Monday 17 February 2014

I've got an answer, but what's the question again?



Research is a funny thing.  When I was choosing a project they all seemed so clear and well defined, but when I started work and had the chance to look behind the curtain it became clear that my first impressions were far from correct. In fact, you could even say that it is a truth universally acknowledged that PhDs must never be a beautiful journey on the shortest path from A to B. Instead there must be detours, dead ends, unexpected discoveries and changed priorities. The biggest trick of the final thesis is to sift through the mess and pretend that you did not in fact stumble around for three years, but that everything you did was all part of the plan.

After following the bumpy, dusty path of the PhD, where do you get to when you finally reach the end? Sometimes you end up at the original destination, having taken the long way around, but there never the less. However, those that walk this road are lucky. I am petty certain I'm not going to reach my initial destination. I don't even know if that destination is in the same country as the original one anymore. I suppose on first glance that doesn't seem like big deal, things changed and you ended up somewhere else. So what? The scary thing is that all these changes happen so subtly, so imperceptibly that you wake up one day and go. Wait a second, what am I doing!? I have data, but what on earth is this? What does it mean? What is the question I'm trying to answer? It's a strange place to be in, to have results and know that they say you've accomplished something but not know what that thing is. This all leaves you wondering whether you've actually done something meaningful or just gone off on a useless tangent.

The first clue for me that I was probably going to have a different destination from 'the plan' should have been that my project had major changes to my supervisors original vision from the get go. When I was originally chatting to my now supervisor about the project we decided to throw in some Raman spectroscopy on the strength of me being a physicist, having a contact at Leeds and being enthusiastic about it. So it should be hardly surprising my ride has been a little chaotic. However, at the time I thought I had a pretty rock solid plan. We had a goal in mind; to be able to analysis what bone cells were doing while they were growing using a home built spectrometer. We originally thought the point of interest would be in going back to first principles and stripping away the post processing algorithms of the shiny machines people always use, but we were a bit left of the mark. Building a Raman spectrometer should be easy; we thought! 20mW of power, well that's a lot! We'll have a working machine in a few months. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Although Raman is probably one of the most inelegant forms of spectroscopy where you just blast a sample with a laser and see what comes back, the task is harder than you would think. The biggest barrier to doing it is that the useful signal you generate is around a billionth of the power you put in. ‘Real’ low power spectrometers rely on seriously crazy calculations to work, which just wasn’t feasible for us. So we started testing different ways to use physics to extract the tiny Raman signals (making me feel particularly lucky to be part of a lab whose main expertise is in highly precise measurements of tiny things). Eventually, after a lot of blood, sweat and tears we completed our spectrometer and we think it works. Unfortunately, that all leads to a new quandary. We made a new thing, and that's awesome, but why exactly? What's the point, what's the story? 

In my mind the question I’m now trying to answer is the following:
'Does removing computational processing and using the inbuilt physics of Raman spectroscopy improve the results you can get?' 
Will that change before I finish? Probably, but does that really matter? Do you really need to have continual reassurance that everything is going according to the original scenario you created? I don’t think so. The more I’ve thought about finding my question, the more I’ve realised it’s something I may not know until I reach the end. I’ve got lots of different aspect to my work, which all have different challenges, so as I go I’m bound to stumble across all sorts of problems and solutions. Some of the work I do might not make it into my final thesis, but without those side projects I wouldn’t have made the big breakthroughs. I’m a person who likes to see the big picture, to always know where I’m going and why, which is probably why I would in many ways much prefer to be on a well-defined PhD path. But, more and more, I’m starting to accept that my ideal path just doesn’t exist. 
A PhD isn’t one dimensional and I shouldn’t expect the route to the end of a PhD to be one dimensional either.

2 comments:

  1. This is a really useful insight into how a PhD can go. Thanks Rachel!

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    1. I just hope it was useful. It's one of those things you don't know about unless someone tells you!

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