This post was written without AI with the exception of a single grammar/spelling check at the end. I wanted to write this one myself, and I hope it resonates with others. It’s still a piece I am iterating on, and I may update it over time. I have a lot of (extisential) thoughts on this topic and I want to make sure I do it justice.

The moments leading up to my dissertation defense are distinctly burned forever into my mind. It was a beautifully chilly, crisp, late-fall day in November. I remember sitting on my couch next to my fiancée in our small two-bedroom apartment, just a few hours before we had to leave. Our life was in boxes because I had a new job lined up and we were moving in a week. I was already in my suit – specifically purchased for the occasion – my knees rapidly bouncing, my palms very clammy (no mom’s spaghetti, luckily), and I had bitten off every last morsel of fingernail I could possibly bite off. Then we got into the car and drove to the rotunda to meet my fate.

I often reflect on that moment. My nerves weren’t so much “what if I fail?” – they were moreso about the fact that this was a moment I had been building up in my mind for the better part of a decade. I had visualized nearly every aspect of it, and now, it was here – right in front of me. I knew, deep down, there wasn’t a single question my committee would ask me that I hadn’t thought of yet. There was no question about my research I had not asked myself. There was no experimental setup I had not thought about trying. There was no data point or plot I hadn’t dreamed about in my sleep. I knew every flaw, hole, and pitfall that could possibly exist in that 140-page dissertation document. I knew all of the strengths and where my research was bulletproof. I also happened to know exactly where the cracks would show if someone pushed hard enough.

I’ve often asked myself throughout the years: “what really is the point of a PhD?” Reflecting on that question post-hoc, I think the purpose of a PhD is about your ability to get yourself exactly to the point I was at just before my defense: “there isn’t anything you guys can ask me that I haven’t already asked myself.” It’s about being able to engage in exhaustive research to fully understand something — and I mean fully understand something. You should be able to get as close as possible to a point where there is no question you haven’t yet asked yourself, no flaw or hole you haven’t yet exposed, and no strength or weakness you haven’t considered. It’s the first thing you think about when you wake up and the last thing on your mind when you go to sleep.

While yes, my PhD technically made me an expert in transformer-based embedding models for single-cell ATAC-seq data, the entire process was much deeper than that. I wanted to reflect on some of these deeper lessons learned, but more importantly how I’m now learning to chew on those lessons a little differently.

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Holding onto uncertainty for as long as possible

First and foremost, my PhD made me a skeptic. I’ve learned to hold onto my uncertainty for as long as possible without collapsing into false confidence. It’s true that we more often than not don’t know how much we don’t know – and instead of rejecting that, it’s something we should embrace.

In a world of 24/7 news cycles, unsolicited medical advice from people with no medical training, and AI developments happening at the speed of light, it’s our right and our duty as scholars to use our skills to sit with uncertainty until we have sufficient evidence. Every new “you’re not gonna believe this 🤯” post on LinkedIn should be treated as unremarkable until proven otherwise. This is the very foundation of peer review.

Anything you say can and will be used against you

Something I like to say is: “if you’re going to talk about it, you gotta be about it.” If you choose to put that line plot on your presentation slide, are you also prepared to talk about it for two hours straight? Why does the x-axis start at 10 and not 0? Why was that specific reagent used? Where does it come from? Does it make sense to try another? These are questions you should be asking yourself long before anyone else does.

Once you step into the arena, there’s no going back — you must be prepared to go the distance and have the stamina to outlast any line of reasoning that might come up.

Learn to convince yourself

Perhaps the best piece of advice my advisor inadvertently gave me was: “can you convince yourself that this claim is true?”

If I cannot convince myself of a claim I’m making, I have no chance of convincing anyone else. Dostoevsky put it more bluntly: “a man who lies to himself eventually loses the ability to distinguish truth within himself at all.” We bear the burden of standing by the things we choose to say – and the only honest path to that confidence is convincing yourself first, before you walk into the room. As the seconds counted down to the start of my defense, I had long since done exactly that.

A PhD should make you feel small

The PhD process should humble you. The ability to exercise intellectual humility is difficult but necessary. The world is full of overly confident people who don’t know what they’re talking about, and the PhD process should make you realize how little you truly know — and why that’s actually a good thing. That healthy dose of skepticism is what enables you to make difficult decisions carefully and honestly. In other words, the PhD process should make you feel just a little bit small… sometimes.

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So how do we get anything done?

I’ve chosen to hold these lessons close, and they quite often serve me well. But the situation is a bit more complicated and not as clear as it may seem.

A PhD takes five years to complete on a good day. In the “real world”, we almost never have five years to collect data, analyze the literature, and test hypotheses before making a decision. As I transition out of academia and into industry, I find myself increasingly at odds with this. I was trained — masterfully, over nearly five years — to be a stone-cold academic who devours this process. I learned to hold onto uncertainty for as long as possible, to only make statements I could fully stand by, and to get there by convincing myself after collecting the right data and testing the right hypotheses. Only when I’ve achieved this, do I feel truly satiated.

But, we almost never have the time or resources to do that in “the real world”. We cannot sit in our ivory towers, crunching the numbers and waiting for our day of revelation to come. This is precisely why research universities and funding bodies like the NIH and NSF exist – we delegate those resources, and more importantly that time, to the people and questions we know are most important to reach near-complete certainty. That delegation is the very essence of what it means to be an academic, a scholar, a scientist.

The game for me has now changed – for better or for worse. I will always strive to uphold those core tenets — skepticism, rigor, intellectual honesty — but I must now do so as fast as possible, and only to the extent that makes sense for the problem and the business. That balance is something I’m still figuring out. But I think the PhD gave me the right instincts to know the difference — even when I’m moving too fast to act on them perfectly.