Article A10.2 Life of a Young Professional versus Life of a Young PhD Student Paulami Mitra IÉSEG School of Management, Lille, France and University of Lille, France p.mitra[at]ieseg.fr Published Online: March 22, 2013 Roughly 4 years back, I was completing my master’s degree. Like most of my classmates, I wanted to get a good job in a multinational firm. I wanted to earn a good salary and live in one of the capital cities of the world. About 10% of my classmates were already planning to enrol for a PhD programme. At that point of time, I never understood why a person would even consider doing a PhD. Only if a person is interested in pursuing a career in academia, it made sense to me. Otherwise, a life of a doctoral student seemed to be really sad. For instance, one gets paid a measly wage, has to bury oneself into books and journals all the time, and yet may never know when the damn PhD is going to end. Adding to the misery, a PhD takes 5 years to complete, on an average. This means that for those 5 years, one never supposedly receives a salary increase. I never considered doing a PhD, even in my wildest dreams. During that period (2008-2009), finding a job was a mammoth task due to the global financial crisis that was at its peak. I desperately started looking for one. I used to send out a big number of job applications per day. Finally I could make it to a financial institution in London. Yes, it was a dream come true! But as days passed by, as a young professional, I started reconsidering my decision. Two years into the company and I had already started questioning myself about where this was leading me. Was I really learning something? Was I serving the society for a good cause? To make matters worse, I had no freedom as my life only revolved around numerical data and achieving financial targets for my firm. I had no social life as weekends were only meant to relax and get recharged for another tough week ahead. Even the promotions that I received only added more work to my schedule while the salary increase only compensated for the inflation. Finally I decided that I needed to make a transformational change in my life. My family happily supported me in this decision too. However, I must mention here that I do not really regret working in this firm as I have always seen life as a learning process. I just wanted to move on. Today, I am just a year into my life as a PhD student and a teaching and research assistant in a small city in France. It feels like life could not have been better. Now when I ask myself those previous questions--“Where this is leading me?”; “Am I really learning something?”; “Am I serving the society for a good cause?”--I have satisfactory answers to them all. 1. Knowledge Exchange Every day when I leave the campus after work, I feel a sense of achievement. My daily activities as a research student make me feel that I am contributing towards the society at large. For the past 1 year, teaching and discussing with my students has been one of the most satisfying parts of my job. I try my best to inculcate motivational, ethical, and business skills among the younger generation. After all, it is said that teaching is a “noble” profession. 2. Career Life after a PhD can take different directions in terms of career. Having a doctoral degree can allow one to choose to be a business professional, an academic professional, or even both. Surely, the possible career paths and the window of opportunity open up a lot more. Moreover, I believe once a person reaches the stage of being a doctorate, one can find a niche and acquire the capability to initiate and manage change both in business as well as non-business settings. 3. Salary True, I do receive a measly wage compared to a young professional’s pay package. But having a PhD “student” status often avails me a few discounts while I shop, travel, or buy passes to attend a public event. I get tax benefits too. It also feels great to have freedom within defined targets and boundaries. Even though very often I need to work on week-ends for my thesis, such freedom allows me to manage my time and my tasks according to my choice. As a result, I have time to pursue my hobbies. Hence to summarise, the net benefit to a PhD student cannot be calculated unless the other aspects of his or her overall experience are taken into account. 4. Academic Travel Another attractive aspect of a PhD student’s life is what might be called paid academic travel. Students are often expected to attend national and international conferences in order to present their research or engage with others’ research work. On the contrary one might argue that conferences are really not holidays. I agree to that. But I also believe in the saying, "The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page." In a PhD scholar’s life, if one has never travelled to attend a conference to present one’s research, one has missed a very important experience. To summarise, the life of a PhD student has its moments of excitement, achievement, and fulfilment. When I started my PhD program I decided to study an area related to macro issues in organisations exploring the interaction of companies within a sector or market. As a young executive I had been a keen observer of such issues and would try to think how such transactions could be performed faster, more smoothly, and in a more economical way. I was introduced to the world of transaction-cost economics (TCE) by my present supervisors who happen to be experienced in this field. TCE has been attracting attention of prominent researchers over the past few decades due to its focus on explaining important phenomena associated with transactions when a good or service is moved across boundaries. Globalisation has increased the volume of such movements manifold and new challenges are being faced by companies engaged in global operations. In this context, analysing firms as a patchwork of various governance structures and not merely as a production system seems particularly relevant and interesting. At first I was hesitant to take up this study as I came from an academic background that was mainly related to technology. But as I delved into the topic further, I found that many aspects of the field could be interesting. More specifically, the interaction among the various modes of governance seems a particularly interesting area for me. My understanding of this field is enriched as very often I get involved in exchanging knowledge and interacting with senior researchers over a cup of coffee. In fact, my PhD curriculum officially allows me time for such intellectually stimulating debates, discussions, and meetings. Thus, every day I get a chance to accomplish and share knowledge. Additionally, TCE is an interdisciplinary field that deals with various aspects of organisation theory, strategic management, behavioural theory, contract law, and economics. An interdisciplinary field is challenging as it requires synthesis of a number of different perspectives that may seem contradictory sometimes. I feel that becoming a voracious reader of academic articles on TCE published in various journals helped me to navigate the initial stages of my PhD. I think that it is particularly important to read widely and not raise the question, “Is this going to be my topic of research?” too often. Much of what I have read at this stage may not find a place in my dissertation. But this breadth of reading has made me familiar with prominent streams of evolving research. Now I have a better understanding of the probable positioning of my work in this milieu. Currently I am in the process of narrowing down my focus and identifying an interesting niche where I can locate the topic of my dissertation. As I look forward to the future, I see a lot of hard work ahead. However, with the support of my advisors, colleagues, and family, I feel confident to complete my work successfully. I do feel enlightened by what the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: “Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” Acknowledgements I would like to thank Jacob Vakkayil and D. P. Dash for reviewing an earlier draft and making useful suggestions to improve the article. Copyleft Xavier Institute of Management, Xavier Square, Bhubaneswar 751013, India Research World (ISSN 0974-2379) http://www1.ximb.ac.in/RW.nsf/pages/Home | ||
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