Mirsumon
21 February 2012
Productivity vs Creativity
Tags: career, competition, originality, papers, publications, Scientific communityPosted in applied research, Ethics, Getting published, PhD life, Research and education
I am at the last year of my PhD. I started working on a topic which was quite new in the sci community. I also published about 5 articles on that topic and 4 other articles in related topics. Sometimes i had too much pressure to publish my works as it normally happens in a place where you have to maintain a good balance between productivity and novelty of your work (i guess). However, sometimes i feel that i lose my interest to improve my experimental data and losing freedom of thinking about the creativity of the whole work. Sometimes, i also feel that i am running too fast that i dont even care about the trees on the street. Where is the freedom in PhD? How can we learn to be an independent researcher? Hope to have it after the PhD!!!
Follow- - - - - -
4 Mar 2012 13:43, Mirjam
Stories like these depend a lot on the individual circumstances. In some groups there is a lot of freedom, in others there isn’t. By the time you have your own group you may find your own balance between productivity and creativity (one does not need to exclude the other, btw). But maybe also not, because the department head, external reviewers, granting organizations may expect a higher productivity from you than you’d want yourself… In the end it always boils down to finding a balance between what others expect of you, what you expect of yourself and what you find important in live. Do you want as many articles as possible? Or is 50% enough and you can go on vacation every year? Did you really need 9 articles to get your PhD? Or did you want that? Or did your boss force you to? And what if you had not listened to your boss? You have to make your own choices and create your own optimal environment, the world won’t adjust itself to you.