08/01/2026
As I have just finished my PhD, I thought I would write about a few lessons that I learned, or perhaps sharpened, during the journey. These lessons can certainly be learned in many other places, wherever you are in your career. In my case, the PhD was an important phase where I had the opportunity to observe and learn them. Let me start with one today.
The first one is simply showing up and being resilient. Keep showing up. Keep doing the best you can.
You may struggle in a course. Even then, you keep pursuing the learning process. You may struggle with a research question, but you continue because there may be another angle to explore or another way to pivot the project. It is not uncommon to hit a roadblock, only to realize that it is pointing you toward a different route or a different question. You may face rejections in grant applications or journal submissions, but you keep going.
Courses or literature review tasks often have extremely long reading lists. I still remember wondering how anyone could possibly finish so much reading in just two days. The professor teaching the course simply said, “Read as much as you can.” I would like to carry that advice with me beyond the classroom. I can only do my best and do as much as I can. What I want to avoid is looking back and thinking, “I could have done it, but I didn’t.”
The term “success” is relative, and even by conventional standards, it sometimes takes many stars to align for everything to fall into place. I have made my peace with the fact that progress can usually be made over time, and that it compounds with consistency. It is better not to focus too much on things that are beyond our control because they only take away our peace of mind.
What we can control is whether we show up today, put in honest effort, and keep moving forward.
The rest will take its own course.
That’s it.
⸻
Even if I continue this series, I want to include one disclaimer from the beginning. I have realized that, even within the same discipline and the same field, people’s experiences can be remarkably different. Because of that, I do not want to present these as universal lessons or impose them on anyone. They are simply reflections from my own journey. That said, I do think there are a few ideas that can resonate across different experiences, even if they look different in practice.