It goes without saying: A review
Over the last five years I have told countless students not to do a PhD. After reading this book I may have to change my strategy.
Over the last five years I have told countless students not to do a PhD. The reasons are many, including low salaries, stressful work conditions and poor prospects of becoming a professor. Despite all this, some students still want to join my lab. To those I say: Read Prof. Caroline Boudoux’ book “It goes without saying”!
Caroline is a colleague at Polytechnique who has been mentoring engineering PhDs for over a decade. She is a successful professor, enterpreneur, and a role model to generations of students at Poly. Most importanly, she has a positive outlook on academia. For each of my reasons not to enroll in a doctorate, she has a nuanced and thorough chapter addressing the issue and explaining ways to get around it. If I had to summarize her perspective in one sentence, it is that setting expectations is the most important part of doing a PhD. So let’s see how she addresses my three most common arguments against the PhD.
Right off the bat, on page 3, she shows that the cumulative earnings of a PhD overtake the earnings of technicians and engineers 20-30 years after high-school graduation. Not great, because these 20-30 years are full of opportunity costs (imagine investing in Nvidia or bitcoin instead of paying your tuition), but good enough for the pleasure delayers. She dedicates an entire chapter to the PhD after-life and while she acknowledges that very few of the students will become professors, she also shows the variety of careers that benefit from a PhD. Caroline’s main argument is that a PhD trains you to internalize original and independent thinking, and this pays off in spades in the long run. Finally, she wraps the book up with a series of advice on how to navigate the stressful environment where lines between mentorship, competition and friendship are often blurred.
Most importantly, she manages to do this without alienating cynics like myself. She says that PhDs come in all shapes and sizes and debunks the myth that you need three peer-reviewed papers to graduate (I didn’t). She realizes that work always expands to fill the time you allow it (Parkinson’s law), and knows that excellence in one topic requires mediocrity in other aspects of your work. Finally, she recognizes that one cannot do a PhD without entering a flow state, where ambitions, curiosity and inner voices do not matter. It is all about playing to your strengths and being absorbed in your work.
I found part 1 (Doctoral strategies) and part 3 (Tools of the trade) to be remarkably close to my perspectives on academia. Part 2 (Leading a research project) was the one where Caroline and I disagree the most. Her approach to a PhD is methodical, mine is chaotic. Hers requires knowledge of MBA terminology, mine avoids anything that has the words Gantt, SWOT, f2s, TRL, RDI and WBS in them. While being organized is important, I believe that part 2 is a little too structured and makes it sound like the biggest portion of a PhD is planning. She even cites Louis Pasteur who said that chance favors the prepared mind, but I doubt that Pasteur spent his time drawing Gantt charts. The biggest discoveries in the history of humanity happened because of a FAFO approach, and I don’t think Caroline gives this approach enough credit.
The book has a unique visual language. Obviously inspired by the Piled Higher And Deeper PhD comic, Caroline’s cartoons have wit and wisdom. The schematics on the other hand are a little too busy, and the font choice makes it difficult to read them. I would have preferred more cartoons and less charts, but maybe that is just a consequence of my disorganized approach to research.
Finally, a word or two about things that are missing from the book. The book gives excellent advice on how to write a paper/thesis, but it does not address reviewing articles and responding to peer-review. It also does not spend enough time on the DORA principles, nor to the concepts of sharing data and code to make research reproducible (p. 89 maybe?). Finally, it only tells half the story of networking, ignoring how important name recognition is. Having a well-cited mentor correlates with your academic success, and while it may not be a causal relationship, choosing a mentor based on prestige may give you an upper hand.
All of these are minor complaints about a well-written and insightful book. I always thought I can explain a PhD to a student in a single meeting, so it came as no surprise that after that meeting most students would never want to do a PhD. I never thought that I have internalized 300+ pages that go without saying, and many of those pages actually make a good argument for sticking around. Thank you Caroline for finding my blind spot and for giving my potential PhD students a new required reading.
P.S. If you would like to join a discussion with Caroline Boudoux about her book, I will be talking to her about it today (Friday the 13th) at 2pm Eastern time. Below is a Zoom link, available to our paid subscribers: