I’ve stated that particular goal hitherto, but then gotten distracted preparing for upcoming talks on my current research. It is time to try again!

Setting goals can make a huge difference.

The setting of goals can be a terribly important step in any project. Unfortunately, it is one which is often forgotten. Yesterday was one of those days wherein I encountered a minor problem in my thesis—a place where the calculations were predicting temperatures which simply aren’t a reasonable answer, which, of course, leads to the question “why”. After checking to be certain there wasn’t a problem with the data entry step of the calculations I discussed the issue with my advisor, who had some guesses as to what factors might cause such an unreasonable answer and sent me off with a couple of things to try—if they turned out they way he suggested they might, we’d have our answer as to what the problem was. Alas, those things didn’t give the expected result, leaving me with the question “now what” just as it was time for the departmental seminar to start.

So I shut down the computer, went to seminar, and went from there to an evening dance class. I went to bed secure in the knowledge that when I got up in the morning I had no place I had to be, and nothing I needed to do to prevent me from putting in many hours of uni work. However, I failed to name for myself a goal for the day—I didn’t select a specific task to be the first thing upon which I would work in the morning.

In the absence of such a goal my day when pretty much as they do when one fails to decide to do some specific task—that is to say I managed to accomplish quite a few useful housekeeping tasks and replied to a few e-mails; the usual sorts of “work avoidance” things that permit us to feel good about doing *something*, even if it isn’t the something we know that we *should* be doing. It wasn’t until after sunset, when my partner commented that he’d accomplished all of his goals for the day that I realized just *why* I’d kept thinking “I should be doing uni work” and kept picking up some other useful task instead. This epiphany having registered, I thought about what still needs to happen before I will be done with the project, and selected a simple, but necessary task, and went to it. A couple of hours later I looked up from said task, surprised to see that time had elapsed, and pleased to have reached a breaking point. Such beautiful results, from such a simple “trick” to get oneself to work!

Needless to say, my list of things I am meant to do on a daily basis (remember to eat, get some exercise, read 1000 words of geologic literature) has just been expanded by one: Decide upon goal(s) for tomorrow.