The pressure is real if you ask me, as you approach the last year of your college, it increases, the pressure to earn, the pressure to stand on your own, the pressure to get a ‘job’.
But I don’t want a job right now, I mean I want a job eventually, but not right now, and to be more specific, not a corporate one. It’s not like that I cannot do it, more like I don’t want to. If you would’ve asked me three years earlier, all I wanted to be was a penetration tester or a security engineer in a good company and work my way up from there to CISO or something. But that was old me. Now I know, now I understand and now I want to explore more.
You see, It’s the curiosity, that I am afraid will eventually die in the corporate world, the world full of robots, doing what they are told to do. Also, I don’t like to be limited if you know what I mean, I want to explore the domain on my terms.
The Influence
You can say that my professors have a strong influence on me and their friends who are researchers and doctorates, their professors and their professor’s professor. Do you see it? If you start tracing the people who’ve influenced me to take this path, you will find yourself in a complex web of highly professional and educated people in the world.
Getting a privilege to work with some of the great minds in the field takes a toll on you, you admire them for their knowledge and deep down want to be like them when you grow up. Or you can say, you start to look up to them as a guiding star and want to follow them.
Also, I see people who keep exploring and expand the boundaries of what we think is conceivable, they play a significant role in overall human evolution.
And also in movies, they save the scientists first because they only know how to get sh*t done, so it’s a win-win hahaha.
Why a PhD? Why academic research?
The domain.
What can I say… I love my work field, it’s significant, it’s critical, it’s complex, and it’s the future. Seriously, I can’t even imagine a single future without the need for advance and adaptive cyber defence.
Freedom.
This is imperative - Freedom.
I love how ‘I’ decide what I want to work on, ‘I’ choose how I want to do it.
I don’t like to work like a robot taking all the orders from others and I don’t certainly enjoy the typical job where you work under a person you call ‘boss’ and they work under someone else they call ‘boss’ and so on.
For the record, I have nothing against it. It’s good, and effective most of the time, just not for me.
I would rather “discuss” with my guide/professor, how should I approach the problem that I chose to work on. It’s this feeling of working together and learning stuff along the way, goes both ways.
I like to talk to people to discuss their views on the topic, I usually get surprised by the fact that how differently a problem can be solved just by talking to a person with a different mindset and point of view.
The intensity of research.
The job is not easy. research is hard, intense and needs commitment and consistency. But the result is worth it, it’s not just acceptance of your papers and praise of your poster, it’s the knowledge you gain in the process, you understand things and discover sections that 98% of people in the world don’t even know about.
Plus if you are passionate about something then it’s not a burden, it’s your daily routine. You wake up with a goal, you organise stuff accordingly, you plan for the short and long term and then you devote your time to your subject. It can be overwhelming sometimes, but never hectic or stressful in a bad way.
Overall these activities make you a better person, who learns to organise and plan everything in life, not just work and will glide through most of the ups and downs of life, just because it was all calculated and predicted.
Respect.
People respect you for your knowledge, passion and contribution as a researcher. It’s important, it gives you meaning and motivation to continue what you are doing because you know that people are supporting you, respect and peace of mind is important in any work, and I think academics and research is one of those jobs.
Opportunity to Educate and get Educated
It goes both ways, as you learn and as you grow. You, as a researcher, also learn to respect people irrespective of their status and education. If other person knows more than you, you respect their knowledge and skill and learn from them, if they are less educated, you respect their will to know things out of their comfort zone and help them learn and educate them and see their perspective on the problem as they are not blinded by existing knowledge and they can think out of the box.