It never stops to amaze me what non-academics think about doctoral dissertations. I understand why they don‘t get the psychological torture of it all or that they don’t see the kinds of personal sacrifices you have to make for a PhD, but I never really expect them to not understand the process of writing a dissertation itself and it surprises me every time. Like, I‘m in my sixth year of this shit and someone asked me what I‘ve even been doing for the first five years if I‘ve only started writing it fairly recently, and they actually had the audacity to ask if I‘d just been staring out of the window all day for years. When I told someone else that sometimes you spend several hours reading a paper and all you get from that is that you can now add one sentence to your dissertation, they told me to stop being so perfectionistic and just write some stuff, my PhD supervisor wouldn‘t give a shit anyway and the comittee probably won‘t either. And I actually had to explain to them that I can‘t just make some stuff up in scientific research. That I need sources to back up every claim I make and that I need to verify them. My PhD will be published for the entire world to read, and not doing any of these things or plagiarising someone, even accidentally, is a literal crime. And they don‘t get it!!!!! They think I‘m just overthinking some little exam, not much different from doing your A-levels or whatever, just on a higher education level. They think I‘m being both difficult on purpose and unfathomably lazy at the same time.
What the fuck
