Reasons Why I Want a PhD

Note

This was originally written back in December 2021, when I was starting to journal on my iPad Notes app to help channel my anxieties. I largely have kept the same beliefs, so I think it may be useful to just type this out here.

Industry

I’ve done industry in a work environment that was mostly healthy and safe. It was a software engineering job at a patient billing company where I worked to send out bills to patients. This sounds fairly simple, but is actually a very complicated job that involves both healthcare and financial regulations. To top it off, our software had to interface and communicate to multiple hospital systems, each running separate versions of Epic or Cerner or their own homegrown monstrosities.

It was fairly nice and challenging, but I realized for myself that the constant trickle of small tasks with immediate feedback was not really my best workflow. It was too easy to get lost in finishing the next task and moving tasks to the ‘Done’ column on the Kanban board (see the Silicon Valley clip). The constant drip of dopamine from completing the next task is too addictive for me, especially when in industry the tasks are often expected to succeed. It would make sense, after all, never to ask your employees to work on a task that has a good chance of actually failing; there is an expectation you deliver, and a company based off shakey premises usually fail.

I wanted to go for the struggle in science to find research and truths which are truly unique and that nobody else in the world has found yet. I want to work on techniques and hypotheses that have a real chance of failing to find anything, and to try stuff that other people haven’t tried before.

Sharing knowledge

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed amazing heroes who helped saved millions through innovative designs and science. Chief among these wonderful scientists is Kati Kariko, who helped design much of the basis for the technology that mRNA vaccines are built off of. Her work was amazing and clever and despite being ignored for years has paid off handsomely.

In contrast, I remember working in industry. Most of my work was, by design, proprietary to the company, as it should be. Much of it was scaffolding that most folks would consider boring. However, I did make a few interesting bits of code, alongside my coworkers, that I thought were innovative, like a new way to make PDFs render faster in VueJS. None of this will ever really be able to see the light of day. I understand our work probably would not be useful to most folks anyways, but the chance that it could have helped others but may never will does hurt my heart.

I don’t know, if I should pursue academia all the way, that I will ever gain recognition or become famous. I don’t know if I’ll ever do anything worthy of fame. But I do know Isaac Newtons’ apocryphal remark “I stand on the shoulders of giants”. I think I would be quite happy if I were to help be a part of those shoulders and help someone else make a discovery.

Missing the openness of research

I missed having done research and doing the free form discovery of new datasets. I missed being able to structure the chaos into order. I loved learning about new ways to interpret data and make a story with it, and then finding ways to probe the story and tear it down. I missed creating interesting experiments and testing it out in new ways.