How to finish your PhD.
Tip #1 – Love your work
I have often been asked for tips on how to finish a PhD on time. I submitted my PhD in 2013 in a little less than four years of registering for it. I studied along with a full time job. Since then, I have never really sat down to think about how I managed to submit on time. Here, I am part reflecting, part summarising, what helped me with my PhD. This is in the vague hope that it will help many of my friends who are struggling with organising PhD work. I am writing this as a series of blog posts that I will keep writing on the go.
My first suggestion is to choose an area of research that you love. Often I have seen people take up a PhD when they felt it was the right time in their career. In the absence of research questions that they really want answered, they ended up choosing areas of work that suited the supervisor they wished to work with, or provided them better job possibilities. This, although sometimes becomes necessary, I personally believe, is a blunder. A research work is not like any other assignment. If you don’t love the research area, are not truly intrigued by the unanswered questions, you would be spending four years, at least, in reading, writing, learning about things that you don’t care about. This means that you have to force yourself to read rather than truly wanting to read, explore, learn. I loved what I was researching and was truly intrigued by what was written in it and what still needed to be found. At the end of the day, when I was absolutely exhausted, my work was refreshing. I remember days when I would feel that “it is too late in the day. I still have to prepare for tomorrow’s lectures. Today is not the day for a PhD reading.” And then I would pick up a book or an article and be so engrossed in it that I would have to force myself to put it down, lest I end up with a sleepless night. While I didn’t realise it at the time, when I look back now, I feel that this helped me to be constantly working. And that contributed to finishing my research on time.