I am extremely proud of my personal growth during the last years, and my PhD experience has a lot to do about it. But, as a disclaimer, I don’t recommend it to everyone!
In a nutshell, I joined the chaos and had the impostor syndrome. I developed game-changer habits and absorbed the knowledge from experts. I fought countless problems while questioning my motivation. I took shortcuts and hit the wall every… single… time. I started to slow down in order to go fast. I became obsessed and kept running towards the goals. I delegated projects and collected more rewards than expected. I networked in foreign countries and published in prestigious journals. Overall, this marathon-long roller coaster has shaped my mind to be fearless and have hunger for impossible challenges.
However, I am aware that it’s always easier to look back. It’s funny how, over time, our brain smoothes out sufferings and keeps the positive emotions. This is why, this post is a quick glance of the ups and, most importantly, the downs of my doctorate journey. Hopefully, it provides useful insights for current or future PhD candidates.
The first time I stepped inside Institut Néel (Grenoble, France) was back in 2017 for my master internship. Having zero experience in cryogenics (temperatures below 4K), my first thought in the lab was: “oh… what a chaotic place…”. If you look at the photos below, you may grasp the idea. Weird-looking instruments, wild-hanging cables and unlabeled valves. I couldn’t recognize any order, and thus my anxiety-meter started to rise.
From the very first day, I was flooded by countless unfamiliar concepts such as 2D electron gas, helium mixture or stability diagram. I felt like a fish in space: absolutely no idea what I was doing and why I was there.
I was overwhelmed and a bit stressed. To calm myself, I started a habit that turned out to be a game changer even for my personal life: compulsive note-taking.
Taking notes is not only for storing and organizing information. It actually plays a key role to digest ideas due to the simple fact of consciously writing down concepts with one’s own wording. Digital or paper, it doesn’t really matter. I prefer, however, the former because it can be accessed from anywhere and at any time while having minimal risk of losing its content.
As an example, you can see below a snapshot of a daily task log from my OneNote. Up to date, this is still the first thing I do every morning (even before the coffee!). In 5 min, I write down the priority tasks for the day. They have to be specific and fast to execute. Trust me, our brains just love whenever we check a box!
The one thing that any PhD student can relate is that unexpected problems happen all the time. On top of the already challenging research objective and tight schedule, we must allocate extra time to solve apparently endless technical issues.
Let me give you a personal example that delayed my work for several months. In my field, fabricating a nano-device often takes two to three months. Now, add on top the fact that electrostatic discharges can easily kill a sample (e.g. by wearing a cotton sweater). Guess what? Even though I was extremely careful during its physical manipulation, no sample survived at the beginning (see an exploded device below). It turned out that some old solder joints were unstable during the process of cool down, inducing rapid and large voltage switches. Not only it took me weeks to figure out the problem, but I had to be back in the clean room to fabricate new devices.
More unexpected problems kept me busy and I started to feel no progress at all. Stress, anxiety and lost of motivation were just few unavoidable emotions of a doctorate journey. Looking back now, my relentless attitude of facing these down moments strongly contributed to the success of my personal development.
A primary challenge of my PhD is the nanofabrication process of the devices. They have often tens of metallic structures at a nanometric scale (a 1000 time smaller than a human hair!). This means that an innocent dust can ruin the sample.
When I joined the group, the fabrication recipe had a success yield around 50%. This number was simply too low considering the facts that the process usually takes few months and we fabricate a handful of devices at the time. Most importantly, it hurts. Imagine after cooking a beautiful pie, it gets smashed on the floor. Yes. Now you can grasp the feeling when one of our carefully made devices get destroyed.
Nanofabrication taught me two important lessons: be patient and care about the details. For example, I realized how important was to take many detailed pictures of the devices after each step, even though it was time consuming. Thanks to this habit, every time I spotted a problem, I could narrow down between which stages the damaged occurred. Therefore, it allowed me to come up with custom solutions. By caring about every single detail in the process, I managed to achieve an almost 100% fabrication yield.
Let me show you my most beloved sample (see below). Leaving the science for another day, the colored patterns are equivalent to nanoscopic “highways” for electrons! If you want to see other weird-looking designs, check out my nanofab collection!
Even though my research was about physics, the reality was that most of the time I was not doing physics. Nanofabrication, setup characterization, soldering and coding filled my ToDo list. Each of them was time consuming and, from a research perspective, not exciting. Since I was sometimes lazy, I took shortcuts. In other words, I was putting the minimal effort to make something works, skipping steps in the standard process. Needless to say, this was a terrible approach. Via the hard way of destroying samples and messing up the setup, I learned the obvious lesson: there are no shortcuts. With a renewed mindset, I did my best on each task regardless of my motivation. The truth was that by slowing down on these seemingly boring issues, I was accelerating towards my goals.
I probably don’t need to convince you that motivation is an important drive for anything we do. I was constantly asking myself the most basic question: “Why I am doing this?”. For some people, they pursued a PhD for the love of science, while for others, it was a personal challenge. Sadly for many, this journey was an inertial continuation of their studies. In my case, I was motivated by the pure ambition to achieve challenging goals. I wanted to struggle with complicated problems to discover essential skills for my future projects.
Over time, I became obsessed with my PhD project; not in a negative way, though. I was still priotizing social events, sports, healthy food and a good sleep above work. However, I encouraged my brain to reflect on my research at any time. While gardening, for instance, I wondered about strange features in my graphs. During a chill run, my mind came up with creative experiments. Basically, these off-lab activities gave me plenty of headspace to think without any pressure. Some of my best ideas appeared during these periods!
The bottom line here is an extremely intuitive fact: if you want to achieve greatness in anything, you have to be obsessed.
During my studies, I hated group projects. I was uncomfortable with the idea that my grades depended on someone else. Only if I had paid more attention to my surroundings, I would have noticed signs of teamwork everywhere. The confirmation of the Higgs boson, the detection of gravitational waves, the construction of the largest fusion reaction (ITER) or the first image of a black hole. The success of these ambitious projects was strongly linked to collaborative efforts of countless people.
Why am I telling you this? My doctorate project had four objectives. By the end of my second year, I haven’t succeeded in any of them. I felt I was close to get results, but, only with a year left, there was simply no enough time. After a long consideration, I came down to the only possible solution: delegate a couple of objectives, so I can focus fully on the rest.
Honestly, I was uncomfortable to give away my progress to someone else. Obviously, that was my ego talking. After discussing with my supervisor, I delegated tasks to collaborators. At the beginning, the process was slow because I had to teach them how to perform the experiments or simulate the devices. Before I knew it, the research was going smoothly without my interventions. I began to like the role of supervisor.
Few months later, both objectives were achieved! We published our findings in Physical Review Research and in the high-impact journal Physical Review X. Working in a collaboration has its ups and downs, and this time it paid off by a large margin. I am glad to have learnt to silent my ego and trust the others.
In research, there is rarely an “Eureka!” moment. If you are like me, you would be skeptical whenever you see something interesting in the data. Only by performing many follow-up measurements to discard other explanations, I can slowly start to believe it. However, there was one memorable moment that truly made my heart to race due to excitement. And, it turned out that I was right.
Let me just give you a brief background. One of my goal was to collide two electrons and see their repulsive effect. Skipping the experimental details, I was looking for a peak in a gigantic parameter space. In other words, a needle in a haystack.
One afternoon, while analyzing data from other experiments, my eyes caught something strange: a tiny excess in the probability. With a lot of skepticism, I played around with the data and the feature was still there. “Hmm… interesting”, I thought. So I immediately stopped the measurement in progress and went on the hunt for confirmation. An hour later, I had a big smile on my face. I was staring at a peak which could be the signature of two electrons colliding.
This memorable moment was captured in my notes (see below). Since then, I optimized the parameters and, with help from theoreticians, we unveiled the exact mechanism. With this finding, three out of four objectives were achieved! At the time of this writing, I am really proud to announce that this work has been recently accepted for publication in the prestigious journal Nature Nanotechnology!
I had a mix feeling about writing the thesis. On one hand, I was curious about my communication skills and desired to share technical details. However, the fact that only a handful of people will read it was demotivating. So, even though I wanted to have a “perfect” manuscript, I put myself a hard deadline. Instead of the typically 4 to 6 months, I wanted to finish the writing in 3.
The routine was extremely boring: wake up, write, lunch, write, sport (really necessary!), dinner, sleep and repeat. Due to the long sitting hours, my back started to complain. Even after I finished the manuscript, the pain didn’t go away for weeks. So, a gently reminder to regularly stretch during writing!
I managed to be on time and everyone was really happy with the writing quality. If you are bored and curious, you can check the manuscript here. I also leave you below a photo of the book version with a meaningful cover!
Soon after the submission, I successfully defended my thesis and officially become a doctor! You can see my happy face with a funny graduation hat.
Let me say it again: I am very proud of my personal growth. This is thanks to the amazing people that walked by my side during these years. I had the best supervisor I could ever ask for; responsible and funny flatmates that made me feel like at home; hiking and skiing partners who shared my love of nature; a Spanish gang which saved me from homesick; countless patient mentors from who I learnt so much; and a supportive family that was always there. Definitely, people were the best part of this tough, but great journey.
