Retreat, Reflect, Recharge, Retry

It has been a long time since I published my last PhD Life blog post. The reason is that I have quit my PhD position in Bonn because I did not enjoy that position at all, and neither did I enjoy my life there. Instead I have started a second PhD attempt at SAP SE, with good old Karlsruhe Institute of Technology being the academic partner, and so far I actually do love it. I will talk about that new position in detail in the next blog post, while in this post I’ll focus on what became of my (failed?) adventure in Bonn and why it ended up like this.

When I signed up for my PhD position in Bonn, I have decided between two PhD position options: The first one of them was in Karlsruhe – the place where I’ve studied – and dealt with Reinforcement Learning (RL) on molecular graphs for materials design. The topic sounded highly interesting to me, and the professor and his small crew seemed to be very nice to talk to. The second offer was the position in Bonn I ended up at. While the Karlsruhe lab was very young and in my eyes “not yet established enough”, the robotics group in Bonn had a good reputation, immense funds and a large team of PhD students that I thought I could leverage for collaboration. I did not really manage to meet and talk to my prospective colleagues when I was holding my job interview talk there (probably I didn’t try hard enough to socialize), and with the professor I was not on the same wavelength as much I was with the other one in Karlsruhe. Nevertheless, I chose that position because of the research group’s reputation, because I wanted to see another city after doing Bachelors and Masters in Karlsruhe and because I was somewhat scared by the thought of conducting “inter-disciplinary” research, which would have been the case for the first choice. I feared that while trying to connect the domains of RL and Materials Design, I would fail to develop my own distinct research line and  successfully navigate between the two worlds. That’s why I opted for the second offer.

There were a few things that were suboptimal in Bonn: Firstly, I soon realized that the communication between the PhD students and the professor was rather special, and the PhD students really were tunneling on their individual lines of research. For me there were basically no group meetings (i.e. brainstorming sessions, reading clubs etc.) besides the plenary student thesis and PhD project presentations, and some mandatory project meetings. My attempts to introduce more communication, while not met with resistance, were not welcomed either because the people were too busy doing their own research. Secondly, the topic I ended up in (Computer Vision/Video Prediction) was not really the one I signed up for. In Computer Vision, the sheer amount of work published every year meant that carving one’s own path would be impossible without a bit of guidance, discussion and collaboration – things that were not available to me at that place. With my first attempts failing (as most first attempts in science do) and nobody to turn to, my motivation quickly diminished. Thirdly, the prevalent pressure to publish as soon and as often as possible did not help in rebuilding the motivation either. Of course, citations are a researcher’s currency and citations come from publishing papers, especially as first author. However, when publishing becomes self-justifying,  and meaningful and useful scientific discourse is not possible because everybody is busy working on their own papers, and the first reaction to your failed experiments is a reminder that you should start publishing soon, then the last bit of your motivation to do meaningful research goes down the drain. Finally, life outside the job was not ideal either: Having friends and family in south western Germany regularly led to frustrating travels due to the unreliability of Deutsche Bahn, my flatmates were rather complicated to live with, and I found it hard to meet new people in Bonn (which was partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic). All in all, coming home stressed from the job and finding it hard to relax afterwards meant that over time, stress slowly accumulated until it even started to show physically. Since this is not how I wanted to live, I decided to abort the mission and leave the city and the job.

Since the position in Bonn has been my first full-time job and the first job after finishing my studies, there are quite a few valuable points concerning wishes for my professional life that I can take from these past ten months. For example, while it is a fact that pursuing a PhD mainly involves individual effort to develop one’s own line of research, I noticed that I really profited off working in collaboration and communication with others. Furthermore, I really enjoyed the given flexibility in terms of working place and time (credit partially goes to the pandemic): I enjoy coming to the office on perhaps two to three days a week, but I’d also like to continue having one or two days a week where I can focus on my own work without much disturbance. Being a PhD student is not exactly the same as what some people would call “proper work” (e.g. being an engineer, a teacher or a retail worker) because it basically still is a semi-supervised training program for future researchers. But in my opinion it nevertheless puts you out there into the vast ocean called “professional life”, where you have to learn to navigate yourself to where you want to go (more than most study programs, I argue). Nowadays, I am quite sure that I was more afraid of the interdisciplinary aspect of the Karlsruhe offer than I should have been, and that I can rely on my gut feelings to nudge my decision. My gut has been somewhat sceptical about the Bonn position from the start, and I have deceived myself by over-valuing the reputation and the equipment of the research group in Bonn – things that of course can come in very handy but don’t yet guarantee a successful PhD and a fun work environment. Last but not least, a very important one: It’s not a shame to concede in situations where pushing on would mean more misery than benefit. I have invested lots of energy into my job search and the application process prior to securing the job in Bonn, and the long-term goal of becoming a renowned researcher with a PhD degree surely is a huge one. However, compared to the years of hardship that would result from me pushing through, even such a big achievement would pale. I mean – what good do 2000 citations and a PhD degree do if, as a result from the permanent publication pressure and absence of joy in my daily office communication, I’d turn into a cynical publication machine with sleep disorder and the inability to enjoy the light moments in life?

From the preceding paragraphs it might look like I consider my past year in Bonn to be wasted time, and that I fundamentally regret the choice of going there. Please be assured that that is NOT the case – I still had my share of beautiful moments, I have indeed met beautiful people and discovered amazing places. And finally, I come out stronger from that period of relative “hardship”, having learned some very valuable lessons. So after all, I am still thankful for everybody involved who has made my time in Bonn into what it is, and with renewed strength and confidence I am hailing into the next PhD attempt, which will be described in the next blog post.

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