Weird Habits Of PhD Students That People Don’t Know About

Messy hair, eccentric eyes, thirsty for knowledge, and a lab messier than their hair are characteristics that are commonly associated with weird scientists and researchers. Of course, there are some weird habits of researchers that have become immortalised in fiction and popular culture, whereas some habits remain unknown to people who haven’t partaken in research themselves. In this blog, we will take a look at some weird habits of PhD students, and if you happen to have some of these habits, they might be signs you should do a PhD in the near future.

What Are Some Common Academic Personality Traits?

While there are some strange habits graduate students develop and retain for the rest of their lives, there are some common academic personality traits that people with research mindsets possess. Do not confuse the two, however, as these traits can be found in people who are just naturally curious, and not necessarily PhD-minded. Here are some academic personality traits that you should know about.

The ‘Productive’ Perfectionist:

For most people, perfectionism is a hurdle, but perfectionism in academia is not a hurdle for some exemplary people. For some scholars, research isn’t just about doing a job; it is the desperate need to ensure that every footnote is formatted to the millimeter and every argument is shielded against the most obscure critique. Academia-oriented people tend to be perfectionists of the highest level.

Chronic ‘Imposter’ Syndrome:

Ironically, the more an academic knows, the less qualified they feel. Even after publishing peer-reviewed papers or writing grants, many PhD students live in a state of perpetual fear that a senior professor will call them out for their lack of knowledge. This drives an academic to constantly learn and expand their knowledge, which might sound good at first, but it can also lead to the development of isolation habits among PhD candidates.

Intellectual Hyper-Fixation: 

One of the most notable academic personality traits is the ability to zoom in on a microscopic detail and stay there for years. While a normal person might find a fun fact interesting for five minutes, a person accustomed to PhD life will turn that fact into a 300-page dissertation. Basically, an intellectual can pick a niche and dedicate their whole life to becoming the master of that area.

Pathological Skepticism:

 Academia encourages critical thinking and questioning, and if you find yourself to be a pathological skeptic, maybe those are signs you should do a PhD. Intellectuals and academics don’t just read a news headline; they check the methodology of the cited study, even if they don’t necessarily know everything about the ins and outs of citation. While this makes them brilliant researchers, it also makes them a little challenging to deal with on a day-to-day basis.

High Autonomy And Low Social Battery:

One of the main weird habits of PhD students that almost everybody notices is that they tend to be lone wolves. They don’t enjoy social events nearly as much as everyone else, and they mostly just want to be left alone. They spend weeks talking to their data alone, which is why they find small talk uninteresting, although longer and in-depth conversations can still hold them in place.

What Are Some Signs You Should Do A PhD?

If you are a school, college, or university student and you haven’t officially begun your PhD life, then you must watch out for these signs. These are signs you should do a PhD, but that doesn’t mean that you necessarily have to do a PhD; it just means you have what it takes to endure the rigorous multi-year journey a PhD student has to embark on.

You’re Experiencing an Intellectual Itch:

 If you find a topic and can’t hold yourself from wanting to know more about it, then you might just be fit for the PhD life. This is not just a sign of an exceptional PhD student, but it is pretty much a basic requirement.

You Don’t Mind Being Wrong:

 A person with a research mindset will never get upset if you tell them that they were wrong. They won’t ask you to shut up and assert they are right, but they would ask you to explain your reasoning behind declaring their point of view as incorrect.

You Prefer Questions Over Answers:

If you pick up a graduate school decision guide, you will always find one piece of advice: ‘Universities like curious students.’ Higher education institutions and PhD departments both seek candidates who prefer questioning things rather than settling down with an answer. A true intellectual likes asking questions about everything related to a topic more than finding the answer to one big question.

You Have A High Tolerance For Solitude:

Isolation habits among PhD candidates are a very common and concerning issue, but you shouldn’t be concerned if you prefer isolation a little more than what’s considered normal. Intellectually inclined people often like to work alone in isolation.

You Want To Own A Slice Of Knowledge:

PhD-inclined students have an urge to not just learn, but to be the person who can claim authorship over a certain body of knowledge. This obsession is one of the strange habits graduate students develop, but it is also a great motivator that drives them to discover more and more knowledge throughout their PhD journey.

Top 5 Weird Habits Of PhD Students And Researchers

Academic personality traits do not automatically equate to someone’s PhD-fitness, but there are some weird habits of PhD students that you must try to find out within yourself. If you happen to possess some of these weird habits, it might mean that you just need a little graduate school motivation to convince yourself to join a PhD program as soon as you’re eligible.

1) The ‘Abstract’ Social Filter:

PhD students are smart, but they struggle with small questions like ‘How are you?’ or ‘How was your day?’ They prefer to talk with people who can have engaging conversations, and they often use long words even while having mundane conversations.

2) Radical Bibliomania:

For most people, a large collection of books or papers is just a ‘to-read’ list, but for a person with a research mindset, it is an obsession. They collect tons of papers and books that they might never read just to feel a sense of intellectual superiority.

3) Anthropomorphising Equipment:

Researchers often refer to their equipment and systems with personal pronouns, as if they were friends or sentient beings. Among all the weird habits of researchers, this might be one of the hardest things to spot, as PhD students don’t do this in front of other humans. But when your only friend is a computer and lab equipment for most of your career, then you tend to attribute human characteristics to them.

4) The ‘Thesis Eyes’ Stare:

You must have heard about the thousand-year stare that some soldiers or victims of PTSD have, and senior PhD students often sport the same glares most of the time. It isn’t uncommon to see a PhD scholar simply stare into the distance as if they are seeing a vast cosmic entity approaching the earth, but it is simply their fixation that causes them to lock their gaze at a random spot for no apparent reason.

5) Bizarre Superstitions and Rituals:

Intellectuals usually don’t fall into superstitious beliefs, but some of them create their own weird beliefs. They often wear a ‘lucky lab coat’ for each experiment, or sit in the exact same seat at the library because they believe it’s the place of ultimate concentration. These are some of the strange habits graduate students develop after years of putting every moment of their lives into hard-focused research.

Does Having A Research Mindset Make You Eccentric?

Even though the weird habits of PhD students cultivate a stereotype that all PhD students and researchers are a bit eccentric, is that really the case? A short answer to that question will be yes. Becoming a researcher requires a certain level of hard-focused obsession with solving problems, which can be defined as eccentricity in the conventional sense.

Generally, society refers to those people as eccentrics who have prioritised a deep dive into the narrowest topic instead of collecting the broadest knowledge possible. If you aren’t someone with a research mindset, it might be hard to understand, but someone who is obsessively focused on a specific area of knowledge will develop certain side effects that cause other people to perceive them as eccentric.

Academic Career Advice For Students Who Want To Do A PhD

If you are someone who aspires to do a PhD and is in need of some good old-fashioned graduate school motivation, then here is some academic career advice from top-tier academic experts.

Choose The Advisor, Not Just The Project:

The project might be good, but a bad supervisor can completely derail even the best of PhD programs. This is why you must look out for the toxic traits of PhD supervisors before choosing to go ahead with your doctoral program.

Prioritise Research Fit Over Prestige:

PhD interviews often see students being rejected despite being smart and competent. The reason for this is that they are often not what the department needs. You should also choose a research department that wants a candidate like you, not a department that everybody else thinks highly of.

Treat It Like A Job, Not An Extension Of School:

Treat your PhD as a 9-5 job, because that way it’ll be natural for you to take breaks and prioritise time for yourself. If you consider it to be a part of normal schooling, it will subconsciously force you to allocate uneven time periods for research, which can disrupt your sleep schedule and be unhealthy for you in the long run.

Master The Art Of Rejection Early:

Rejection is as natural for a PhD student as research. Your supervisor, no matter how nice, will reject most of your hypotheses after you first submit them. They’re not being mean, that’s just how academia is. The culture of perfectionism in academia won’t go anytime soon, so you must prepare yourself to embrace rejection as gracefully as possible.

Isolation Habits Among PhD Candidates: A Growing Concern

PhD students are known to be lone wolves, and while that could be a good thing for research, it isn’t a good thing to make a habit out of. In the context of doctoral studies, isolation often manifests through specific behavioral patterns that can derail a candidate’s progress and wellbeing.

It is very easy to see isolation habits among PhD candidates, and while little doses of concentrated isolation purely for studying is fine, it becomes a problem when isolation becomes dominant in their lifestyle. PhD students begin growing too connected to digital screens and lab equipment that they lose their sense of human touch, which will hurt their social skills as time goes on.

Not only that, isolation is also dangerous to the human body and mind, and even if some people can handle isolation, they will eventually begin to lose their mind because of not being able to adjust to society.

Conclusion

In the end, it is important for you to know that weird habits of PhD students aren’t necessarily a negative side effect of them being too engrossed in their research for their own good. Most often, it is just a reflection of academic personality traits that they have always possessed. If you want to become a scholar someday, it is important that you know that you possess these habits already, because if you do, then they are signs you should do a PhD in the near future. If you want to learn more about PhD life and how to survive a PhD program, read more blogs at India Assignment Help.