You may find the title of the blog really hilarious if you are a research scholar who has experience bundles of hardships through the process. The entire PhD is hard then what is it to find out about the hardest part of doing a PhD. Well according to me as a PhD scholar, is that in the field of research there are not any fixed or accepted standards for evaluating progress of work and in research you have to show and get approval of your work from not one person but many and not one department but many and since standards are evaluation criteria are absent, not everyone is happy at the same time. So whom to please and whom to displease? Do you agree or no that you have encountered this as the hardest part of your journey as researcher?
When you have people who are important in evaluating the progress of your PhD showing dissatisfaction with your work, it surely creeps in insecurity with your progress. In this challenging journey, recognition, praise and acceptance goes a long way in bringing a sense of satisfaction and relief that one is on the right path of progress. With the standards of progress being so tricky, it is very much possible that you walk down the blind alley, unless you have some strong experienced source who is guiding your path. It is all the more true when have subjective opinions boggling you down and making you feel confused dejected, getting fair and right feedback from the sources is the most important thing at that point of time.
Sometimes scholars try to assess their own progress. Remember that in the absence if evaluation criteria that is standardized, you would be not doing justice to your progress. Either you would overrate yourself or feel that your achievements or progress is trivial or insignificant, in either case, it is unfair evaluation. Explaining you work to a person who is away from your research is a better way to fight this challenge as what may seem too less development to you may actually be something very significant. Your research supervisor is the best person here and is actually a very important contributor in your PhD journey that can help you fight with this biggest challenge of research that can actually be generalised for around the globe.
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Doing the PhD is the hardest part. Everything requires a hell of hard work. But if topic chosen is from our core area of interest, doing PhD is interesting