The Third Annual State of the PhD Address

Last year, I had exciting news: I passed my comprehensive exams and officially became a PhD candidate.

This year, I have… less marketable content. No major milestones. No Nobel Prize. No surprise email from Harvard asking if I can start next week.

Naturally, I assume the academic community has spent the past twelve months eagerly awaiting my annual update. My fellow PhD students and applicants have been unable to make life decisions without first knowing how my third year went. In the interest of advancing both science and humanity, here we go.

Research: Rejection, Rejection, Then Somehow an R&R

A few years ago I imagined rejection would be emotionally devastating. Instead, I mostly thought: okay, now what?

For one paper, we revised and resubmitted within three months. Then we waited another three months. And then something unexpected happened. I received my first-ever R&R, and it was for my first-author paper. This was one of those moments I had been imagining for three years. I expected fireworks. I expected overwhelming excitement. I expected to frame the decision letter.

My first reaction was: The AE saw something in this paper. Thank you. I am forever indebted to you and your descendants. My second reaction was: Wow. That’s a lot of work. Don’t get me wrong. I’m incredibly happy. But an R&R is a strange achievement. It feels less like crossing a finish line and more like discovering there is another mountain behind the mountain. Still, I’ll take it.

Research, Part II: Apparently I'm Qualified to Judge Other People's Work

This year I also reviewed for a top journal for the first time. The paper’s topic was unique and oddly specific. When an AE receives a paper on a specific topic and immediately knows who should review it (and that person turns out to be you), it is both strangely flattering and mildly concerning.

Being a reviewer was also an educational experience. I pointed out an issue and suggested a way the authors could address it. Then I had an uncomfortable realization. I hadn’t done it either. In. My. Own. Paper. Nothing motivates methodological rigor quite like accidentally reviewing yourself. I immediately opened my working paper and started making revisions.

The review process also gave me a new appreciation for AEs. After spending hours thinking through the paper, writing detailed comments, and trying to balance being critical with being helpful, I realized that an AE has to do that for multiple reviewers at once, make sense of conflicting recommendations, and somehow arrive at a fair decision. Looking back, I probably wrote far more than necessary. There is definitely an art to writing reviews that are constructive, concise, and useful. I’m still learning.

Teaching: They Let Me Teach Strategy

One of the highlights of my third year was teaching Strategy for the first time.

The funny part is that it’s the same textbook I used when I was doing my MBA at Georgia Tech. Even funnier, the author is a Georgia Tech strategy professor. Life really comes full circle. First I paid money for that textbook. Now I’m assigning chapters from it. This feels like a highly efficient business model.

I plan to write a separate post next year about teaching as a PhD student. That is, of course, assuming I continue receiving decent teaching evaluations. Otherwise, I will pretend this year never happened and remove all evidence from the internet so I don’t embarrass myself.

So What Did I Actually Accomplish?

If you measure PhD progress by major milestones, Year 3 doesn’t look particularly impressive. I handled rejections without panicking, earned my first R&R as first author, reviewed for a top journal, and taught a new course. None of these come with ceremonies (although my lovely coauthor did take me out to celebrate the R&R. She had shrimp and grits. I had a burger with collard greens. For reasons I cannot explain, this is the detail my brain decided to preserve.)

I suspect this is what much of my academic life will look like: slow progress, incremental improvement, and occasional moments of realizing I have no idea what I’m doing.

So that’s Year 3. No dramatic milestone. Just becoming a little more like an academic than I was a year ago.