The true meaning behind your work

I work in a crowded lab. Seriously, we are probably the biggest research group in the department, and we only have one faculty member. Thus, my advisor turns out to be a very busy person. However, he does make sure to spend a good amount of time with each of us, and encourages us to share some of the advice he gives us to other people in the group. (I guess that’s the way in which he manages to save sometime not having to repeat the same story over and over again).

This sort of dynamic makes us a very unique group: We share a lot and have very good friendships among all of us.  

The other day, one of the most senior students was telling us about one of his discussions with our advisor, regarding someone from another university that had seek some help from our research group a couple of months back: let’s call him John. Turns out John is about to graduate with his Ph.D. this Fall, and seems to be very grateful for the help we gave him by allowing him to use some of our resources for his dissertation work. This is pretty awesome. However, the discussion between my advisor and my friend was about the amount of work that went into John’s dissertation, and the importance of his contribution to the field. Turns out, John’s work, while interesting and meaningful, is far less that what we would consider acceptable even for a previous work section of a dissertation proposal, less so, for an actual dissertation. 

So, my friend, who is probably graduating this Fall as well, came to my advisor just concerned about how there is a lot of variation between research groups, and between universities, in terms of how much work is required for you to get your doctoral degree. What my advisor said about it was really impressive, to me at least. He said he knows that he really pushes into doing lots of work, and that having him as an advisor is not easy at all. He said, that he just does that because he believes that when you go out there, to the “real” world, your work’s got to speak for you, and the fact that you went through this graduate experience in this research group in particular is going to mean something. He said that the day that he allows work like John’s to be considered enough for a dissertation, that will cheapen the experience for all of us, and that is not fair. 

True, we do complain about the amount of work and the stress that we have to go through to survive our own graduate school experience. However, what my advisor said reminded me that, in the end, people are going to look at my work and know that it actually means more than whatever degree I get for it. Or at least that’s what I want to believe.

≈ Diego ≈