Be Who You Are, Not who I wish you to be.

Imagine you are two years into your PhD, and someone at a conference asks “so what is your research about?” You start to answer, and halfway through, you realize you are describing your advisor’s grant proposal.

I am writing this episode as an advisor, and I want to start with something I genuinely mean: I would rather you spend your PhD finding what you are truly devoted to than spend it producing work that fulfills my expectations. It is common, and somewhat expected, that the direction you eventually find yourself devoted to is different from the one that excites me the most.

The reason I say this is that the PhD environment creates several pressures that quietly push students away from their own interests and toward directions that belong to other people. Most of these pressures come from well-intentioned structures and reasonable incentives. But if you are not aware of them, they can shape your entire trajectory before you realize you never chose it.

Grants Are for Professors, Not PhD Students

One of the most common patterns I see is a student who spends their first two years working on a project their advisor assigned, often because the project is tied to a funded grant or a future grant the advisor plans to submit. The advisor needs either progress to report or preliminary evidence to secure a large fund, while the student needs a project (preferably a well-defined one, by most people’s preference) to get started. The arrangement seems perfectly reasonable, and in many cases, it genuinely is a good way to learn the research process: the problem is already framed, the resources are allocated, and you can focus on developing skills without also having to define the direction from scratch.

So what could go wrong?

The trap appears when you never transition out of this mode. You keep working on topics the advisor needs covered, and you never ask yourself whether these topics are what you would choose independently. I have seen students reach their fourth year and realize they have a strong publication record in a direction they feel no personal connection to. The publications are real. The skills are real. But the self-knowledge that should have been developing alongside them was never given the space to grow, and the realization that “I don’t actually care about this” after four years of work is one of the most painful things I have watched a student go through.

If you find yourself in this situation, the problem is not that you worked on your advisor’s project. The problem is that you treated the assignment as your direction without exploring the broader landscape and assessing whether it actually is. A funded project is an excellent place to learn, and it is also an excellent place to discover what you do and do not enjoy, but only if you are paying attention to that second question while doing the work.

The Seduction of Early Success

A related pattern is equally subtle, and in some ways more dangerous because it feels so good.

Some students arrive at their PhD with publications already in hand, or they produce strong papers in their first year or two. The early success creates a powerful gravitational pull: “I published well in this area, I know how to do this kind of work, and the community recognizes me for it, so this must be my direction.” The reasoning feels airtight. What could go wrong?

What the reasoning misses is that early-stage publications are often easier than they appear from the outside. The advisor may have already framed the problem tightly, allocated the data and resources, and guided the analysis closely enough that the student’s role, while real and valuable, did not require them to think deeply about whether the topic genuinely excites them. The low-hanging fruit was picked successfully, and the success feels like a signal of fit when it may actually be a signal of good scaffolding.

Early publications are evidence that you can do research. They are not evidence that you have found the research you want to do. I have watched otherwise talented students lock into a direction based on first-year success and then spend the next three years with the work feeling increasingly like obligation and decreasingly like curiosity. If you recognize this pattern in yourself, it does not mean those early publications were wasted. It means they taught you something important about what you can do, and now you need to ask a harder question about what you want to do.

The Noise of Other People’s Opinions

Beyond the structural pressures from advisors and early success, there is a constant stream of well-meaning noise from the people around you. Let me give you a few scenarios you will (or already did) encounter.

You are standing at a poster session, and a professor you admire walks up and says, “Have you ever considered applying this to healthcare?” You had not, but now you cannot stop thinking about it. A hot topic emerges midway through your project, and suddenly half the papers at the next conference are about it, and you start wondering whether you should pivot. A labmate is working on something fashionable and publishing rapidly, and you catch yourself thinking “maybe I should be doing that.” A reviewer praises one aspect of your paper, and you begin to orient your next project around that praise.

Each of these signals feels informative, reasonable, and some of them may genuinely be. The problem is that you cannot distinguish the signal from the noise unless you already know what you care about. A compliment about your ability in area X is useful information if you have already explored the landscape and decided that X matters to you. If you have not, it is just another voice pulling you toward someone else’s idea of what you should be doing.

Pleasing the people around you, your advisor, your reviewers, your labmates, the senior researcher you met once at a poster session, is an exhausting and ultimately hollow optimization target. Their opinions matter as data points. They do not matter as the compass.

Why Depth Beats Breadth

I have seen students graduate with ten papers across ten different topics, and I have seen students graduate with four papers that form a tight, coherent thread. When both of them walk into a faculty interview, the student with four focused papers consistently makes a stronger impression, because they can articulate what they care about, why it matters, and where they are going next. The student with ten scattered papers struggles to answer “what is your research about?” without listing titles. (This is, by the way, one of the most common interview failures I have observed, and it is almost always a symptom of never having answered the question for themselves.)

It is more valuable for a PhD graduate to know what they are genuinely devoted to than to have a long publication list in directions they wandered into by accident. The self-knowledge compounds: once you know what you care about, every paper you write reinforces the same direction, every collaboration you pursue serves the same trajectory, and every decision you make becomes easier because the filter is clear.

How to Start Figuring It Out

If you are reading this and thinking “I do not know what I care about yet,” that is completely fine. Most students do not know in their first or second year, and many change their minds multiple times throughout the PhD. The point is not to have the answer now. The point is to be actively asking the question.

A few practices that I have found genuinely helpful.

After every project you complete, ask yourself honestly: did I enjoy the thinking, or did I enjoy the result? If the publication felt rewarding but the daily work felt like a chore, that is information. If the daily work absorbed you and you lost track of time and the publication was a bonus, that is also information, and it points in a very different direction.

Pay attention to what you read voluntarily. The papers you seek out on your own, outside of any project requirement, at midnight because you are genuinely curious, are a reliable signal of interest, because no external pressure is driving the choice.

Talk to people who work in areas that intrigue you, and ask them what their daily work actually looks like. The gap between what a research area looks like from the outside (impressive results, prestigious venues, captivating keynotes) and what it feels like from the inside (the specific daily tasks, frustrations, the hours of debugging or data cleaning) is often enormous. Knowing the daily reality before committing is worth far more than admiring the output from a distance.

The Long View

Your PhD is a few years. Your career, whether in research or outside of it, is decades. The publications from your PhD will eventually be a small fraction of your total output. What will not fade is the clarity about who you are, what you care about, and what kind of work makes you come alive.

Be who you are. Not who I wish you to be.

A saying from a person I admire, and I have kept it with me all the time.