What do you do as a PhD student?

One might wonder just what we do for PhD research. This old post of mine (from facebook, actually) sums up part of the process quite well, writing from the perspective of a later-stage PhD student in the middle of my field research in London.

What do you do as a PhD student in economic sociology?

December 16, 2008 at 10:34pm

Today, I'm going through MA dissertations in the library of the Sotheby's Institute in London. I've been interviewing people about art as an investment, but found that you can look at the dissertations here and they had 22 (!) that were listed under art as an investment. I've been writing a lot of papers and grant proposals, which is really never going to stop throughout my career as an academic. (Luckily, I enjoy it and I'm getting better at it!) I had a nice time attending the LSE Accounting department workshop, which is run by Peter Miller and Mike Power. In January I'll be attending a workshop on value and calculation at Goldsmith's College, of course doing more interviews, as well as research at the V&A National Arts Library and the British Library.

The difference between being in school and being a PhD student is the role of your research and the way you work with other people. The research changes from projects that you do and turn in, to projects that you do and then publish work about. There's a tricky balance to navigate between owning your work and being so personally connected to it that you can't let it go. You have to have a thick skin to be a successful academic- people can and will make very critical comments. That's just the nature of the game, and that is part of what keeps social science rigorous. Not to mention that these same comments also make your research better, as you think about and incorporate the various critiques. Of course, I also like teaching quite a bit, so it would be nice to get a balance of both.

The other part of the equation is that you become part of an academic community. I think I came to that a bit late, avoiding conferences in my first couple of years, but then I realized how helpful this community of scholars can be. You can get great advice and suggestions from people that are doing research close to your own, as well as those with research that is farther away. Also, this is part of how you get a job. (I'm thinking about this because I will go on the job market in Fall 2009.) The academic job market is quite far from a transparent system- there are a lot of politics with the hiring and search committees, although I'm not going to say this is inefficient, because part of what is going on is that each department has a different institutional culture, and they want someone who will be a good fit, in addition to doing good research. If they like you and you get along with people in a department, that can be a good indicator of whether you'll do well there. (And having seen a couple of professors be miserable at Chicago, I'm quite aware of the problems that can occur when there's a bad fit.)

Anyway, back to the research.