Understanding Your Uniqueness

       In the previous article, I mentioned the shared uniqueness among all doctoral students.  I find it quite fascinating to grasp the concept of uniqueness of a doctoral student. At the risk of brushing the fringes of philosophy, I would like to share with you the thought.  According to Population Reference Bureau by the year 2011, about 107.6 billion people had been born in our world. If we subtract from this number the current (2017) world population (i.e., about 7.6 billion), we can say that according to this estimate at least 100 billion people have completed their life cycle on this planet since the beginning of human history. I find it acutely amazing that our perception deems so unique the experience of life that has been already lived by a 100 billion people. The claim made by our perception manifests itself when my teenage kids complain that I can never understand their life; likewise, when the doctoral students protest that mentors fail to understand their viewpoint.         

Trusting your individual uniqueness challenges you to lay yourself open. James Broughton

        Perception is a strong driving force that shapes our lives. That is why the study of perceptions through qualitative methods is so critical. Doctoral researchers have a unique advantage of learning how to rationalize their perceptions as they learn to recognize and mitigate the researcher’s egoistic bias. From this perspective, the uniqueness of the doctoral experience is not about embarking on the doctoral journey. Instead, it is about going through the introspective transformation through the journey that rationalizes the inner self and breaks it down as expressions of existing knowledge. That is the point in time when a doctoral student begins to see the tiny fissures in the literature that provide an opportunity to create new knowledge.
​        Hope this thought may help some of the readers tap into their unique strength, and make the best out of their social, emotional, and financial investments made into their doctoral journey.
Cheers!
Dr. K