Is a PhD hard?

As a PhD candidate I rarely get to be social and chat with strangers. But on the rare occasions I do, I frequently hear: “Oh you’re doing a PhD, that must be hard!” Yet I have never really thought about what that actually means. That is, until now.

I recently attended a workshop on building resilience. The teacher repeated a quote: “A PhD is hard, coal mining is harder.” This might seem like a somewhat confusing statement especially when considered in conjunction with the first quote. And it begs the question: “Is a PhD hard?”

To answer this question we first need to explore two questions:

1. What is meant by hard?
2. What makes something hard?

What is meant by hard?

The two introductory quotes seem initially to be at odds with each other. However when considered together it becomes clear that ‘hard’ when referring to a PhD is often used to describe two different concepts:

• Concept 1: The challenge of understanding complex ideas.
• Concept 2: The effort (time and willpower) used to perform the task.

The second quote, which compare a PhD to coal mining use Concept 2 for hard. While the first quote, often seen in small talk, may refer to both or either concept.

Concept 1 requires a PhD candidate to be smart. While Concept 2 requires resilience. This relates to another quote from the workshop I liked: “You need to be smart to begin a PhD, but you need to be resilient to finish one.”

Now that we have a very simplistic working definition for hardness, we can get to the actual question. Is a PhD hard? This question will inevitably have to be answered in context. The context being, comparing a PhD to other jobs/activities.

Concept 1: A PhD generally requires understanding complex ideas. Compared to most other jobs/activities it ranks highly. One would usually have to look to either law, medicine or engineering to find similarly complex ideas. Thus it is hard in this sense.

Concept 2: In terms of effort things gets interesting. Anyone in any industry can ‘work hard’ in the sense that they put in a lot of effort. Indeed as noted by the workshop teacher, a coal miner probably have to put in more effort than most PhD students. But is that comparable?

To dig deeper, we will need to answer the next question.

What makes something hard?

To answer this question we will use the following premise: “The expectation to do something in timeframe makes something hard.” The expectation is a result in some form, often a completed job, report or paper. The timeframe is an important limitation. Almost any idiot can write a good report or mine a few kilos of coal if they have 10 years to do it (and doesn’t procrastinate).

Given that you know what you should do. Efficiency is what dictates how fast you do that. Thus something becomes hard if you’re not efficient and vice versa.

\[\text{Efficiency} = \text{How fast you work} \times \text{Time spent working}\]

Efficiency is dictated by this simple formula. “how fast you work” and “time spent working” are the factors which influence your efficiency. Using our two definitions for hardness: Working fast requires understanding concepts while working a lot requires resilience. Working fast is hard in the Concept 1 sense and spending a lot of time working is hard in the Concept 2 sense. This means that how fast you do your work is dependent on you being smart and resilient.

On working fast: Someone who have learned efficient ways of doing their work (e.g. by recognising patterns in their work or deliberate practice) will work faster than someone who hasn’t. Yet learning these concepts require understanding of potentially more complex ideas.

I see intelligence as an indicator for how quickly someone learns a new concept not whether someone is able to learn it at all. Thus assuming a skill ceiling and infinite time. When it comes to productivity, a smart person will learn to be efficient faster than his peers, but they will eventually catch up to his speed.

In practice everything is limited in time and the skill ceiling is at times incredibly high. Thus intelligence matters.

PhD students are generally quite intellectually capable. Therefore they should be able to adapt and learn ways of working efficiently quicker than many others.

Turning back to the question of effort. How do we compare effort of a coal miner and a PhD student? If measured in time put into the job, a PhD student has more possibilities because they have the capacity to improve the speed that they work at to a much higher extent. This increase their efficiency which in turn makes their work easier. In this sense a PhD is actually easier than coal mining job because a PhD will gradually and quickly learn how to work faster.

Many jobs have a low skill ceiling, which means that once you’ve learned the basics there is little room for improvement. This means that the only way to becoming more efficient is to put in more time. Thus the job becomes hard in the Concept 2 sense of the word.

Is a PhD hard?

Absolutely! Is it harder than coal mining? In terms of understanding complexity (Concept 1), yes. In terms of effort (Concept 2), probably no. PhDs learn how to become more efficient, which makes their work less hard.

Afterwords:

Effectiveness: There is much more to getting things done than just efficiency. (Hence the assumption in the post: ‘given that you know what you will do’). Efficiency is just a part of effectiveness. The effectiveness vs efficacy distinction is insightful and I highly recommend looking into this if it is unfamiliar. I’d recommend reading the book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” to get a proper grasp. But simply googling “effectiveness vs efficiency” is a great start.

Factors influencing what is hard: Of course there are other factors that contribute how hard any activity is. I try to kept things simple here. Here are some other factors that influence difficulty that I can think of off the top of my head:

1. Competition always makes things harder. PvP has a higher bar for success than PvE. Performance in both are necessarily upper bounded by human capabilities.
2. Personal bias. Some people are most interested in some topics than others.
3. Motivation. A multitude of factors influence motivation which is crucial for effective work.

Intelligence: I touch on the topic of intelligence. The science around intelligence is controversial and in the interest of keeping thing simple I did not want to dive into the intricacies of the topic. Nor am I qualified to do so. The reader should be aware that my understanding of intelligence and its workings is limited. This post simply makes use of what is currently my impression of intelligence.

This was written on a smartphone, in bed, a lazy Sunday morning and edited on the toilet.