PhD is a synonym to thinking. Regardless to whatever your specialisation of PhD be you are expected to do a lot of thinking. It isn’t just about your subject or your topic, to be begin with you got to also think about time allocation, thinking about what you are reading so as to give it a critical perspective, pondering over your overall progress and so many other things. Continuous monitoring over your progress and introspection would help you to know about your pattern of working and also so much about yourself. I actually feel that self-confrontation is an integral part of any PhD.
Some of the few things you would get to know about yourself while doing your PhD are:
1. Working style: With the way you work and by observing and thinking about it you would discover so many hidden traits related to your behavioural strategies. If you want to understand your traits better, ponder over how do you decide to do your work? With consistency or only upon the deadline approaching? Observe in your behavioural pattern, if you pick up difficult tasks first or easy ones? Do you delegate your work to others or do it yourself with meticulous observation to eliminate errors? PhD expects a lot of hard work, regularity and precision in your performance. How you respond to that requirement, I believe is a reflection of your personality and if you understand that you are on the path of self-discovery.
2. The discreet factors: If you identify your pattern of working you could further try and understand the reasons behind the specific behaviour. Most of the strategies that determine your behaviour are a product of some or the other emotion. The different emotions could be:
• Fear of facing others or proving your worth in front of others
• Laziness
• Vulnerability towards the immediate environment
• Wanting to seek perfection at work
• Procrastination
3. Your ability of social interaction: communicating at different levels becomes imperative in a PhD. Your PhD would make you grow as a person in various ways as you would learn to improve your skills to communicate with others and adjust and accommodate with others during your journey.
4. Conferences and workshops: The different conferences and workshops would not leave the kind of impact on you as much as the learning on field would do in terms of developing your personality, retaining the skills picked up as this is practical earning which no amount of preaching can substitute in life.