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Today I will talk about the two things you need to do in order to have a very successful career as a researcher. If you do this, you can make really good money depending on which sector you do the research in, but these two things are necessary regardless of the type of work you do.

You can be a researcher and make good money if you are ok with this one thing… your project will never be completely done.

Are you ok with that?

Most people work on their assignments and brief their results at the end or what they accomplished and they are done. Not in research. In research, you have to discuss *what you have* right now. There is always more to do. There is always future work.

It is not *research* if it can be done fully in a finite amount of time and there is no future work discussion.

Are you ok with discussing what you have? Are you ok with participating in the publishing process whatever that looks like?

We do group seminars and division seminars at MIT LL, for example. But you have to be ready to discuss how the work will move forward and what caveats and assumptions it has, in what ways it is wrong. And what still needs to be done.

If you like things to be *done done*, then research will be very uncomfortable.

Research is not something that can be done in a day. Not all projects are research projects. But if it is, then it is something that should take longer.

Some things can be shorter term but that is because you scoped it out to be shorter-term, that too is part of research: to determine the scope of something. Getting good at scoping out your work is essential to a successful career as a researcher. 

Sounds like too much to worry about? It gets a lot easier with experience. I have been doing research now for 13 years and this is second nature to me. 

There are big rewards to being able to do this. You get paid to work on some of the hardest problems in the world!

If you get comfortable with this idea of your project never being done – first surviving the ordeals of this and next even thriving – then you get paid to solve some of the hardest problems in the world. That is not going to be the job description of most people, so yes, research is lonely too. But appreciating this can lead to a successful career as a researcher.

Nobody expects research to be done in a day and that is why research is done generally on a more flexible schedule and you have more freedom or autonomy – if you don’t you can move someplace where you would.

Having flexibility and never being done is the nature of things. And you can make good money depending on where you are, again, you can move to make this happen. But think about it and see if you are ok with this because after that is accomplished it can be a lifestyle.

https://youtu.be/m_NJijhYhys

Research is really a lifelong process and lifestyle, not a normal job.

A lifelong process. Are you ready to live this life though? Because nothing about this lifestyle is short-term.

Longevity is the name of the game. This brings me to the second part. You have to figure out how to deal with your demons along the way.

There are periods of time when things are going badly in research. If things were easy and you always knew what to do next, IT WOULD NOT BE RESEARCH. So yeah, sometimes it is so hard, you have to think and you have to struggle. You have to wake up knowing you don’t know how exactly to move forward with your problem, and you have to go to bed knowing you still have more troubleshooting to do. You are *never done* but sometimes this is especially true because you are stuck.

Or maybe you are mentally exhausted from living this lifestyle and need a break. The question is will you recognize this and actually take a break and hit the refresh button? This is the second part of the equation to success in research.

Will you be able to take care of yourself, the researcher? There is no research without the researcher.

You have to think of ways to take care of yourself, physically and mentally. Can you learn to take breaks? You need a life outside of research that can fulfill you in order to have a successful career as a researcher.

I have my kids who are cats, I like traveling, and I have a side hustle of content creation. Back in grad school, I used to love teaching as a side job. Why? Because research is hard. If you only do research, then you will go mad.

For more on this, read the blog post: Deprioritizing your Ph.D. is necessary when you are in “The Tunnel”

Deprioritizing your PhD is necessary when you are in “The Tunnel”

The Tunnel

Every demoralized graduate student is in a long, dark tunnel. Everyone says you should “just finish.” But you do not know exactly how long that is supposed to take.

Does it just happen at some point? Do you keep on going and going and it happens one day? For me, I didn’t know I was out of the tunnel until after my defense.

Actually, sometimes, I still feel I am in the tunnel. But that is post-dissertation stress disorder or PDSD – a topic for another book.

Not only is it a tunnel in that you cannot see the end of it, but you are also expected to have tunnel vision. You forget about the rest of the world and how there is a life beyond academia.

In other words, it is a tunnel both in terms of:

1. inducing feelings of demoralization and discouragement making it impossible to see a successful outcome, and
2. the “tunnel vision” that academia demands

It is OK to take a break for mental health during a Ph.D. and take care of yourself and put yourself first even though a Ph.D. can tend to be an all-consuming process.

You are definitely more important and your life is absolutely MORE and BIGGER than getting a Ph.D.

You have to figure out how you are going to manage yourself when the path is that of research. How you are going to manage not just your project and work, but YOU?

How are you going to keep yourself happy when (at times) you accomplish nothing in research?

In this field, we accomplish a lot, but also nothing sometimes. And we didn’t become researchers because we don’t care. So it is not going to feel very good, so what are you going to do then? You need to have your answer ready for that. And that is part of the first thing I mentioned too. These two things flow together. The never being done and what are you going to do when you feel bad? Identifying ways to take care of yourself is necessary. 

Are you ready for the emotional labor of research?

The emotional side of research is hard. And you have to deal with it. But if you do, you can be very rich or at least very well taken care of. I am not saying every researcher is rich, it depends on who needs your research. But research as a profession can yield a sustainable life – you just have to figure out how to deal with these couple of things.

Subscribe on YouTube for more content! I have a playlist there on how to get a job doing research going from academia to industry.

To read how I transitioned from academia as an international student to the US Air Force, read this blog post. As you might guess, well-paying research jobs are more likely to be found outside of academia and I do my best to make resources available in this blog that would help readers find such jobs.

From academia as an international student to the US Air Force – How it works