As I think I have said before on his blog, most science research is not done by middle-aged academics like me but by PhD students and postdocs (postdocs are typically people who have got their PhD within the last few years). We academics have so many things to do: teach, admin, meetings, more admin, etc, that we unfortunately can not spend as much time as we want on research.

Much of the time we do devote to research is really helping PhD students and postdocs do the real work, like doing the calculations and gathering the data. This is both teaching and research, the two cannot be separated here. One week you are helping a PhD student learn about to model proteins diffusing in a living cell, the next week you have calculations from the student of proteins diffusing in a cell which might be the first people have ever done for that protein. This is a part of the job that I enjoy. Don’t tell the University but I’d do it for free.

But all good things must come to end. A PhD takes around 3 to 4 years, and then they have to go and get a job – in or outside science as they want. After you have worked closely with someone for 3 years plus, you miss them. You wish them well and hope they do well, and that what you taught them was useful, but you miss them.

But my student will be back, and this is because of the one iron law of PhDs: writing up the thesis always takes longer that you think. My student is still writing a thesis. It took me longer than I thought to write my thesis, and my students have in turn obeyed this law. A few weeks ago, I might then have said that breaking this law was about as easy as exceeding the speed of light. I guess now I should compare writing a thesis to a different law of physics; I will have to if my fellow blogger has to eat his shorts.

Writing a thesis is hard, a thesis is the length of a book, is on a highly technical subject and when a student writes it, it is maybe 10 times longer than the longest thing they have written before, so it is no surprise that it takes longer than you think. But the thesis get written and once you have written yours can look back on them as a learning experience, because thesis writing does teach you a lot about communicating your results in writing.  It is just that it is unfortunately a learning experience that took longer than you hoped.