Planning is to corporate world as research is to academic world

Category: Education

Let’s start this post with a question. What is the first thing that comes to your mind when I say “corporate world” and “academic world.” Let me guess, and only guess—corporate world: people with suit and ties, highly ordered, a perfectly planned and organized world, whereas academic world: students in hoodies, science geeks in lab-coats working in sterile clean labs. I always wonder why this stereotyping? After being part of an academic world for more than 7 years, I know that academic world is far more than spending life in a laboratory or reading books. Now being part of a corporate world, I know that planning and organization influence the most to run an organization. Let’s just clear this “geeks in lab-coats” stereotype. The comparison that I mentioned in the title is absolutely wrong; the tile is just wrong. Someone working in an IT firm, who absolutely had no idea what PhD is about, once asked me, “so, what exactly did you do as a PhD student?” I had to explain that person in an understandable language. I replied, “I guess in your company you have many teams, which are assigned certain tasks concerning specific aspects of the software that you are developing, and you should finish those tasks in a given period using a fixed or maybe not so fixed budget. Similarly, I worked on projects and managed all the aspects related to those projects, which in your corporate world are commonly known as market research, project development, resource management, data collection, data analysis, communication, troubleshooting, and publication. Of course, my supervisor provided me excellent guidance and I had help from lab assistants.” Hope you are getting the gist why I said that the comparison mentioned in the title is absolutely wrong. If you are a graduate student and have not thought that by the time you finish your PhD, you will be trained in “research,” “project development,” “resource management,” “data collection,” “data analysis,” “communication,” “troubleshooting,” and “publication” skills, which are usually reserved for the corporate world, then think again. When you are trying to develop an idea into a successful product, apart from investigation, planning and organizing resources are inevitable parts of that process. Whether you succeed or not, but by the end of your graduate life, you will learn these three basic skills, on which both corporate and academic worlds run. Let’s focus on the importance of investigation and planning in your graduate life. Say, I hire you as a graduate student and tell you that there is an xyz idea, which I think is feasible to develop into a thesis project. Will you manage to do it? You accept to work on it. What is the first thing you should be doing?—Research and planning. If you are relatively new to this xyz subject then, as a first step, you have to gain comprehensive knowledge concerning that subject. Understand what has been published, what is going on, and what are the unresolved problems in this field. Apply this knowledge to turn that xyz idea into a question that you can address in your thesis. Don’t forget that you are paid, well partially paid, to ask and answer two question, why and how. Communicate with your supervisor or seniors and solve doubts. Once you have a proper problem, make a plan to solve it. Discuss the plan with your supervisor, take his/her advices and make appropriate changes. Planning is not just having a flow chart on a paper and leading it to success because not necessarily all plans go according to the plan. Therefore, be ready to troubleshoot obstacles or even to deviate from the original plan to achieve the next possible goal. However, every step from developing a project till publication heavily depends on investigation and planning. Of course, you don’t have to be skilled in these areas when you start as a graduate student but a research degree is designed in way to teach and strengthen your research and planning skills. Your supervisor, specifically senior colleagues, will always guide you in the initial steps but you will have to put a lot of efforts from your side as well. Strengthen the foundation of your thesis work with thorough research and by having a strong, near flawless, and amendable plan; this will definitely lead you to success.