Why am I doing a PhD? - Motivations of an Eternally Curious Intellectual

My friends ask me "why are you doing your PhD?". I have had many such questions thrown at me - Why are you restarting at the University of Sussex after doing your course work at IIM Ahmedabad. They tell me sometimes that I am wasting my MBA and delving into an arena that pays less, needs more rigour and hard work. People have also commented on this pandemic being a bad time to start this lonely journey (which I completely disagree with).

Well, to all of them I want to say one thing - RESEARCH is a CAREER! Some people actually like studying, being on their own, living in an abstract world, daydreaming about how this world would be had it been Utopia.

There are multiple reasons why I love research, especially social sciences research.

Gyan ka Daan hai sabse bada Daan!

This translates into dissemination of knowledge as the biggest alms, donation or charity! I like teaching. The primary reason I am doing a PhD is that I want to experience the joy of giving, the elation of spreading knowledge, extending the horizons of knowledge, the satisfaction of enhancing someone else's learning, the responsibility to have the next generation that is more responsible and socially conscious, ethical human beings, and responsible managers.

When I was doing my MBA at IIM Indore I had realised that I want to do a PhD because it was not being a practitioner or manager, that would satisfy my ambition of realising my full potential but researching Social Sciences would satisfy my intellectual hunger. When you work for a corporate, you work for an organisation and more often than not, you end up being a cog in the wheel (even when you are the CEO’s right hand). The impact that you make is minuscule.

I want to make some impact, measurable impact. Not just increase sales of an organization by x% or reduce cost per customer acquisition by y%. I am interested in Policy making and not just one organisation. My PhD is also themed around this - Strategic responses to Grand Societal challenges. I like to call myself an impact scholar. My research looks at the phenomena of societal challenges which are so Herculean in nature that they essentially require interdisciplinary eclectic perspective into studying them because society doesn't exist in silos as the academic disciplines are. I am a trained computer engineer but studying management I was drawn towards Social Sciences. My coursework at Fellow Programme in Management at IIM Ahmedabad also opened the doors of disciplines in Social Sciences including Philosophy, Sociology, Psychology, Law along with the Management disciplines like Organisational Management Theory, Strategic Management, Business policy, Public policy etc.

Working in the corporate is not satisfying. Even being in strategy or in Top management, a lot of things that are not in your control. Sometimes the strategy formulation (read most of the times) is very different from strategy execution. There are stark differences in the strategy formulated, emergent and realised. This is the great source of sorrow for anyone who wants more variables in control, perfection and only little aberrations between thought and reality. Doing research lets me into a wonderful world of abstraction, where things are labelled. There is a structure we need to follow. The fellow people are more intellectual. Thinking and reading is more critical than just marketing.

I am a recluse, philosopher, artist, thinker. I LIKE being alone, with myself, my own thoughts. This is not being ‘lonely’. Research and academia allows me to do this, which I cherish. I prefer Solitude. It lets me introspect and polish myself.

Last but not the least, my mother is an academic and seeing her as I grew has been the biggest motivating factor.

It has been a fortnight attending my classes at the University of Sussex Business School. End of September, there was a week-long Induction programme after which the autumn term began. I am just amazed at how organised, well-structured everything is here, even in this chaotic COVID time. Among many formalities and administrative tasks, creating a University profile page was suggested. So, to take the first step towards creating my research profile and gain legitimacy, I made my University profile page.

This is my University of Sussex Profile: https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p517049-swati-bhargava