PhD - Poor, hysteric and Deluded ?

‘What happened? You still haven’t managed to get a job?’ This is probably one of the most frequently encountered questions by PhD students everywhere in the world. From the time of joining a PhD programme till the time the degree is awarded the struggle is on for giving satisfactory explanation to the rather perpetual curiosity of relatives, friends and often times the ‘met only once but I am still your well wisher’ types whom you meet on social occasions. Keeping in mind their common traits I am taking the liberty to label them as ‘Curious cases’. Most of the curious cases seem to suffer short term memory loss as they keep repeating the same question in the same tone every time they see you.

The moment your well wishers realise (with shock)that even after completing the Masters programme you don’t have a corporate tag around your neck that proudly announces your allegiance in the corporate world, your merit goes down in their material scale. The rating by these judges, who are very vocal of their opinions, gets further degraded when they brand you as an over aged and deluded student trying to get ‘another degree’. Now do these ratings matter? Well... sometimes they do. Thanks to the audacity of the curious cases in garnering the required moral support and sympathy for you in your inability for not having managed to get a job when your friends and cousins draw five figure salary and have flown to the US at least once for an onsite assignment, on family get-togethers and social gatherings you become a helpless witness to the downward flight of your social pecking order travelling at an unbelievably pernicious pace.

Typically by the time you are half way through the PhD programme, you would have perfected the art of dodging questions about why you haven’t found your way into the job market. By the time one is in the final stages writing the thesis the student would have developed strong linguistic defence mechanisms, armed with technical vocabulary capable of warding off the onslaught of malign commentators and console the concerns raised by benign inquisitors. Trust me when I say that it makes a difference to tell someone that you are ‘trying to examine the structural incompetence in the social fabric of India to implore the policy makers to see reason in the need for initiating customised policies capable of addressing the perils of outliers in our society’, instead of simply saying that your PhD is about the problems faced by tribal communities in India.


Things are fine as long as you are in the comforting company of fellow scholars who express solidarity with your plight and share your view to seek retribution at an opportune moment for the comments, concerns and commotion about the delayed but socially much desired entry into the job market. They request the pleasure of your company in being part of the endless discussions, which gets labelled by casual onlookers as unproductive verbal exercise by insignificant souls, which start at the University coffee house in the dawn and gets stretched to the nearby church of Bacchus towards dusk. Forced to live on a shoe string budget (this was especially true until recently in the case of PhD students in India) and conduct the head scratching exercise in front of parents to obtain financial support for a much needed conference attendance, I am sure that a large proportion of PhD students in India would find themselves in the lowest quintile of the most unhappy persons on planet earth. Astounding irregularity in the receipt of university fellowships, tedious paper work associated with obtaining the sanction orders and indifferent attitude of the administration, though not necessarily in that order, have significant roles in making life miserable for those who aspire to obtain the highest earned academic degree.

The long hours spent in front of the monitor, the tired eyes giving the image that you are a big time ‘Grasshopper’, fingers that always move as if tapping on invisible key board, skipped meals and the wretched and ragged attire; all work against PhD students in their social life and get themselves branded by the uninitiated (the non PhD students) as hysteric. Albeit the penury in material comforts and social life, most of the students do not back out from the race for 15-30 pages in a high impact refereed journal or give up their effort to put together some three hundred odd pages as a monograph or as a collection of essays with a title and their name on the cover page or shy away from the Toms and jerry game called ‘Open defence of the thesis. I say Toms and Jerry because in an open defense the student (Jerry) is expected to shield the shower of arrows from the experts and audience (Toms), where suddenly everyone in the room gets curious about what you have been doing in the last four years and yells “I have a question for you”.

Now after considering these aspects if someone believes that the acronym PhD could mean to indicate Poor, Hysteric and Deluded humans I would not blame them. However, disregarding the dexterity demanded in the demeanour of a PhD student, the next time I sense a diatribe from the curious cases I would try saying “No I still haven’t managed to get a job.... Does that bother you?”