Dr. Sunil Saroj, Associate Professor a Symbiosis International University shares his perception on the right attitude towards pursuing a PhD.
What is a PhD, according to you?
If you go literally, then it is a doctor of philosophy. A lot of emphasis has to be made on the philosophy part. PhD is about gaining an overview of a particular subject. Most of the PhD topics are unidirectional and extremely focused, but the overall goal is to develop a philosophical understanding over it.
PhD also talks about the synthesis of knowledge, but before synthesising the knowledge we should also have a broad overview- how is it going to impact society? What are the deliverables? If not the immediate deliverable to the society, but in the long term how is it going to help us understand a particular process and benefit mankind?
Science is driven by observation. When we observe something, we try to question it. The question is generally ‘how’. How is this thing happening? And once we understand how it is happening, the next question is ‘why’. Why is this particular thing happening? And if we want to understand why— we need deeper knowledge. Answering ‘how’ is simple. For instance, in biological sciences, we talk about the mechanism of a particular thing. But WHY is the larger perspective. If we want to answer why, then we need an understanding of diverse fields.
If I am talking about a small part of bacteria, I need to understand the entire functioning of the cell. If I want to understand host-pathogen interaction then I should understand the host as well as the pathogen. Here we are talking only about biological forces, but there are also physical forces that play a role. For that, I require a detailed understanding of physics, chemistry, and all of those processes which are governed by the principle of mathematics; without considering all these aspects it is hard to come to a specific conclusion.
Thus, pursuing a PhD should ideally help me understand any particular question from all these diverse perspectives.
Earlier a PhD would be completed in seven years, which reduced to five years and now it has reduced to three. It is understandable that people want to progress quickly in their careers. Hence, the research topics or the research questions are highly focused nowadays. But it does not mean, we should be leaving the ‘why’ part. We need to understand, why a particular thing is happening, or else there is not much difference in a PhD and a MSc dissertation project. MSc students do a research project for a short period and we do not expect them to answer something called ‘why’. But when it comes to PhD, if we are not able to answer the ‘why’ then PhD is just an extended MSc dissertation project.
To conclude, while pursuing a PhD, a person must be able to answer ‘why’ in addition to the ‘how’ and that is one way to develop the philosophy around science.
