A PhD is driving one nail into the wall
I increasingly think doing a PhD is like driving one nail into a wall—the wall
being the accumulated wall of human knowledge.
At first, you may not even see the wall. You do not yet know what counts as a
nail, where one could be placed, how the existing nails relate to each other,
or which gaps are real. Reading is partly the work of learning to see that
surface.
Then comes another problem: choosing where your nail should go. The value of
a nail depends on the wall around it, but its shape also comes from your own
judgment. You need enough basic ability to see prior nails, understand how they
were driven, and recognize the rules of the game. Yet the reason for choosing
this particular nail cannot be borrowed entirely from other people.
So the PhD may be less about covering an area than about making one
well-founded intervention: seeing the wall, locating a gap, shaping a nail, and
being able to explain why it belongs there.
This understanding is probably only provisional—a stage-specific view.
