In a cou­ple of months, I’ll be start­ing my PhD at UC Berkeley School of In­for­ma­tion. The whole grad school ap­pli­ca­tion process was a wild ride, and some­thing I’d like to write more about in the fu­ture, but for now, I’d like to write a bit about my mo­ti­va­tions for de­cid­ing to do a PhD in the first place.

Hedges (and ac­knowl­edg­ing the au­di­ence (that’s you!))

If you’re con­sid­er­ing ap­ply­ing to grad schools, please don’t take this post as any­thing other than my own thoughts as I nav­i­gated this de­ci­sion. If you re­late to them, that’s great! Maybe you should do a PhD. Maybe nei­ther of us should (whoops).

If you are some­one who has done a PhD in the past (or are in the mid­dle of one right now), I’m not sure why you’re read­ing this, but if it re­minds you of your own mo­ti­va­tions, that’s great! If it does­n’t… Different strokes for dif­fer­ent folks, I guess.

If you are me from the fu­ture, hi! I hope things are go­ing well, and if they’re not and you’re re­ally doubt­ing me for sign­ing you up for this, here is why I (you (we)) de­cided to do it in the first place.

Anyway, I de­cided to do a PhD be­cause…

…I’d like to sat­isfy my cu­rios­ity.

I be­came in­ter­ested in do­ing re­search in un­der­grad be­cause I read a pa­per I really liked. It was the first time I en­joyed read­ing a re­search pa­per, and that made me re­al­ize that there’s sci­en­tific re­search hap­pen­ing that I’m actually in­ter­ested in.

I would like to read more of those types of pa­pers. I would like to read more pa­pers full of other peo­ple’s in­ter­est­ing ideas, but there are also pa­pers I would like to read that test my per­sonal hy­pothe­ses about the world. Because I don’t have the re­sources to fund my own re­search lab and tell peo­ple to write those pa­pers, it seems the next eas­i­est thing to do is to tell my­self to write those pa­pers. So that then I can read them.

…I want to get bet­ter at re­search.

The flaw in the above plan is that I’m not very good at writ­ing pa­pers right now, so I need to get some prac­tice op­er­a­tional­iz­ing re­search ideas, writ­ing code, syn­the­siz­ing lit­er­a­ture, (and writ­ing pa­pers). If only there were some kind of ed­u­ca­tional in­sti­tu­tion in which I could prac­tice con­duct­ing re­search.

…the al­ter­na­tives weren’t as ap­peal­ing.

I’ve also done soft­ware en­gi­neer­ing and data jour­nal­ism in­tern­ships.

I was­n’t that thrilled with my SWE ex­pe­ri­ence: the work was some­times in­ter­est­ing, but I missed hav­ing a sense of own­er­ship over what I was do­ing. In my re­search ex­pe­ri­ence, I owned my work, and I liked that feel­ing. The flip side is that there’s less of a men­tal safety net — fail­ures feel more per­sonal. There’s a con­stant pres­sure to be pro­duc­tive be­cause if you’re not work­ing on your pro­ject, it’s not like some­one else in the org will be. But to ex­pe­ri­ence higher highs, it makes sense you have to also take the lower lows, and it was a great feel­ing to see my name on a pub­lished pa­per.

I’ll write more about data jour­nal­ism in the fu­ture prob­a­bly — I worked on the data graph­ics at NBC News Digital for a se­mes­ter. It was a gen­er­ally fan­tas­tic ex­pe­ri­ence, but I felt two frus­tra­tions: 1) you have to work on the news, which is­n’t al­ways nec­es­sar­ily what you’re in­ter­ested in and 2) it’s a big­ger ask to use some more ad­vanced method­olo­gies be­cause it’ll both take more time and be harder to ex­plain to read­ers.

…why not?

Finally, it’s just some­thing I’d like to do. Why do we climb moun­tains or run marathons or set out to do any­thing at all? There are mo­ments where you’ll feel great, for sure, but also plenty of pretty ter­ri­ble mo­ments. But I think any mean­ing­ful ex­pe­ri­ence has good parts and bad parts. On bal­ance, hav­ing done a PhD will prob­a­bly make me a more im­proved per­son, so it seems like there’s not much rea­son not to do one if I, for what­ever ar­bi­trary rea­son, just want to.

If life is just a col­lec­tion of ex­pe­ri­ences, then this is an ex­pe­ri­ence I’d like to col­lect.

PS

I did the nested par­en­thet­i­cals a cou­ple of times in this post. I think I like it. I hope it did­n’t bother you too much.