[tnecniv]

Building on early success isn’t even easy. I had some early success in mine but then years of stagnation until I developed enough understanding to iterate in a way that didn’t feel like a trivial waste of time.

On the other end, the suffering paid off. I’m a much better thinker and researcher for it. However, it was brutal getting there.

What I found interesting and I think is true for almost everyone is that doing a PhD is hard, but it will likely be hard for different reasons than you expect. Because of the PhD students I knew as an undergrad and their experiences, I expected to be grinding out work in lab 12 hours a day. My advisor didn’t push me that way (thankfully), and gave me a lot of freedom, but that also meant having very few training wheels and guidance (I liked him as an advisor and he cared / wanted to help as he could, but I got into topics he didn’t know much more about than I did for a long time and I just had to figure it out myself). As a result, my PhD was less of a death march but more a constant battle with existential dread stemming from the uncertainty of whether I’d ever figure things out.