A lonely job

Doing a PhD is a lonely job.

On the first front, you are expected to do something new that no one had ever done before. To meet this requirement, the best bet is to do something that is very different from what other people had done. Very likely, you'll be the only one doing this kind of research. For example, lots of researchers had done studies about situation awareness among pilot, nuclear plant control room, and other similar control rooms. No published research had reported situation awareness among paramedics. And that's what I'm doing at the moment. I'm at a distance from other situation awareness researchers. The intellectual loneliness can be a problem when trying to solve a problem specific to my own research.

On the second front, it can get socially lonely. The lab, for example, is not a socially active place as a library or a shopping mall. It is very quiet most of the time. And because the researchers are not tied to a 9-to-5 work time, they come and go at their own time. Before and after Christmas time, even the whole department was quiet. The social isolation can be a problem when one craves social attention that it is sometimes necessary to go out of the workplace and socialise elsewhere.

This is not saying that the whole process of doing PhD is a lonely journey. There are opportunities to expand one's horizon, occasionally. That is why some researchers get excited upon hearing news about conferences, symposium, seminar and so on. These are the venues where the social and intellectual isolation can be left behind. Meeting like-minded researchers can go a long way to make connections, spawn new ideas, and solve problems. The feeling of relatedness is like a vaccination for the loneliness bug that visits from time to time.

Now I feel less lonely.