Will I feel competent as a researcher after my dissertation?

[hejduk]

I hate to be a Debby Downer, but I'm just not feeling quite up to snuff. While I've taken all my required (and additional) research methods and theory courses, I can't help but feel like I'm not a competent researcher yet. Being in the social sciences doesn't seem to help either, as all my term papers are conceptual work with no original empirical work done. 

 

Is this normal to feel this way? Just huge self-doubt with my exams pending? Or will I feel more competent as I work through my dissertation and really get to investigate something I'm excited about?

 

Ugh. Hate feeling like I need more classes or that I'm not ready for the big leagues!

[juilletmercredi]

I'm ABD (today officially, yay!) so obviously I haven't finished my dissertation yet.  But it's my impression that you THINK you're supposed to feel competent after the coursework, and when it's over you're always scared to death.  "OMG, I don't really know anything about being an independent researcher!"  That's very very normal.

 

Truth be told, the coursework isn't meant to make you into an independent researcher.  It's only there to lay the groundwork.  I felt more confident after I finished taking my exams, and then even more confident after I got pretty deep into my proposal.  BUt also doing independent projects with my advisor added to that confidence.  It's also my thought that you don't feel fully 100% confident even after your dissertation is over - you still build in waves during your postdoc and/or during the first years of your professor position (I have gleaned this from observing my advisor, an assistant professor who had just finished year 2 when I arrived).

 

I definitely feel more confident now after my exams.  I don't feel like a fully-fledged researcher, but I feel like I c ould at least figure it out on my own.  You don't need more classes; most of the stuff you need to learn, you can teach yourself.  Your exams teach you how to do that!

[Sigaba]

Focus on your exams now. Worry about your dissertation after you pass.

(To answer your question, though, if you pick your topic wisely--and I did not--you may be able to "reverse engineer" existing works, especially cutting edge monographs and dissertations. Also, search engines like Google are very powerful tools. If you figure out the right four words,you can find almost any thing or any one.)

But that's down the line. Focus on your exams. The process will do a number on you. You don't need more things to stress you out right now.

[Eigen]

http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,134907.0.html

A relevant thread.

I know how much my confidence and abilities as a researcher have improved in the last few years, and I still feel completely lost a great deal of the time.

Talking to friends who are post docs and TT faculty, I don't think the feeling ever really goes away, because you stay acutely aware of all the stuff you don't know.

[fuzzylogician]

Finishing my coursework felt important in terms of my progress in my program, but not really in terms of feeling like an independent researcher. Same for defending two qualifying papers - they were the products of projects that were started very early in my career and working on them made me feel like I know more and less at the same time. Working on the first few projects and papers, I think I needed more guidance and had less of a good feel for my progress. Somewhere along the way, though, I somehow acquired quite a good sense for things like time estimates for projects, identifying choice points and making informed decisions, academic writing that will appeal to readers, and potential outcomes/pitfalls of my work. I don't know when it happened, but now I can do a lot more and be confident about it, without needing to ask for advice, or rather update my advisor about what I did instead of asking for his advice about what to do. And then recently there appeared new aspects where I am completely clueless and depend on my advisors for advice rather fully--for anything having to do with the job market. I assume and hope that I'll learn more about that process and improve over time, too.

 

Generally, though, I think this feeling of (in)competence comes and goes in waves. You face a new challenge or you're not yet able to do something, you're insecure but you go on, then slowly you figure that stuff out and feel good about yourself, then you encounter the next challenge and are insecure again, you work at it and figure it out too, and so on. There's a lot of that both during the PhD process and after it, as a young post-doc or professor. You always learn on the job and there is usually not a lot of training that is geared towards the psychological/mental aspect of being a researcher/professor, especially when you compare it to the kind of advising you get for the professional aspects of it. So that's a thing many people deal with alone but don't talk about, and for whatever reason everybody assumes that they're the only ones having these thoughts and difficulties. I really like this TED talk by Uri Alon about "the cloud" that deals precisely with this issue (and the fact that we don't even have a good name for it, let alone talk about it freely).