Being a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar

Efficiency vs. Effectiveness: Reflecting about Academic Research in the Social Sciences

I am a doctoral student in social sciences. I am working on social networks and innovation in the U.S. snowsports industries. During the last months, I have met quite a number of PhD students from both the US and Europe, whom I have been able to talk about the sense and non-sense of being a PhD students.

We came to the following conclusions
(1) Life as a researcher is great, although the boundaries between working day, weekends, holidays are extremly blurred. One simply never stops thinking about research. When reading a "normal" book, one tends to think like "I should have read this last scientific article instead"
(2) Life as a researcher is also frustrating, because you spend hours, days, and even weeks on a single argument in a paper. The odds of changing the world with this argument are very minuscule, because researchers always think in terms of "incremental contributions".
(3) It often happens that after 2 months of work you find that your argument does not work, because in the 115th paper your read somebody showed why it cannot work. So you come to the conclusion that your work was "for nothing".

However, although we all went through tremendous "ups" and "downs", we are happy to be researchers. But we are also very much looking forward to the moment, when we'll have the PhD certificate in our hands.

Any thougths?

posted by Thomas Langenberg @ 3:09 PM