How to pick your physics PhD

A personal perspective on the difficult choice of PhD project, with a focus on experimental physics PhDs.

Let’s start from the basics: what is a PhD? PhD is short for Doctor of Philosophy, or Philosophiae Doctor in Latin, and Philosophia comes from the ancient greek Philo (love) and Sophia (knowledge/wisdom). So, a doctor in the “Love of Knowledge”. Sounds great and very poetic, but what actually is a PhD?

Nowadays a PhD is a 3–10 years endeavour (depending on the country and university regulations) during which one carries out innovative research on a specific aspect of science or humanities. In most of Europe, PhDs are around 3–4 years long, while they can get longer, and sometimes even open-ended in the US/Canada. The student, upon finding a supervisor, starts this long journey of discovery, sometimes in a small team, other times alone. There are several reasons for people to decide to embark on a PhD journey, some do it for the pure love of learning and passion for their chosen subject, others because they have long dreamed of becoming a Professor, a dream which can either be authentic or consciously and unconsciously imposed by their environment, others because they want to have an impact on society through their research.

So the very first step in deciding to enrol in a PhD program is asking ourselves “what is my deepest motivation for making this choice?”.

I belonged to the first category, I was just really in love with physics at that point, and did not want to stop learning…