Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: the PhD student way to combat imposter syndrome 

Sherlock Holmes paces his apartment, bored and stagnating. His friends are worried about his unquenched thirst for knowledge, intrigue, passion, narrative; his need to bear witness to all the flaws and foibles of humanity. Can’t you just, idk, watch a movie? When Sherlock does come home from a long day of solving mysteries he is too tired for what he loves: he can’t concentrate on the newspaper, feels too physically exhausted for the violin somehow, despite his work only being with the brain. When Sherlock pays a princely sum of money to fly to Switzerland to watch an old professor speak, and possibly confront him, his friends remind him that being a ‘consulting detective’ doesn’t really pay and that he regularly works for free, yet still he goes. Sherlock Holmes is the world leading expert in mud from London’s various boroughs – his friends ask him what the benefit of such a thing is, but to him it is self-evident. 

I am, of course, characterising Sherlock Holmes here as a PhD student. 

The appeal of Sherlock Holmes is that he is a truly incredible person – literally not credible. He is a fictional character, placed squarely in Victorian London – or, the real world of the reader. It is incongruous, charming, imaginative. We the reader cannot see the machinations of his mind; even stories like The Musgrave Ritual, told from his perspective, do not place the reader inside Holmes’ mind; instead we trail along behind him as he unravels the mystery slowly before our eyes and explores a world that we know but somehow experience on a different plane. 

A PhD is something like a good mystery story: you go in with assumptions based on form or prior knowledge and you hope that the process of investigation will not only yield more information but also be the purpose of this journey, almost moreso than the conclusion. The aim is to show the world you see something the rest of us don’t, and hopefully demonstrate its use. Information that seems myopic, simplistic, or honestly just powerfully dull becomes paramount to building a sweeping picture of society more generally and comes to stand as a pillar or scaffold of something greater than the sum of its parts. Mystery stories, though, do tend to have protagonists who are barely holding it together: though Sam Spade is glamorous and principled, he quit a better-paying job to drink too much and sleep on the couch in his office. Kosuke Kindaichi and Sherlock Holmes are both the best and brightest of their generation, ruined by drugs – plus, Sherlock has a housemaid and still manages to live in squalour, and Kosuke canonically has messy hair and disgusting toenails. Miss Marple is a gossipy spinster with nobody who loves her. You don’t want to be these people, even if you want to have the adventures that they do – and, really, is death investigation an adventure?  

Am I saying that you don’t want to be a PhD student? I am saying that there’s an awful lot to hold together, and not a lot of adventures to make it worthwhile. It pays about as well as being a consulting detective, and you get just as grubby – perhaps not from crime scenes so much as archives or labs, but somehow many of us end up looking dishevelled. I do believe, however, that there’s a superpower that PhD students obtain that I do also see in the detectives across fiction, and that’s a certain confidence – perhaps not confidence in the way society generally sees it, in the way that we carry ourselves or that we are worth more than the offer on the table, but confidence in our ideas. Our method. It’s the opposite of imposter syndrome: the intensity in the desire to prove something usurps all feelings that the vessel you are is not good enough. The Self is less than the Idea. 

All advice is that you should not embark upon a PhD, so it is quite a self-selective application process. In addition to the hoops you would anticipate a PhD student must jump through we also have to either believe that you are immune to the human struggles of PhD life and will continue to be for three plus years (during which time you yourself will be of an age where all kinds of life things happen, either unto you or in the lives of the people who surround you), or believe in your research enough that it supersedes the pain. At this point in my grad school career, I have two modes: lay down on the ground and play Disney Dreamlight Valley forever, don’t think about anything, my head hurts; and, I must run around all the libraries in London, read eight books, translate something from Latvian, and I accidentally wrote 3000 words on the pop song I was listening to casually. In short: there are two wolves inside me, and both of them are Sherlock Holmes. One is shooting VR onto a wall and the other is wearing a disguise to chase down a solitary cyclist. In order to progress at all I need to harness the chaotic, Dionysian energy of research – my whole purpose for participating this intense and unnecessary rigour. The Idea exists on its own, but by articulating it properly I can share it. Thus, the Idea sustains the Self. 

Is it possible to apply this to other pursuits? Surely. Name anything as your idea – the more grandiose the better – and use it to sustain yourself. Freedom. What is freedom? Perhaps freedom is paying off a mortgage and being free to travel without worry, or freedom is not being tethered to a bad relationship. Apply all actions to your own higher purpose and it will sustain you through the bad times: getting up early in order to go to a job you hate, or the kind of loneliness that makes you miss the quiet companionship before the cruelty or the apathy set in. These hifalutin, radical aims remind you that it’s worth it – and with life, as with a PhD, it is the journey that is more valuable than the ending.[1] 

When we study, we are examining the sordid, emotional acts of humanity at its most depraved. We are looking at the smallest things, things which only exist in history, or microbes; things which most would say are irrelevant, in order that we may apply them to other contexts and elucidate their power or influence or patterns for a wider audience. A PhD is defined by becoming the world leading expert in something hyper-specific (‘giving a truly original contribution to your field’), and you can’t succeed if you look at it and think “there’s a hole that must be filled, might as well be by me.” I personally truly believe I am giving us the blocks to build a better world by understanding success, culture, and philosophy in tandem, and that spurs me on. Couched in those terms, there’s always the question of whether something is ‘worth it’ – a quiet weekend day playing video games to recuperate is sensible, but to go home from work every day and log on would make me think ‘for what purpose am I holding my work back?’ 

Detectives believe in themselves, whilst letting themselves be guided by the evidence. Sherlock Holmes truly believes he is smarter than the police, Miss Marple listens to all suspects quietly, and Sam Spade is so willing to be led by evidence that he puts himself into dangerous situations to solve the mystery. Although they all use different methodologies and have different aims for solving their crimes, each of them is led by and lives to a credo of their method; for the detective, as for the PhD student, the Idea lives outside the Self and they allow themselves to be a vessel for it.

I’m surrounded by people who have chosen to do difficult things for a higher purpose – whether that’s my PhD-acquiring friends pushing themselves for the sake of their research or people who’ve chosen work with long hours to provide for their children. Parenthood itself is arguably one long noble sacrifice, and it would not be an unusual perspective to make your raison d’etre setting them up for a good future. I respect and value whatever people’s life path is – and I think we’ll all be happier to think in terms of a higher purpose, as defined by us ourselves. We are the Self, but we choose the Idea – and the Idea is why we push the Self. 

[1] I would still like that piece of paper at the end, though. I would like to finish my studies. 

On This Topic: 

• TWENTY YEARS OF SCHOOLING AND THEY PUT YOU ON THE DAY SHIFT
• The best explanation of the Apollonian / Dionysian urges that I have ever heard.
• As a connoisseur of Sherlock Holmes I have no qualms telling you that this is the best. Alas I am separated from my DVDs to show photographic proof of my knowledge but trust, I have seen at least one Sherlock Holmes adaptation you haven’t heard of.

To-Do: 

• Find a restaurant for R & I 
• Email H & A!!! 
• Contract!!! 

Today’s Culture:

• I do lose a large proportion of my time to Disney Dreamlight Valley, regrettably.
• I need to stop buying ink. I have five pens and approximately 8700000 colours of ink… but also, I need to try Wearingeul.
• I miss Japanese breakfasts. So nourishing and light! Such variety!