With another years comes another set of Academy Award nominees. Since I’ve started getting into the habit of watching all the Best Picture nominees, I decided I may as well try ranking them in order of preference. This got somewhat tricky, since the nominees this year are generally quite good (and at worst merely OK). Starting from the bottom:
10. Maestro
Somehow, this is the second time that a movie starring Bradley Cooper is my least favorite Best Picture nominee. (On the plus side, this is still better than American Sniper, so at least it’s the better of the two.) Maestro itself is fine – it’s well-acted, has good camerawork, and the work to make Bradley Cooper look like Leonard Bernstein is so good that it has a strong shot at that Best Makeup award. But the movie feels emotionally hollow: despite being centered around the relationship between Bernstein and his wife Felicia, Maestro didn’t really feel like it conveyed why they cared for each other that well. It also ignored other parts of Bernstein’s life that would have made for good biopic material, like his social activism and AIDS research advocacy. Essentially, all the audience gets out of the movie is that Bernstein was a talented musician and had a tempestuous romantic history (and also had a drug problem).
9. Past Lives
Now we’re getting into the “good movie” territory. Past Lives is a solid romantic drama with a unique hook of two childhood friends growing up apart and then meeting again decades later (which director Celine Song has said is semi-autobiographical and really strengthens the similarities to Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise). My main quibble is that the movie felt like it was a little too short, which negatively impacted the character development – even just another 10 minutes of running time probably would have helped in this regard. Still, it’s pretty impressive for a directorial debut, and I’m curious as to what Celine Song does for her next movie.
8. American Fiction
American Fiction was the last movie I watched from the nominees (since it was only released on streaming a few days before the Oscars), but it’s certainly not the least of them. It’s an excellent satire of how many African-American stories get reduced to stereotypes to retain popular appeal (and then goes back to criticize that point as well). I really enjoyed the acting in American Fiction – Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown are the standouts, but all the performances are quite good. If I had to criticize something, it’s that the movie feels a bit overstuffed for its two hour running time by juggling the satire and a family drama plot, but it’s still enjoyable.
7. Poor Things
I went in to Poor Things having no real idea what it was about, with the only two things I knew being 1) Emma Stone’s character is a woman brought back from the dead and 2) it has a lot of sex scenes. As it turns out, this wildly understated how weird and funny Poor Things is… as well as just how central the sex scenes are to the plot (and just how many there are). It’s an incredibly feminist and comedic take on Frankenstein at its core, and is pretty much impossible to predict (in a good way). It’s somewhat telling that when I and others in the audience reacted to plot revelations with audible exclamations of “What.”, characters in the movie reacted identically, as though director Yorgos Lanthimos is fully aware that yes, the movie is completely unhinged. At some points, it almost feels too weird, but that didn’t keep me from bursting out laughing throughout the movie, with Mark Ruffalo’s role as an idiot lothario being especially fun.
5. Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest (tied)
Sandra Hüller has had quite the 2023, being in not just one, but two movies nominated for Best Picture (and being nominated for Best Actress for her performance in Anatomy of a Fall). Both Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest are excellent, but in different ways. The former kept me in suspense throughout as to whether lead character Sandra actually killed her husband or if he killed himself – and as the courtroom drama ensues and more of their personal lives are shown, it arguably becomes less clear which is more likely. The Zone of Interest, meanwhile, is arguably completely non-suspenseful – as a historical drama, we know what Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss is doing in the camp and how it ultimately ends. Instead, the tension comes from seeing how he and his family live completely ordinary lives despite their home being literally right next to the concentration camp, with the occasional interruption from things like finding human bones and ashes in the river while going for a swim. Occasionally, the cracks in the facade grow wide enough to see the ugliness lying beneath the Hösses, such as when Hedwig Höss responds to a perceived slight from her housekeeper by casually remarking that she could “have [her] husband scatter her ashes across the fields.” And of course, the movie is a certain lock for Best Sound, with the near-constant sounds of the atrocities in Auschwitz (with no visual accompaniment) underscoring the horror of how wrong these people seem to be.
4. The Holdovers
The Holdovers had a lot of hype as a new heartwarming Christmas classic before I finally got to watching it, to the point that I suspected it wouldn’t be able to live up to it. Naturally, I was totally wrong – The Holdovers is excellent, and it says a lot about the calibre of nominees this year that it doesn’t feel like a near-certain lock for Best Picture. Paul Giamatti, Da’vine Joy Randolph, and Dominic Sessa all turn in excellent performances that kept me laughing (and occasionally close to tears). It not only manages to capture the aesthetics of 1970, but in a nice touch is even deliberately filmed in a way to make it look like a movie made in that year. You’d have to be a real Scrooge to not enjoy this movie.
3. Killers of the Flower Moon
Martin Scorsese’s latest does a superb job of showing a horrifically racist system. Every criminal involved in the plot to seize the wealth of the Osage, from Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo diCaprio) and King Hale (Robert de Niro) to the various other goons involved, is not just absurdly greedy and racist, but also incredibly stupid (we’re talking something out of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but played seriously). Yet somehow they manage to get away largely scot-free for much of the movie, and even when caught get fairly light sentences for all their crimes (which explicitly includes blowing up homes and attempting to murder children for their money). Everything about the movie is meant to evoke a sense of dread for the plight of the Osage, including Lily Gladstone’s Mollie Burkhart. The movie is incredibly long at 3.5 hours, but there’s so much going on that I’m not sure it would be possible to cut it down even further. It says something about Scorsese’s career that from any other director, this would be considered their magnum opus, but for him is “pretty good, but not necessarily their best work.”
2. Barbie
The Barbenheimer phenomenon was a wild moment in movie history, and it’s only appropriate that the movies involved were two of my favorites from 2023 despite being wildly different. Barbie likely won’t snag Best Picture or any of the acting awards this year because of the strong competition (but I can hope for “I’m Just Ken” to get Best Original Song!). Despite that, I just had so much fun watching this in theatres that I had to put it up here. I was laughing pretty much the whole time, even when (or maybe especially) it felt like the movie was poking fun at me specifically (I really need to make sure I don’t talk about The Godfather too much from now on). Yes, it’s incredibly on the nose in its satire of patriarchy, but that’s part of the fun. That’s without even getting into Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling’s performances as Barbie and Ken (I cannot stress enough that Margot Robbie should have gotten a Best Actress nomination for this role) and the delight of the visuals in the movie. In fact, even writing about Barbie makes me feel like rewatching the movie.
1. Oppenheimer
In a shocking twist, the guy who’s interested enough in nuclear deterrence to do a PhD on it (and blog about it once in a while) considers the movie about the development of the atomic bomb to be the best film of 2023. I won’t go on for too long about Oppenheimer (I’ve already blogged about it here before), so I’ll just say that I think it’s Christopher Nolan’s best movie yet and manages to justify its big budget by casting what feels like every notable actor in the business in even minor roles. It feels like a miracle that a movie like this could be made now, and I can see it racking up a ton of wins at the Oscars (as it has at seemingly every other major awards ceremony for 2023 so far).
It’s strange to think that (as of writing) it’s now been 3 years since I submitted the final version of my dissertation (post-defence and post-revisions) and applied to graduate from my PhD program. Doing a PhD was definitely a challenging journey – all told, it took up about 5.5 years of my life from the start of the program in the fall of 2015 to the dissertation defence in December 2020. There were plenty of ups and downs during the process right up until the very end. While I (eventually) learned to adjust to the… unique demands of a PhD program, it admittedly would have been nice to know at least some of what I learned from the start. Thinking about it inspired me to try writing out these ideas so that current and prospective PhD students can benefit (even if they end up going “well yeah, that’s obvious”). I did consult on some points with a fellow PhD who graduated from the same program (and has asked to remain nameless; if that changes, I’ll edit this to fully credit them), but we were in general agreement on what should be emphasized here.
Note: Everything written below is from the perspective of someone who did a social sciences PhD full-time. Someone doing their studies in a field of harder sciences (e.g. physics, chemistry) or is doing a PhD alongside a full-time job may not find this helpful because of the nature of the work they need to do for their research or plain old time constraints. Additionally, this list is going to be a little blunt sometimes about the challenges people face doing a PhD, since I felt doing otherwise is outright detrimental to people thinking about starting a program. I’d rather they be able to make a fully informed decision about such a major commitment (even if it leads them to decide against it). I’m also not going to talk about the dissertation defence process here, since I already wrote about my experiences with that here quite a while ago.
And with that, on with the list!
Think about whether you want to do a PhD for the “right” reasons: One thing I noticed in my program was how some people said they wanted to do a PhD because they loved learning or that it would help their career. While the former is certainly commendable, you have to ask yourself: do you love learning so much that you’re willing to spend all your time on it, including giving up a lot of income? (Also important: PhDs don’t exactly pay well unless you’re a master of getting grants.) Because you can probably get just as much out of looking up some reading lists online and reading academic books in your free time. As for getting one to help your career, sure, it doesn’t hurt, but there aren’t many jobs out there that would require having a PhD. Most people are just as well off with just a Master’s degree in a relevant field and spending the time getting work experience instead. If you’re going to try and commit to the 5-7 years (or more!) needed to earn a PhD, you should be doing it because you not only enjoy doing research, but want to make a career out of it.
Make sure you’re researching something that you’re passionate about, not just because it’s cool: This is going to be a recurring theme in this post, but doing a PhD is a massive commitment. It may be tempting to focus your research on a hot new topic, but unless it’s something you’re really passionate about, think it over! Like everywhere else in life, trends in research come and go, and what’s popular in year 1 of your PhD may be considered passé halfway through year 4. Just as importantly, if you’re only interested in your research topic because it’s a popular subject, you may find yourself caring less and less about it over time. Getting through a PhD is hard enough as is, so don’t make it harder on yourself by researching something you’re ultimately not that interested in. Focusing on something you feel genuinely passionate about will help keep you motivated when researching and writing. If it’s a well-established topic, it doesn’t stop you from making a novel research contribution either (and if anything, there’ll be enough existing work in the field to give you a strong base to build on). From my own experience, I was still able to come up with a novel research topic relating to nuclear deterrence even though it’s a field that’s been around since the 1940s. The fact that it’s a subject I cared about (and still do!) helped me get through the sheer mountain of books and articles that I read as part of the dissertation research.
Think carefully about your choice of supervisor: Your dissertation supervisor plays a massive role in a PhD: they not only review your work, advise you, and give the OK for when you’re ready to defend, but they can bring up research opportunities and act as a reference for grants and job applications. Who you ask to be your supervisor, in short, can make or break your chances of getting a PhD and your future career. You should research possible supervisors before you even apply to a program, and choose where you go based on the most suitable choices (where you end up going, however, will depend on where you’re accepted). If possible, you can even try getting in touch with them directly (email is the way to go) to gauge their willingness to supervise you and ask current students what they’re like. (After all, you don’t want to end up with a supervisor who’s a jerk or unhelpful!).
You should also consider taking similar care in choosing the other members of your dissertation committee. While they’re not as important as your supervisor, they’ll still play a major role in getting your dissertation ready for the defence, so asking the right people is still crucial. You can be a little more flexible regarding their expertise in your specific field (but make sure it’s still at least somewhat related), but you should make sure that they have the time and the willingness to review your work throughout the writing process. Be sure the members of your committee will at least get along with each other – the last thing you want is old rivalries flaring up with you in the middle of it all.
Do your due diligence when looking up possible supervisors to avoid going through your own PhD horror story (Source: Times Higher Education)
Treat the PhD like it’s a job: It can be easy for people doing a PhD to either dedicate all their time to it or slack off and just work on it once in a while. The former approach is a surefire way to burn out, and the latter is likely going to either have to rush to meet some deadlines or be forced to leave the program because they passed the maximum number of years. If you’re doing a PhD, it’s to your benefit to instead treat it like a full-time job (albeit one that likely requires more time than a 9-5 would). To this end, I recommend the following:
Set a work schedule and stick to it: Following a consistent schedule will do a lot to make sure you keep a regular pace in researching and writing. If you find you’re more productive during certain hours (say, if you get more writing done in the morning), try and set your schedule accordingly. At the same time, it also helps in keeping you from overworking yourself by giving a cutoff time. You’ll likely end up working on weekends as well, in which case you may want to have an altered schedule to give yourself some more free time to do other things.
Have a set workspace: keeping a space dedicated to work does a lot to not only help you focus, but also avoid the feeling that PhD work is encroaching on the rest of your life. The ideal would be having a dedicated home office, or at least a proper desk, which you can mentally associate with work and use to keep everything organized; working from your couch or kitchen table is something you should try avoiding if possible to reduce distractions. If your department has offices for PhD students (even shared ones), consider working from there during weekdays, which also has the advantage of giving you opportunities to actually interact with other human beings instead of becoming a hermit.
Take regular breaks: Most jobs are required to give you a lunch break and break periods during the day, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t do the same during your PhD studies. Chances are that you won’t be able to maintain your focus on work for the entire day and will end up getting distracted – taking some time to let your brain unwind will likely help you be more productive. Even better, use your breaks to get in some exercise, even if it’s something as simple as going outside for a short walk (although if you live someplace with weather like Ottawa, this may not be feasible due to it being too cold/too hot/being struck by a tornado).
Set some boundaries between your PhD work and your life: Tying into the above point, it’s all too easy for people to hyperfocus on the PhD and neglect just about everything else. This is, to put it mildly, a Bad Idea: PhD students aren’t machines, and need downtime like everyone else. Draw a line in the sand and make sure you have time for other things in life. Besides keeping a regular routine (no, you can’t neglect your hygiene to get more done for your dissertation), make sure you still spend time with family and friends (or at least talk to them), get some fresh air, and do something for fun once in a while. Again, this might not always be possible, but making an effort to have something resembling non-PhD-related time in your life is going to do wonders for your mental health.
Being smart helps, but it’s not the biggest predictor of success: Sure, you need to show that you’re reasonably smart to get into a PhD program in the first place, but it takes more than that to actually get that degree. People need a certain degree of endurance, if not outright stubbornness, to make it to the end. You’re inevitably going to face a lot of feedback on your work, if not outright criticism and rejection, and you need to either be able to handle it out of the gate or toughen up as you go if you want to avoid wanting to quit. If anything, someone who has had to work hard in school beforehand and earned decent to good grades is likely to be better-equipped to handle a PhD program than someone who’s been able to breeze their way through previous degrees. The former is going to know how to handle criticism and challenges, while the latter are going to have to learn to do that to avoid breaking down under the pressure. Or as @IRHotTakes put it:
Like, B student in high school, 29-30ish on the ACT, too much of a hater to ever quit is going to have a much better time of things than a straight As in high school, perfect ACT score guy with a glass jaw who has never got knocked down and had to pick himself back up.
— Open Source Stupidity (OSSTU) Starfish (@IRHotTakes) January 16, 2024
Try to submit work to conferences and journals: While it’s tempting to become laser-focused on producing a dissertation, it’s actually to your benefit to try and do some extra work on the side to get your ideas out there. While it can be daunting to submit articles to journals for review and publication (thanks to increasingly lengthy review processes and the dreaded foe known as Reviewer Two), it’s still crucial for getting publications in an academic job market that treasures them above almost any other qualification. Submitting a paper for presentation at a conference is generally much easier due to everyone’s work still being in progress (paying the conference and travel fees to attend are a whole other story, even if you get departmental funding), and gives you an opportunity to meet new people in your field. Whichever way you go, you should consider using material you’ve researched and written as part of your dissertation (for instance, a rough version of a chapter edited to be more standalone) to not only make it easier, but to use this as an opportunity to get feedback on your research and get ideas. You should also consider talking to fellow PhD students in your area of research or members of your committee about working together on a paper / journal submission; while this will be more work (especially if your co-authors don’t contribute as much!), it can also lead to better paper by combining different areas of expertise and skillsets.
Yes, Reviewer 2 is a dread and terrible foe, but one you’ll have to face off with if you want to build up those publications (Source: Reviewer 2 Memes)
Don’t neglect socializing with your fellow PhD students: One thing I noticed during my PhD studies is that some people in the program acted as though everyone else was their competition, which didn’t do very much to endear them to others. This is a terrible approach, since the only things you could possibly be competing for are scholarships: it’s not like the university has an arbitrary limit on the number of PhDs they’ll hand out at the end, after all. If anything, getting along with your peers in your PhD program will do a lot to help you get through to the end. After all, most of your friends and family probably won’t understand the kinds of challenges you’re dealing with in the program (unless you know a lot of people who already have PhDs of their own or some other advanced degree, like an MD). Your fellow PhD students, on the other hand, will know exactly what you’re going through, since they’re going through it at the same time! (We definitely all commiserated together over the stress of comprehensive exams, that’s for sure.) On top of this, other PhD students (whether in your department or elsewhere) can give you ideas on your research that you may not have thought of, despite (or sometimes even because of) their different areas of expertise. (Fun fact: people specializing in economics can grasp nuclear deterrence ideas pretty quickly, since the latter field was heavily influenced by economists early on!)
The real challenge is going to be actually hanging out with PhD students; after all, as I kept repeating earlier, it’s very easy for people to hyper-focus on their PhD work to the exclusion of all else. Trying to organize something ends up being a major challenge as a result, since everyone feels too busy to interact with other human beings. In my program, this got to the point that I and several others joked that trying to organize something with PhD students was like trying to herd cats. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible, however; you just need to set expectations accordingly. Chances are you’ll have an easier time just hanging out with people around the department and grabbing some coffee on campus.
Even if all this sounds unappealing to you for some reason (maybe you’re just not very social or don’t especially like the people in your program), you should at the very least try to stay civil to avoid creating a hostile environment. Treating other PhD students as rivals is only going to give you a bad reputation in the long run, which is going to (probably) hurt you career-wise.
If you’re running into issues with the program, or even just how it’s making you feel, talk with others instead of internalizing it: For most of us, a PhD program is not a walk in the park, mentally speaking. Maybe you’ll get frustrated with aspects of your program or department. Maybe you end up feeling imposter syndrome and wondering whether you should actually be there, or you’re making much less progress than you expected. Maybe it’s even something else, like worrying about finances. No matter what, you may be tempted to just hold it in and not bother others. Like in many other career/educational paths, this is a terrible idea that’s bound to make you feel worse. You’re much better off talking over your issues with someone else. This could be friends or family, although they may not necessarily “get” some of the issues with doing a PhD if they don’t have much experience with an advanced degree themselves (but can still lend a sympathetic ear regardless). Try to also talk with your supervisor (especially if you think it’s affecting your dissertation work), your colleagues, or maybe even a counsellor if there’s one available on your campus (be prepared for a potentially long time to get an appointment).
Have some hobbies: Yes, doing a PhD will take up a lot of your time, and yes, chances are you aren’t going to be exactly flush with cash if you’re doing it full-time (unless you have some hefty grants or family supporting you). But using some of your precious free time for some kind of hobby (or even multiple hobbies) will help you out a lot. The most important part, of course, is that it’ll help your brain rest after spending most of your time thinking about the PhD – after all, chances are that you’ll be spending even your free time thinking, so actively occupying yourself with something else will, counter-intuitively, be relaxing. You can also treat your hobby time as something of a reward for working, which can help motivate you a bit. Depending on the hobby, it may also keep you social and/or active. Some hobbies may even relate to your research topic, but in a more relaxing way. In my case, I made sure to make time for leisure reading, including continuing to participate in a monthly book club, which occasionally helped dig up something relevant for my dissertation (I hadn’t originally thought of citing Ronan Bergman’s Rise and Kill First, for example, but it was a handy reference). I also ended up getting into model building as a way of relaxing, since it usually takes enough focus that you basically can’t think about anything else at the same time, and also had the bonus of getting me into a local builder’s group.
As a bonus, they also added some decor to my desk and shelves(besides all the books)
Expect the unexpected: Everyone’s PhD experience is going to be different to some degree, but one thing that is consistent is that things won’t always go as planned. This could range from (relatively) minor things like not finding the source you wanted or needing to make more revisions than you planned for to more significant obstacles like not finding enough support for your hypotheses. Being able to adapt to these obstacles, rather than flailing in a blind panic about things going wrong, is crucial to getting through the PhD. (OK, you can take a few minutes of flailing in panic at first, but then work on solving your problems). In my case, for instance, I had my initial supervisor leave the department for family reasons right after I defended my dissertation proposal (which did involve a funny moment when the email he sent to inform me arrived right after I sent him a draft, which was followed by a hasty addendum that it was sheer coincidence). I ended up needing to find a new supervisor, which was a problem considering the only other professor in the department who was an exact fit for my topic was too swamped at the time to take me on. (Luckily I was on good terms with another professor with close enough expertise to make it work). As for the curveballs involved in the actual defence process, I wrote a whole blog post about that, which you should read to get an idea of how preparing for a defence goes anyways. (Be warned that at least two people have told me that reading it gave them panic attacks about their own defences.)
Try to set a daily writing goal: This bit of advice comes not from academia, but horror writer Stephen King. In his book On Writing (which has good advice for any writers, including academics), he advises keeping to a daily writing goal, keeping in mind that you should “set this goal low at first, to avoid discouragement (p.155).” While his own goal of starting with 1,000 words a day may not necessarily be feasible for everyone – it’s much harder when you have to stick to citations! – the spirit of this advice is very much applicable. I personally kept to a few hundred words a day at minimum, but you may want to do more (or less than this). This writing doesn’t need to be polished – your main focus is getting your thoughts on the page, where you can edit them at your leisure. Keep your goal realistic so that you can hit it with relative consistency (everyone has off days), and consider increasing it as you go. (And don’t count writing references towards this – you’re only creating the illusion of progress that way.)
Make like the Master of Horror and try to hit those daily writing goals – but maybe follow an outline along the way instead of improvising and ending up with a poor ending (Source: NPR)
You will never have a perfect draft: There’s a common saying in academia that “A good dissertation is a done dissertation,” and like the best expressions, it’s very true. Focusing on making a dissertation perfect, whether in draft or final form, is a futile endeavour that’ll just drive you crazy. For starters, even writing the rough drafts is going to take you forever, and trying to make your chapters flawless will make this exponentially worse. On top of that, you’re going to have do edit everything anyways because your supervisor and committee are going to point out things that need changing, both large and small. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make an effort to keep things presentable – sloppy work is going to be dimly viewed, after all. But your first focus in writing should be getting your ideas out there in a coherent manner, then cleaning things up. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself running out of time and/or money for tuition rather than getting that degree you worked so hard for.
A PhD is a marathon, not a sprint: No matter how hard you work, a PhD will take years to complete. You might think that if you work from 8 AM to midnight 7 days a week with no vacations, you’ll finish faster, but 1) no you won’t, and 2) you’re just going to burn yourself out fast. If anything, trying to maintain maximum effort constantly is going to end up making you take longer to get your dissertation ready to defend. Much like a marathon, you’re better off going at a steady pace to get to the end. There are some times where you may have to ignore this and do things like work until the early hours of the morning to meet a deadline, but with good planning you can keep this to a minimum. I was lucky in that this really only happened once, when I foolishly committed to getting two chapter drafts to my committee before the Christmas holidays and ended up working until 2:30 AM to wrap them up. Unfortunately, I was also so tired from it that I failed to actually finish the conclusion for one of the chapters (as in a sentence just trailed off and left the paragraph unfinished) and didn’t notice until I went back to it a few weeks later, which was… awkward.
Also, definitely don’t try to cram everything in at the end unless you want to destroy yourself
Check in with your committee regularly: One of the best things you can do while working on your dissertation is checking in with members of your committee regularly. This not only means giving them drafts as you go along so they can provide feedback on your work, but also meeting with them (or at least emailing) to give updates on your progress. This does a lot to make sure everyone is on the same page – after all, if you’re doing something that your committee members think will hurt your dissertation, it’s better to find out early on than right when you’re getting ready to submit it before the defence. And while you can apply to defend your dissertation without your supervisor’s approval, this… tends to not go well – don’t do it if you can help it.
If you find things are getting too difficult, there’s no shame in taking leave or even quitting the program: Maybe you find yourself hitting a wall in your research repeatedly. Maybe you have a bad relationship with your supervisor to the point of having shouting matches (I’ve definitely heard some of those happening!). Maybe you’re running low on funds or got an offer for an interesting job that pays a living wage. Maybe there are family problems that you need to prioritize. Maybe you’ve concluded that you actually don’t want to spend your life doing research. Whatever it is, you’re dealing with something that makes you wonder if you should be continuing with the PhD. First of all, you should follow my earlier advice and talk to someone (or better yet, multiple someones) about this before deciding what to do. If you’re still facing problems, departments tend to let you go on leave from your studies for a certain period of time, which you should look into. If that isn’t enough, or if you consider the problem to be something with the PhD program itself, quitting is something on the table. Yes, it’s tempting to rule it out after all the time and effort you’ve put into your work – especially if you’re near the end of your PhD – but in some cases it may be the healthiest option. As for feeling ashamed about it, you shouldn’t – most people don’t finish a PhD as is, and you should be focusing on what’s best for you and not just what others think. Again, have plenty of discussions with friends, family, and colleagues to make sure that it’s the right move. For the most part, taking a leave of absence is probably enough, but don’t take all your options off the table either.
Last week, I was surprised, much like everyone else, to find out that Henry Kissinger, the infamous former national security advisor, Secretary of State, and academic, had died at the age of 100. The surprise came less from the fact that a centenarian had died, but more that it happened after Kissinger had outlived so many other notable figures of the 20th century (to the point that he even outlived one of the journalists who had written his obituary).
Considering that Kissinger was such a divisive figure in life, it isn’t surprising that the debate over his legacy erupted roughly two minutes after his death was announced. The headlines ranged from praising him as a masterful statesman and diplomat to condemning him as a war criminal and one of the worst Americans of the post-WWII period. This is without even getting into the many, many, many memes about his death (suffice it to say that Kissinger was not what could be called popular among generations of Internet users, save as perhaps an easy target for devil jokes).
Given all this, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to try and assess Kissinger’s long, long, long career in foreign policy. To keep things somewhat tidy and organized, I’ve divided things into two lists – positives and negatives. (Spoiler: the negatives outweigh the positives, and even the positives aren’t that great.)
Positives
Most obviously, it’s very hard to deny that Kissinger’s efforts to establish diplomatic relations between the US and China in the 1970s weren’t a masterful diplomatic effort. Beyond the obvious issues of being well into the Cold War and President Richard Nixon’s ardent anti-Communism, China at the time was a very diplomatically isolated country. Kissinger managed to pull this off with not just steady negotiations, but also careful coordination with Romania and Pakistan and even secret visits (at one point pretending to be seriously ill in Pakistan and then sneaking out of the country in disguise to avoid drawing attention). On the other hand, Kissinger was very opposed to the effort in the first place, to the point of thinking Nixon had lost his mind when suggesting it in 1969 (making his wholehearted embrace of China later on even more opportunistic and self-serving in hindsight).
On the academic side of things, Kissinger’s 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy was very significant in nuclear deterrence theory at the time. In particular, it was highly critical of the Eisenhower administration’s strategy of massive retaliation (TLDR: responding to every threat to the US by nuking it). Kissinger instead proposed a flexible response strategy, which combined conventional forces and the use of tactical nuclear weapons for a more gradual escalation in war. While this may seem pretty obvious now, keep in mind that when Kissinger wrote the book, the concept of nuclear deterrence was only about a decade old, so a flexible response was considered incredibly novel. (That being said, the argument of using tactical nuclear weapons for limited nuclear war was controversial even at the time, so this still isn’t wholly positive.)
One of the major ways that Kissinger had a negative impact was his actively contributing to Nixon’s efforts to sabotage negotiations between North and South Vietnam to win the 1968 presidential election. Specifically, Kissinger passed on information on the negotiations he obtained from US diplomats to H. R. Haldeman, the campaign chief of staff and later White House chief of staff. Haldeman who in turn informed the South Vietnamese government to encourage them to boycott the negotiations until Nixon was elected. The scheme, later known as the Chennault Affair, would at best have been incredibly underhanded and at worst an outright violation of the Logan Act, which criminalizes efforts by US citizens to interfere in diplomatic efforts.
Kissinger’s famous realpolitik approach to foreign policy was largely reliant on supporting various dictators in exchange for their helping US foreign policy goals. This meant that the Nixon and Ford administrations either turned a blind eye to various atrocities and at worst tacitly supported them. Most notably, Kissinger and Nixon chose to not interfere with the West Pakistani government’s 1971 invasion of Bangladesh and the subsequent genocide, and even actively ended the careers of diplomats who condemned it, including Ambassador Archer Blood. In their eyes, Pakistan’s help in establishing diplomatic relations was worth ignoring crimes against humanity (and getting angry about India becoming involved in the conflict).
As part of this, Kissinger was also a major supporter of the US stepping up its bombing campaign against Cambodia to drive out North Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong in the country, passing along orders from Nixon to bomb anything that moved. The estimates are that the 500,000 tons of bombs dropped on Cambodia during 1969-1973 killed 50,000 to 150,000 Cambodians. On top of that, the bombing also helped set the groundwork for the Khmer Rouge to take over Cambodia and then carry out its own genocide.
While Kissinger did help negotiate peace with North Vietnam in the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, it ultimately proved pointless, since both North and South Vietnam immediately began ignoring the Accords and North Vietnam ultimately took over the rest of the country by April 1975. It essentially served as a fig leaf to cover the US withdrawal from Vietnam after leaving the region in shambles. His subsequent Nobel Peace Prize was hugely controversial as a result (even among members of the committee), although Kissinger gets some slight credit for trying to return the prize.
On top of establishing the conditions for coups to take place in some countries, Kissinger also actively supported coups in democratic countries, particularly in Latin America. Chile is especially notable, since there are plenty of documents showing that Kissinger was a major architect of efforts to destabilize Salvador Allende’s government with the explicit goal of allowing his government to be overthrown or collapse. Once Augusto Pinochet did just that and established a military junta in 1973, Kissinger then pushed to support his new government, even personally telling Pinochet that his government was better for US interests than Allende’s. And while Kissinger didn’t push for a similar military coup in Argentina in 1976, he also personally offered support for the new government’s efforts to stamp out human rights.
Finally, Kissinger deserves some condemnation for how he monetized the political connections he developed during his time in politics as a consultant. Dan Drezner goes into much more detail about this on his Substack (and credits Kissinger with the dubious distinction of pioneering “the for-profit third act of a career in public service), but the short version is that Kissinger’s post-politics career essentially consisted of getting paid to get clients close to people in power using his reputation. This would be merely sleazy if it wasn’t for the fact it also involved a lot of cozying up to dictators, including Chinese and Russian leaders. As a bonus, he would often force himself into diplomacy as a self-appointed intermediary, which anyone could tell you is less than desirable in any kind of negotiations. The emphasis on money is probably best exemplified, though, by the fact that Kissinger’s death wasn’t announced by his family, but by his consulting firm.
So unfortunately for Kissinger’s posthumous reputation, the negatives definitely outweigh the positives, at least in these circles. (Writing a major text on nuclear deterrence is nice and all, but doesn’t make up for the coups.) His legacy seems to be less cold and rational realpolitik to advance US interests and more a callous disregard for other countries while engage in self-aggrandizement and profiteering.
This October marked the 25th anniversary of the North American release of a game known as Metal Gear Solid. It was notable in several ways – the emphasis on stealth over fighting, the cinematic presentation, the fact it was fully voice-acted in 1998 – but what stands out most (at least to me) was how it took the usual premise of action movies and treated it with a great degree of realism. While there’s only so much you can do with “group of genetically enhanced soldiers go rogue and hijack a nuclear-weapon-armed giant robot,” director Hideo Kojima integrated multiple real-world considerations into the game. The most blatant of these was to justify having a giant robot with a railgun that could launch nuclear warheads across the globe was to be able to circumvent then-present nuclear disarmament treaties and conventional missile detection systems while being able to relocate itself before a counterstrike (it was very funny to find out years later that DARPA and Livermore National Laboratory were in fact real organizations and not just made up for the game). The success of the game led to it spawning multiple sequels and spin-offs over the years until Kojima was fired by Konami (the game’s publisher) in 2015 shortly before the release of Metal Gear Solid V. Each of the subsequent games continued to combine the realistic elements with fantastical ideas that Kojima and the other developers drew from pop culture into a surreal mix (besides having protagonists with codenames like Solid Snake, think cyborg ninjas and psychics reading your controller inputs alongside discussions of how memes can influence society and how soldiers are treated as disposable tools by politicians).
Also can’t emphasize the giant robot with a railgun for launching nuclear warheads enough. (Which is also designed to roar like the T-Rex it’s named after for… intimidation, I guess?)
What’s especially interesting is that as the Metal Gear series went on, it began to make predictions of the future that, while far-fetched when the games came out, seemed to be close to reality, if not outright prescient. Given the above anniversary, the fact that the first few games have finally been re-released on consoles that I actually own (and can actually play them myself now), and the constant anti-nuclear weapon stance of the series – which I’ve not only mentioned on this blog in the past, but in hindsight probably helped me become interested in the subject in the first place – I thought now is a good time to look back on the things Metal Gear predicted. Most of these came up in three particular games – Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001), Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (2008), and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (2013) – so I’ll largely focus on those. As a warning to anyone who may be interested in trying the games at some point, I’ll be discussing major plot points liberally, so SPOILER WARNING.
Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001)
Predicting 9/11: This is probably the most obvious prediction that the game made, although not in a way any of the developers intended. Specifically, the final sequence of the game featured a large vehicle being hijacked and crashed into into Manhattan by terrorists, causing massive casualties and damage to the city (ironically, not to the World Trade Center itself). What’s notable is that the September 11th attacks occurred only three days before the game was scheduled to be finalized (and just two months before its release), with development having begun back in 1999. This actually led to some very frantic discussions (including Kojima offering to cancel the game and resign) and last-minute changes, with most of the imagery being cut out of the game.
Yeah, this probably would have caused a firestorm of controversy back in 2001.
Government monitoring of Internet traffic: One of the major revelations that occurred late in the game is that the US government (at the behest of the Patriots, the secret conspiracy controlling it – more on that later) is engaging in widespread surveillance of Internet activity using AIs. This basically predicted the 2002 PATRIOT Act and other US programs, such as the NSA’s PRISM program, to monitor Internet traffic. However, the intended goal in MGS 2 was to also censor Internet traffic as part of a broader effort to engage in large-scale social manipulation, which is arguably more in line with what the Chinese government has done with its “Great Firewall” for the past decade or so. The AI aspect of this could, however, be prescient as well given concerns that real-world AI could be used for censorship purposes. (Hopefully the AI would be less… disturbing than the fake Colonel who’s running things in the game.)
Social manipulation through fake news: This is one topic where MGS 2 was very much ahead of the curve. Not only is the use of fake news on social media for social manipulation a major revelation in the game, it’s also referenced specifically in regards to the Patriots using fake news to manipulate the results of US presidential elections to get their puppet candidate elected. The game even goes so far as to predict that people would withdraw “into their own gated community… leaking whatever “truth” suits them,” and if that’s not a prediction of people creating echo chambers on social media that tune out facts inconsistent with their worldview, I don’t know what it is. Considering how the possibility of fake news circulating on social media influencing US presidential election results was a major concern in 2016 and 2020 (to say nothing of other elections and even the Brexit referendum), this prediction is unsettlingly accurate, to say the least. The COVID-19 pandemic only made this worse with disinformation encouraging and exacerbating various conspiracy theories. Ironically enough, while real-world disinformation has led to conspiracy theories like QAnon, which lead people to think the world is run by a secret elite cabal, MGS has an actual secret elite cabal which is using disinformation to cover up their existence.
Far-right American terrorist and militia groups: Much like the first game, MGS 2 features a squad of quirky elite soldiers going rogue as the main antagonists (emphasis on the quirky part here – it’s probably the most polite way to describe characters like Fatman, a heavily overweight bombmaker who spends his boss battle zipping around on roller skates while sipping from a bottle of wine with a straw). What makes them stand apart is their choice of name and goals: they’re referred to as Dead Cell until they take over the Big Shell oil cleanup rig, at which point they not-so-subtly rebrand themselves as the Sons of Liberty (yes, as in from the American Revolution). On top of that, their goal is slowly revealed to be to “liberate” Manhattan by detonating a nuclear weapon above it and generating an EMP, cutting it off from the unaccountable leaders of the rest of the country (yes, the parallels to the American Revolution are completely unsubtle).
Hideo Kojima’s approach to writing video game plots, essentially.
Back in 2001, this certainly would have been controversial, but not exactly prescient. After all, the US has had issues with violent ultranationalist and far-right groups for a long time – incidents like the Oklahoma City bombing were still relatively fresh at the time. But the rise of the Tea Party and Freedom Caucus movements in the Republican Party, along with militia groups like the Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, and Proud Boys (some of which are considered terrorist groups, at least in here in Canada), makes this more unsettling than likely intended, especially when thinking about their participation in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. For extra fun, the in-game Sons of Liberty not only work with Russians (albeit a mercenary company), but take their orders from a former American president who left office clouded by the scandal of his handling of a national crisis and is trying to use force to seize power again.
Now granted, Solidus Snake is ahead of Trump by being a) competent, b) actually following up on his threats and fighting people instead of blustering, and c) not being horrifically bigoted.
That last part may seem absurdly on the nose, but don’t worry, this isn’t the only time MGS managed to predict what Trump would do as president before he was even nominated…
Metal Gear Solid 4 (2008)
Increasing reliance on autonomous weapons: One of the major elements that was introduced in MGS 4 (besides the neverending wars fought with mercenaries – more on that later) are the Gekko, essentially fully autonomous mini Metal Gears roaming the battlefield on two legs as infantry combat vehicles. While drones were hardly unknown in 2008 (and the earliest autonomous vehicles date all the way back to World War I), the Gekko seem to have presaged not only developments in fully autonomous drones, but also bipedal robots for use on the battlefield. Mind you, they’re certainly very different from actual military-use robots, which tend to swing between bipedal robots that provide support and what amount to small, remotely-controlled tanks. We’re still not at the point of fully autonomous machines that can attack and kill targets without human input, but it’s not out of reason anymore either – and it’s naturally raised lots of ethical and practical debate about their use. (Given the Metal Gear Solid series’ antiwar themes, it’s unsurprising that their use is universally depicted as making wars worse).
Well, one thing you can say for modern robots: you don’t have to worry about them kicking you (yet).
Increasing use of mercenaries in warfare: The other major element of the setting introduced in the game is how wars are essentially fought entirely by private military companies (PMCs) – more bluntly, mercenaries – to the point that they not only outnumber the military forces of states, but perpetuate an economy fuelled entirely by armed conflict. While the real world is nowhere near that bad, it’s hard to deny that PMCs have grown since the Cold War ended, and especially since the late 2000s. They’ve grown to not only provide security, but in some cases act as outright proxies for states to supplement their armed forces. Russian PMCs are the most obvious example of this recently, with companies like Wagner acting as force multipliers in Ukraine and as a way of spreading Russian influence abroad, particularly in African conflict zones. It’s even been argued that the general increase in PMCs can pose issues for state legitimacy – after all, if states have often been considered the sole legitimate users of force within their borders, what does it mean for their sovereignty when there’s private companies dedicated entirely to fighting?
Military use of computers for emotional regulation: This one is a little more out of left field – as part of the theme of war being damaging to people who fight them, MGS 4 has soldiers dosed with nanomachines to regulate their emotions as a way of ensuring they can keep fighting despite trauma and essentially have a constant high from endorphins, as well as serving as an authentication system for weapons. When those nanomachines get turned off, things get… bad. This is one element that I thought was completely fantastical and didn’t originally consider including. But as I thought about it, it does seem to (somewhat) echo efforts in creating brain-computer interfaces (although with less gruesome results than say, Neuralink). In fact, it turns out there was a project funded in 2014 by DARPA (boy, is that on the nose) to develop brain chips. At least this project is more positive than the MGS prediction, given that it’s meant to help treat PTSD in veterans.
Trump… just Trump: Alright, so picture a physically large man with over-the-top speech and mannerisms who’s largely gotten through life via his personal wealth rather than any real skills of his own and has a demeanor so absurdly callous that he’s responsible for large numbers of children being separated from their families and imprisoned in cages. On top of all that, he’s also entered politics with views that are blatantly far-right, rants about how American society and Washington are corrupt and need to be torn down, and is willing to use violence to Make America Great Again and more “free” (or at least how he interprets it).
If you’ve read the past few sentences and immediately thought “well, that’s clearly Donald Trump,” you’re right, but it’s also Revengeance‘s main villain, Senator Steven Armstrong. Granted, there’s a few key differences – Armstrong is so right-wing enough that it somehow loops around to anarchism (as opposed to being a fascist sympathizer at best), is imprisoning children to use them as child soldiers instead of being virulently racist, and enhances his body with nanomachines so that he can fight a cyborg ninja (again, I can’t emphasize enough that this series can get very weird). But the key points are so similar that you’d think the developers came up with Armstrong as a response to the Trump administration…. Except that Revengeance came out in 2013, long before Trump even announced he was running for the Republican nomination in 2015. (It even had Armstrong planning to run in the 2020 presidential election!) Granted, it’s not these traits are uniquely Trumpian, but it’s somewhat unsettling that the grotesque, over-the-top parody ended up instead being an accurate prediction of how an actual American president would behave only a few years later.
What, you thought I was kidding about the “make America great again” reference?
Russian nuclear saber-rattling isn’t anything particularly new in the past few years – after all, the war with Ukraine has seen Vladimir Putin and various proxies/cronies make nuclear threats ranging from “somewhat subtle” to “more over-the-top than a comic book villain.” But the most recent moves by Russia on the nuclear front could have even broader implications – specifically, the decision last week to start taking steps to withdraw from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Withdrawing from the CTBT, which was adopted by most states in 1996 (but never actually entered into force thanks to several countries failing to ratify it), would be a first step for Russia to conduct nuclear test explosions. This is a big deal, since the treaty helped solidify a norm of not conducting test explosions (which is part of why it was a big deal that North Korea did so several times). The current situation in Ukraine not being especially favorable to Russia would certainly encourage this, and the repeated boasts of nuclear-powered missiles suggest those would be tested (even though the concept is hardly new and has long been considered an insane idea).
This seems to just be the latest in a series of blows to the nuclear arms control regime. It certainly isn’t the first time Russia has done something like this, as it suspended its participation in the New START treaty in February 2023. On top of that, other states are also working to expand their nuclear arsenals. Besides Russia, the US and China have also been working to increase the number of nuclear warheads in their stockpiles. This is especially notable with China, which historically has kept a relatively small nuclear arsenal meant for counter-attacking, and would suggest a major shift in its nuclear strategy. The rivalry between India and Pakistan means that both are believed to be building up their arsenals (in Pakistan’s case, primarily because it can’t win a conventional war with India), and North Korea is likewise continue to develop more nuclear weapons.
Other states, meanwhile, have given serious consideration to developing their own nuclear weapons. Iran remains a somewhat nebulous case of this since the Trump administration largely ruined the deal to freeze its nuclear program. While there don’t appear to be any moves to resume it at present, the Iranian government seems to have adopted a hedging strategy, using the potential threat of resuming it to maintain some leverage. If Iran’s nuclear program were to lead to a nuclear weapon, Saudi Arabia would almost certainly follow suit to maintain a level of parity with its rival. Even South Korea is facing increasing popular demand to develop nuclear weapons in response to North Korea’s capabilities, to the point that President Yoon Suk-yeol openly discussed the possibility earlier this year.
All of this doesn’t bode very well for efforts to limit the number of nuclear weapons. While some may point to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons as a possible way of limiting nuclear weapons, the reality is that the treaty is almost entirely symbolic. No nuclear weapon state, or even their allies, has even considered signing it, so while it’s been in force for over two years now, in practice it only signals that the 69 states that are party to it are against nuclear weapons.
This isn’t to say nuclear arms control is dead, per se. After all, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons still does a lot to discourage open pursuit of nuclear weapons by maintaining a norm against it, and inspections by the IAEA make it very difficult to run a covert nuclear weapons program. Other treaties, such as the African Nuclear Weapon Free Zone Treaty and the Latin America Nuclear Weapons Free Zone Treaty, still seem to be holding up in keeping members from building or hosting nuclear weapons.
However, it’s becoming clear that it’s not as strong as it used to be, and states are feeling increasingly emboldened to seriously consider starting domestic nuclear weapons programs or building up their existing arsenals. If history is any guide, this doesn’t bode well for future efforts to keep nuclear weapons limited. States that see their rivals develop nuclear weapons or expand existing arsenals will feel pressure to do so in kind just to maintain parity in order to avoid nuclear blackmail or conventional attacks under the cover of nuclear weapons. This can easily escalate into a nuclear arms race that, besides being incredibly costly, would increase tensions. At worst, it can lead to a security dilemma, as state efforts to defend themselves with a nuclear deterrent could be misconstrued as part of a plan to go on the offensive later on. That misperception can encourage states to act more aggressively to deter attacks, or even encourage pre-emptive strikes to destroy those offensive capabilities – in other words, the fear that an opponent is preparing for war can lead to war accidentally breaking out.
Unless states, especially nuclear-armed ones, take steps to build confidence that nuclear weapons won’t be used outside of very specific and clearly-designated circumstances, the risk of nuclear weapons being used will inevitably increase. Clear statements, emphasizing conventional forces, and self-imposed limits on nuclear weapons all go a long way to help in this regard. However, international arms control efforts that are universally (or at least near-universally) adopted and are uniformly enforced remain the best way to do this.
Despite some arguments over the movie, it’s hard to deny that Cillian Murphy looks eerily similar to the actual Oppenheimer. Photo taken from ScreenRant.
This post has been overdue for a few months now, since Oppenheimer – possibly the biggest movie touching on nuclear issues in decades – came out way back in July and I managed to see it opening weekend. (I didn’t go the full Barbenheimer route in seeing it back-to-back with Barbie, if only because I saw that a few days after. They’re bothexcellent, if you ask me.) I held off until now to write something because I felt it would be better to first read the book that Oppenheimer is largely based on, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s American Prometheus. (I won’t go into detail about how much I enjoyed the book, since I might write a proper book review for it later on, but the short version is: go get a copy right now).
Reading and watching both makes for an interesting experience: American Prometheus, as a fairly hefty biography, goes into great detail on not just Oppenheimer’s life, but also political and military developments surrounding nuclear weapons after the July 1945 Trinity test, while Oppenheimer gives a more nuanced discussion of the morality of nuclear weapons than most other movies would ever dare. (The movie’s been criticized for not directly showing the effects of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is a fair point, but it’s somewhat excusable due to the movie’s focus and the likelihood that keeping it accurate would likely push what’s acceptable for an R rating). Where they differ is in their focus: Oppenheimer‘s close focus on the titular scientist means that it doesn’t really touch on the Cold War arms race beyond brief mentions and as part of a background element for Lewis Strauss’ grudge against him. The H-bomb and Edward Teller’s outright obsession with developing it are shown, albeit briefly, though we don’t really get an idea of the full impact (or even the difference in scale between the original atomic bombs and a thermonuclear weapon).
American Prometheus, meanwhile, goes into considerable detail regarding these, as well as Oppenheimer’s shifting and complex views on arms control after the war (nowadays, opposing thermonuclear weapons while favoring plenty of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe would be an… interesting view). In large part, this can be excused by the fact that the movie is already 3 hours long while having to minimize certain details. One example I liked to point out to my family after they all got around to seeing Oppenheimer is that it doesn’t even go out of its way to highlight the presence of future Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, who only stands out in the movie due to 1) being played by Jack Quaid and 2) carrying his trademark bongos (sadly no reference to his cracking safes for pranking people). I do think that despite this, however, there could have been a bit more detail taken from the book – for instance, we don’t really get an idea of why thermonuclear weapons are bad in the movie beyond Teller being so into the idea that he turns against Oppenheimer, while the book makes it clear that they’re orders of magnitude more destructive.
Nor was there really much depiction of popular sentiment towards nuclear weapons – we get plenty on how Oppenheimer and his colleagues viewed them, as well as a taste of the Red Scare, but there’s plenty that requires some additional research to fully appreciate. It would have been interesting to see, for instance, how the American public largely favored nuclear weapons when they were first used, only for people to become gradually disgusted and terrified after developments like the publication of John Hersey’s book Hiroshima in 1946 and the Soviet Union’s first nuclear test in 1949, even if only in passing. (Honestly, some reference to the horrible effects of acute radiation syndrome, even if they used Louis Slotin’s accident with the Demon Core, would have been a helpful addition). As it is, Oppenheimer‘s focus is more on the horror of the bomb as an explosive (which the hallucination scene does an excellent job of doing) and how politicians and military officers are so focused on the need to have more to defend against external threats that they ignore the ramifications of a nuclear arms race. This is clearly a message that audiences could stand to have beaten over their heads, especially when we’re arguably at the start of a new nuclear arms race as I write this, but at least some allusion would have made the movie even better (although I can already hear the people I know who feel Oppenheimer was too long groaning at the idea of even more history being shoved in there).
Despite my nitpicking, though, there’s plenty for nuke buffs and neophytes alike in Oppenheimer, and if watching it gets more people interested in nuclear history, I feel like the faults can be overlooked easily enough. Stuff like my uncle picking up a copy of American Prometheus right after seeing the movie and spending a whole weekend reading it or getting to explain to my mother that yes, Truman appears to have actually been incredibly cold to Oppenheimer’s claim of having blood on his hands makes me think that it might actually do that. (Will it get members of the family to read an overly-long PhD dissertation on nuclear deterrence? … probably not.) If we’re lucky, it could even lead to some more nuclear-related movies in the future – we could certainly use some that aren’t completely divorced from reality. In the meantime, there area few that are worth watching (even if they sometimes work through the metaphor of “giant monster attacking Tokyo”).
Kim Jong-Un and Vladimir Putin meeting in Vladivostok on April 25, 2019. Source: CNBC.
It’s safe to say that over 19 months later, the invasion of Ukraine has not gone nearly as well for Russia as Vladimir Putin would have liked. Beyond getting an estimated 120,000 troops being killed and another 170,000 wounded (according to US estimates), having Wagner troops openly rebel and march on Moscow to remove the Minister of Defence from office, and becoming an international pariah, the invasion hasn’t even come close to achieving its goals in seizing Ukraine. While Russia is still a nuclear power, it’s increasingly clear that its military strength and international influence are on the decline due to what could be charitably described as a massive miscalculation by an isolated and egomaniacal leader. The biggest sign of this? It’s now turning to North Korea for arms to continue fighting in Ukraine, with Kim Jong Un having made a rare visit outside of his country to negotiate with Putin. (As is typical for him, he travelled by train to avoid being shot out of the sky – given what’s happened to people who displease Putin, a wise move).
This is a major reversal of fortunes for both countries on multiple levels. Historically, North Korea has been reliant on Russian support since it was founded in 1949. Military support from Stalin played a key role in allowing North Korea to keep fighting during the Korean War, and fears of outright Soviet involvement in the war kept the Eisenhower administration from going forward with potential plans to use nuclear weapons against North Korea. The Soviets continued providing financial support and arms sales to North Korea for decades, and alongside China was one of its only major allies. This began to fall apart when Leonid Brezhnev tried improving relations with South Korea in 1985, and largely halted by the time Boris Yeltsin became president of the Russian Federation. Most notably, arms sales were almost entirely in North Korea’s favor – the country was poor enough that these sales were on credit and never actually repaid (though they largely consisted of older Soviet surplus materiel). Despite these ties, relations between the two never really rose above being transactional, and occasionally grew quite tense thanks to North Korea being much more belligerent than the Soviets wanted. When doing the research for my dissertation, for example, it was clear from diplomatic cables and speeches that actions like capturing the USS Pueblo in 1968 and holding its crew hostage were condemned by Soviet leaders as an abuse of their alliance.
Russia’s pivot to North Korea as an arms supplier is fairly indicative of how far its fortunes seem to have fallen, but also makes a great degree of sense. Beyond the two using similar munitions, North Korea has also managed to keep itself (somewhat) afloat over the decades by acting as an arms dealer. Syria and Iran, have been two of its most notable customers, with Syria in particular having reportedly obtained chemical weapons and the designs for its nuclear reactor (which was destroyed in a 2007 airstrike) through these dealings. North Korea’s aggressive posture towards South Korea and the US has also encouraged it to orient most of its economy to defence production, which makes weapons ones of the few viable exports to countries willing to trade with it. (Unsurprisingly, this mostly goes to supporting Party elites and generals.)
In return for supplying Russia with much-needed ammo, North Korea has plenty it can ask for. Food aid would likely be a top priority: North Korea has often been on the brink of famine, if not outright suffering from it, which has led to mass death (with the Arduous March of 1994-97 leading to a conservative estimate of 600,000 -1,000,000 people starving to death and many more suffering long-term effects from malnourishment). Russia could also provide North Korea with much-needed spare parts for its vehicles and artillery, much of which dates back to the Cold War, and possibly even with more modern fighter jets to maintain some level of conventional parity with South Korea. North Korea’s military satellite program, while benefitting from domestic advancements in missile development, would likely also benefit from Russia support, possibly to the point of using one of Russia’s Cosmodromes.
All of this would naturally be problematic to South Korea, especially at a time when there is increasing support for developing a domestic nuclear arsenal. Despite the nuclear threat from North Korea, South Korea holds a massive conventional military advantage (even discounting US support), meaning that any war between the two would likely result in a victory for the South, albeit likely only after massive losses from North Korean artillery strikes. If this gap were to be reduced, it would likely further encourage a South Korean nuclear weapons program to maintain an advantage, and in turn lead to further tensions on the peninsula. It almost goes without saying that this would also pose major problems for Ukraine, since more munitions for Russia would prolong the war even further. Combined with China’s continued relations and provision of dual-use technologies to both, the 2020s are looking to continue being a very fraught decade.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announcing a not-so-subtle draft to fight in his war against Ukraine – er, “special military operation.” (Sourced from CBC News/The Associated Press)
The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine has been a disaster for both Ukraine and Russia – for the former, it’s been a devastating and unprovoked conflict that has caused significant loss of life, while for the latter, it’s been a series of poor decisions by President Vladimir Putin and his subordinates that has left Russia increasingly isolated and with mounting losses. With Ukraine increasingly pushing back in a major counteroffensive and retaking territory that was lost to Russia earlier this year, Putin has been put in a situation where he’s forced to choose among several options to reduce the harm to his reputation as a savvy political strategist. Earlier today, he announced that 300,000 military reservists would be summoned to fight in Russia’s “special operation” in Ukraine and backed calls for referendums in captured Ukrainian territories to make them officially part of Russia (which would almost certainly be rigged, since Putin’s never seen a vote that he didn’t want to interfere with). Alongside this, Putin also warned that if Russian territorial integrity was violated, “we will certainly use all the means at our disposal,” which almost certainly alludes to Russia’s sizable nuclear weapon arsenal (potentially alongside chemical and biological weapons as well). This has gone over very well with most Russians, by which I mean flights out of Russia have already sold out and protests against mobilization have already sprung up in major cities.
All of this certainly constitutes an escalation of the conflict and a sign that things have not gone as Putin as planned (which tends to happen when you stack your advisors and intelligence services with yes-men and cronies). But how is this different from earlier Russian nuclear threats in the war, such as Putin ordering nuclear forces on high alert back in March?
One of the big changes here would have to do with the planned referendums in eastern Ukraine, since they’re intended to formally make those areas into Russian territory. Once that happens, Putin can then spin any Ukrainian counteroffensive to retake those areas as an attack on Russia itself, which would (in theory) justify using nuclear weapons to retaliate. The idea thus seems to be a blunt form of nuclear deterrence (or coercion) against Ukraine to drive it away – or at least to push the Western countries supporting Ukraine into pressuring Zelensky into not advancing any further.
The other important difference is that while Putin’s earlier threats came from a position of strength, he’s clearly on the backfoot now and seemingly more desperate. The past six months have seen Russian forces suffer increasing losses in what was originally seen as an impossible situation for Ukraine. Given how Putin has styled himself as a master planner and spun the war as something that wouldn’t affect ordinary Russians (thanks to using mercenaries and conscripted prisoners to fight), these losses have been especially humiliating for him, especially since his strongman position means he can’t really pass the buck down to subordinates. (And when your political opponents have a habit of dying in increasingly ludicrous accidents, it’s hard to blame a lack of support, either.) In short, Russia’s invasion has managed to considerably undermine Putin’s domestic support, though it’s not clear yet how much this threatens his grip on power.
These two elements certainly make Putin’s nuclear threats seem more plausible, but is it possible that he’s bluffing about using nuclear weapons, or even would just limit himself to using a smaller tactical weapon instead of an all-out nuclear war? The possibility that this is a nuclear bluff (despite his own statement) is certainly a possibility – actually using even a single nuclear weapon against Ukraine would be a massive and unprecedented escalation in the war. Such an act could lead to more direct involvement by Ukraine’s Western allies in the fighting and to a possible nuclear war. A possible nuclear war is something he wouldn’t want, if only because he would personally not have much chance of surviving it and his rule is typical of most dictators in being meant to ensure his well-being and that of his closest supporters (something I spent a lot of time writing about in my dissertation). As long as Russia’s survival or his continued rule isn’t directly threatened, I doubt Putin would risk actually following through on his nuclear threats – something that other experts and world leaders seem to agree with. This isn’t meant to dismiss a bluff as nothing serious, mind you, since there’s always the possibility of it leading to a pre-emptive strike and causing escalation on its own.
Of course, we also need to consider that Putin will take a gamble in the other direction and use a tactical nuclear weapon, either as a show of force or against Ukraine to pressure its government into backing down, in the belief that it’ll prevent further escalation. This isn’t something that can be strictly ruled out, since the entire invasion of Ukraine seems to suggest that Putin is increasingly ignoring advisors in favour of his own views and the unconditional support of various toadies, which generally leads to decisions being based on wildly inaccurate information (like thinking that Ukraine would immediately fold instead of fighting). To start with, a “tactical” nuclear weapon is a bit misleading, since it really just means that a nuclear weapon could be used on a battlefield and doesn’t inherently mean it’s weaker than a strategic one – by current standards, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would qualify as tactical nuclear weapons. Using one would as a form of intimidation would only qualify as restrained in a very relative sense, not to mention it would cause long-term damage of the area it was used in that would drastically reduce its value to Russia. Just as importantly, we can’t really be sure how other countries would react to this kind of move, since it would literally be unprecedented (since the last time nuclear weapons were used in war was during a period where only one country had them and almost nobody knew they existed, much less what they could do). It’s possible that other countries would back down and let Russia cut its losses, but it could provoke the kind of retaliation that Putin would likely want to avoid in the first place. What could decide this is if Putin thinks that not using nuclear weapons would lead to the end of his regime, since that would be functionally mean death for him (and depending on the outcome of his government collapsing, could potentially lead to his actual death, as former dictators tend to have short life expectancy). If that were the case, he would likely see himself as having nothing to lose in doing so, regardless of the consequences for Russian citizens otherwise since, as I previously mentioned, their well-being isn’t really a priority for him. This is all without getting into how rational Putin is (at least based on the information available to him), which we can really only speculate about from a distance.
All of this leads to the conclusion that while Putin ordering the use of nuclear weapons doesn’t seem to be imminent, the possibility of his using one when pushed to the brink isn’t zero, either. Ukraine and its allies shouldn’t fold under the assumption that Russia will use its nuclear arsenal, but there does need to be caution about pushing too far. And as always, the possibility of misperception leading to someone panicking and (metaphorically) pushing the big red button to launch nuclear weapons is on the table, regardless of whether Putin’s latest threats are a case of bluffing or not.
Jeez, it’s hard to believe that yesterday was the one-year anniversary of my defending my PhD thesis… mostly because the COVID pandemic has made it seem like it was so much further in the past. Time has lost all meaning, I know. I figure that this makes today as good a time as any to write about how the whole process went. (For those who are curious enough to actually read the damn thing, you can find it here. Be warned, though – dissertations are lengthy and dry reads in general, and thanks to my tendency for overly detailed writing, mine is apparently the longest one in NPSIA PhD history. If you’re not really interested in nuclear deterrence, there’s a non-zero chance of slipping into a nap and/or coma. Keep a couple of cups of coffee on hand.)
And yes, the printed version is big enough to use as a doorstop and/or anti-burglar device.
I have a couple of reasons in mind for writing about this. For one, the whole process felt like such an ordeal that I tried to not think about it for most of 2021. I figure that writing this post will be a form of catharsis after feeling… well, pretty burnt out about academia, really. Another reason is that it might give current and prospective PhD students an idea of what they might face. I can’t speak to how other departments handle things, but I felt that in my department, PhD students had very little formal guidance in what to expect when defending their thesis, much less how to prepare for it. The expectation seemed to be that a) you would attend defences on your own time to get an idea of how they go, b) you’d consult your supervisor on what to do, and/or c) you’d figure things out yourself. Admittedly a) is mostly reasonable, except that PhD defences are a rarity – having 3 in a year would be unusually high – meaning that there are limited opportunities, and… well, there had been a rule change for a brief period in the pandemic that would make that somewhat challenging. Writing about my own experience with the defence process will hopefully help with this issue, at least a little bit. At the very least, I’m hoping that it makes it clear that the defence isn’t a formality, and maybe some of the things that can go… well, maybe not wrong, but pretty awry.
(In the interests of not stirring up trouble, I’ve elected to remove the actual names of individuals involved in the story, and instead refer to them exclusively by their titles.)
So, without further ado…
The Submission
This was probably the most straightforward part of the process, although it had its share of confusion. This meant 1) getting the approval of my dissertation committee (supervisor + two advisors), 2) informing my department of my intent to submit a draft for defending (and approximately when), 3) submitting a checklist indicating that all the dissertation rules have been followed, 4) making sure that my supervisor submitted the authorization form with possible external examiners, and 5) actually submitting the dissertation. This unsurprisingly takes a while: I started checking with my committee as to whether my thesis was ready to defend in late July 2020, got the OK from all three around late September (after making further tweaks), and actually submitted it online in in mid-October. Plus, after all that, the defence date was set for December 4 – a full two months later!
Why is this? Well, Carleton requires the dissertation to be submitted to the supervisor at least 6 weeks before a possible defence, and uploaded at least 4 weeks before. This is partially because the date has to work for everyone involved: the student, the committee members, the chair, and the internal and external examiners (the former being from another department in the university, the other being based at another university entirely). Selecting the external examiner is also a big hurdle, because the department has to contact possible examiners one at a time, then give them about a week to respond before moving on to the next one, then making sure they have the time to actually read the dissertation in detail. (I know someone who ended up having to wait 6 months to defend his dissertation because of difficulty in finding an examiner). Also, the PhD candidate doesn’t get to pick the examiner – that’s the supervisor’s decision. Sure, the supervisor can consult the student on possible examiners, but they don’t have to listen if they do.
So, I finally found out that December 4 was the earliest possible date for my defence around mid-October, shortly before uploading the defence version of my dissertation (which meant no more edits until after the defence). I received the proper notice for the defence around the end of October, which confirmed the date and let me know who the internal and external examiners would be. The former wasn’t a problem – this was a professor from the Political Science department who was an expert on Israel, and therefore made perfect sense – but the latter was… confusing. Specifically, the external examiner was not only not on the list of about a dozen names I gave my supervisor, but I had outright never heard of before. Looking at his list of publications didn’t clarify things much either, since it didn’t really seem to relate to anything I was doing in the dissertation. I still haven’t found out why my supervisor chose this external (because there’s no other way for his name to have ended up on the list); I can only assume that he saw one reference to nuclear weapons in an article he wrote on ballistic defence and thought it was close enough. At the time, I thought that this wouldn’t be an issue, but this turned out to be… incorrect.
The Preparation
Preparing for the defence proved to something of a pain, primarily because the actual requirements for the presentation seemingly aren’t written down anywhere. I ended up having to consult some PhD alumni about their own experiences, as well as searching on Google to find the Carleton regulations on the defence format (linked here again!). To make a long story short, I would have to find a way to boil down the main points of the dissertation into a 20-minute presentation (possibly even shorter). This was somewhat tricky considering it ended up being around 400 pages long – admittedly in part because a dissertation involves a ton of repetition, but also because I tend to be overly wordy (in case this blog post didn’t give that away). I started working on the presentation over a month before the defence, and went through a few rounds of revising it to try and cut it down to a manageable length. By late November, it seemed like I would be ready for the defence.
The “Unpleasant surprise”
And so, with just 10 days to go before the defence, I received an email from my supervisor with some incredibly worrying news. As it turns out, every external examiner has to write a report on the dissertation they’re examining to confirm if they think it’s ready to proceed or not, then submit it to the Dean of Graduate Studies. Normally, the student never sees this report, unless the examiner thinks that the dissertation isn’t ready to defend… which turned out to be the case here. The report seemed to be very mixed: on the one hand, the examiner thought the dissertation was well-researched, but on the other, he thought that it didn’t actually support my argument and had methodological issues. Some of the critiques were admittedly fair, while others made no sense and seemed to boil down to “well, that’s not how I would have done it” (e.g. his complaint about my not using China as a case or his insistence that I should refer to a particular author’s definition of general deterrence). It also seemed very strange for him the dissertation for being structured “in social science terms” when it’s written in a field of… social science (last I checked, international affairs wasn’t exactly a hard science on par with physics). The problem here was that I simply couldn’t ignore the external’s critique and ride on the rest of the examiners passing me: as it turns out, the university rules explicitly state that the majority decision has to include the external, essentially giving them veto power.
In any case, I was faced with 2 options at this point. I could either go ahead with the defence and just do everything I could to pre-emptively address all the issues raised (which would essentially mean re-working what I had up to that point), with the risk of potentially failing the defence (which would mean having to redo it) or even the dissertation entirely, which is outright Game Over – you’re gone from the program for good. The other option was to withdraw from the defence, revise the dissertation, and try again later on with a different external. This would not only would drag out the PhD even further, but ran the risk of having an external come up with a whole set of critiques again. I ended up opting for the first option, which seemed better, but proved to be… stressful. (By which I mean that going by the resting heart rate data from my Apple Watch, I seemed to be having a constant panic attack until the weekend after the defence.)
With all this in mind, I set to work essentially scrapping the earlier version of the defence presentation and starting from scratch. I was somewhat lucky in having managers at work who were OK with me taking that entire time off (as unpaid leave, since I was still on a casual contract that didn’t allow for paid vacation at the time), so I would be able to work on the defence revisions during the day instead of having to do everything at night. I was also able to get suggestions on how to proceed from my committee members (who also all seemed to be blind-sided by the critique and felt that I was essentially being judged on a wholly different set of standards), which helped speed things up. It still ended up coming down to the wire, though, as I kept tweaking the presentation and my responses to potential questions until the night before. I also ended up only being able to do a single practice run with an audience (also the night before). Fortunately, the friends who acted as my audience over Zoom were incredibly helpful, giving a ton of feedback on every aspect of the presentation (down to pointing out how I should change the font size) over the course of… 3 or so hours, if I remember right?
It’s worth noting that on top of all this, Carleton decided relatively late in the process to prohibit guests for dissertation defences taking place on Zoom. Normally, PhD students are allowed to invite people to attend a defence, and professors and other students can also attend to observe (and the former can even ask their own questions during the Q&A). Now, however, the university decided to ban this, and never really provided an explanation or even much in the way of warning. This meant that they had seemingly arbitrarily decided that, for the duration of the pandemic, PhD candidates wouldn’t have friends and family acting as silent support in the audience and that other PhD students couldn’t observe a defence themselves. The second point was especially egregious since, as I mentioned before, attending a defence is one of the only ways to find out how it works. I don’t think anyone was happy about this – NPSIA professors were reportedly infuriated at the change, and every student I talked to (in and out of the department) reacted even more negatively. The professors apparently managed to push back enough to be able to attend my defence, and I suppose the wider backlash to the practice ended up being vocal enough that by the following summer students were allowed to attend again. To this day, I don’t have a straight answer why this was implemented (my guess is to have less for the chair to do), but it proved to be another unnecessary source of stress.
Judgement Day
Note: charging at the examining board with a sword is not guaranteed to get you a pass.
Finally, it was the big day. The defence was only taking place at 2:30 PM, so I used most of the morning to keep preparing. This meant going over my prepared answers more to avoid just reading off answers, continuing to tweak my presentation notes to avoid rambling too much, and making sure that I remembered key details of my cases correctly. (It wouldn’t exactly make a good impression to forget when the Six-Day War took place or who fought in it!) By the time the defence started, I had multiple piles of paper in front of me, ranging from presentation notes and my responses to the external’s critiques to a pile of cue cards that I scribbled important dates and names on just to make sure that I had them handy. As it turns out, writing all those notes worked better than I expected, because I somehow avoided referencing them at all (probably because the constant writing and rewriting led to my memorizing everything).
It’s probably important for me to explain just how the PhD defence is actually structured before I go into details about how mine went. Ironically, the defending student doesn’t participate in the initial part, which is a closed meeting between the committee, the examiners, and the faculty-appointed chair to determine if the defence should go ahead at all. If they agree to that, the student gets invited back in and the chair explains the procedures. It’s only at this point (maybe 15-20 minutes after the official start time) that the student gets to give their “introductory statement” – namely the 20 minute presentation giving an overview of their work, usually with a PowerPoint. After that, there’s two rounds of Q&A by the examination board for about 45 minutes or so each, with professors in the audience getting to ask their own questions in the second round. After all that, the student gets to make a closing statement and then gets booted out of the room while the examination board deliberates. Altogether, the actual defence can take up to 3 hours, and the examination board deliberations on whether the student passes and what the final “grade” is can go on for an hour on top of that.
The presentation portion of my defence went fairly smoothly, considering that I’d only managed to practice going over it once. The Q&A proved to be the trickier part. The questions from my committee members and from the internal examiner were largely as expected, so I was well-prepared for those. There were some critiques and suggestions that I hadn’t really expected, but these were fairly straightforward or occasionally went beyond the scope of what I was researching (and for those getting ready for a defence, it’s better to acknowledge this than try to improvise an answer).
What was tough was the questioning from the external examiner, which seemed to be equally divided between critique that made sense, having a wholly different perspective from the dissertation, and at some points seemingly not having bothered to read some parts. To begin with, he outright stated that he hadn’t bothered reading the introduction chapter in response to my explaining that the answer to one of his questions, which still strikes me as unusual. He also didn’t understand the process tracing methodology I used and said that it wasn’t a thing when he was a PhD student, which was odd when a) he could have simply looked at Wikipedia for a brief explanation and b) it’s discussed in the major qualitative methodology books, so I don’t know how he missed that over several decades. I’m pretty sure I also managed to get on his bad side a bit as well when I critiqued realism in favour of constructivism in one of my answers (by saying that it’s good for system-level analysis but not so much for individual state behaviour). Also, it seemed very strange that I had to explain why Israeli nuclear deterrence wouldn’t work against Palestinian terrorism (hint: it’s wholly disproportionate to the point of absurdity, plus nuking the territory next to your small country is going to cause problems). Overall, it became increasingly clear that the external examiner was the only one who had significant issues with the dissertation, and a lot of those seemed to boil down to “this isn’t the paper I would write, though.”
Altogether, the defence lasted for just about the allowable three hours, and the deliberations took almost another hour on top of that. As you can imagine, this was pretty stressful, especially since the early December date meant that it was already pitch-black outside. It came as a huge relief that the decision was that my dissertation passed with major revisions (as in the required changes are significant enough to need approval before final submission, not that the rewrites are massive). I didn’t necessarily agree with the required changes, or the fact that I would need to work through the holidays to get them done in time, but I was happy to have just passed after all the stress of the preceding week. (It is worth noting that while I was supposed to be sent a list of the required changes by the Faculty of Graduate and Postgraduate Affairs, but for some reason I never did. This was less of an issue than you’d expect, since all the changes were those requested by the external, but still.)
The Aftermath
The first thing I did after the defence was… not touch anything related to the dissertation for several days, and instead went back to Montreal for a break with the family. (Hey, I may have had a late January deadline of submitting the final approved version, but I still needed a breather.) After that, I had to go over the precise changes demanded by the external examiner with him. This was more complicated than you’d think, because the list he emailed me after the defence was… substantially more demanding than what was seemingly agreed to before – as in, requiring “re-drafting” of the literature review and methodology chapters instead of the additions to the former and the minor corrections to the latter. It doesn’t help that for whatever reason, the email failed to include any of the other committee members (or the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies who had somehow gotten involved at some point), which gave the impression of his trying to go behind everyone’s backs in pushing more work on me. I ended up having to push back on this in my response, and made sure that everyone else was CC’ed (and continued to do so in further email correspondence just to make sure it didn’t happen again). This seems to have worked, since the changes discussed in our Zoom meeting proved to be much more minor, to the point that it feels like the decision should have been minor revisions.
In any case, I ended up working on the revisions over a few weeks and sent them out to all the committee members for approval. Since past experience made it clear that it could take a few weeks for them to read through the whole thing (which I didn’t have), I made things simpler by highlighting every change I made AND creating a whole separate document indicating exactly where and what was changed. Altogether, I ended up adding around 15 more pages to the dissertation, mostly in the literature review chapter. It paid off, though, since the revised version was approved with no further requests for changes, letting me submit the final dissertation with plenty of time to spare (re: 10 days).
Lessons Learned
Just the thing you want to hear after all that hard work.
Make sure that everyone on your committee approves of the dissertation before you apply to defend, not only because this may mean you’ve failed to address some horrible mistake(s), but also to make sure they’re on your side during the defence. (Sometimes this isn’t enough to prevent someone from publicly throwing you under the bus without warning, but not everything is going to be under your control.)
Check exactly who your supervisor is putting down on that list of potential external examiners – you don’t want to get a nasty surprise down the line! Giving them plenty of options to choose from helps.
Prepare, prepare, prepare: despite what people may claim, you shouldn’t treat the defence as a formality – there’s a reason you can pass the dissertation but fail the defence! If you don’t put in the time to prepare, you may find yourself having to do the whole thing over again in another 6 months (and the one time is already stressful enough!). Spend lots of time getting your slides done, writing up notes, and practicing in front of others, ideally fellow PhD students who can tell you exactly what needs to be fixed. You should aim to keep the impression that you’re just reading off sheets of paper to a minimum (because chances are you’re being graded on that. Yes, I know, you didn’t sign up for this to be judged on your public speaking skills.) Plus, you want to make sure you have answers on hand for at least some of the questions you’re going to be asked. On the other hand…
Be ready to say that you don’t have an answer to a question or that it’s beyond the scope of your research. The examiners are all professors: they’ll generally be able to spot when you’re trying to bullshit your way through an answer and won’t be happy about it. Being honest about not knowing an answer or not having looked into a given topic (whether because you didn’t have time or just hadn’t thought of it) will show that you’re aware of the limitations of your research. Just don’t do this too much, or they’ll wonder if you actually know anything.
If you’re doing your defence remotely (and if you’re reading this during the COVID-19 pandemic, you will), take advantage of this by making sure you’re as comfortable as possible during the defence. Yes, it’s going to be a weirdly impersonal experience like any other long video call, but you’re at home instead of a cramped classroom or meeting room, so you may as well do this in a comfy chair at your desk with a healthy supply of water on hand. (And you definitely want the water, because you WILL get thirsty from all that talking.) Maybe even put some encouraging decor in front of your desk for that extra bit of motivation! (There truly is an XKCD strip for every occasion.)
Don’t be afraid to calmly push back on unwarranted critique. You’re a PhD candidate and the expert on your subject, not an unquestioning lump. Yes, if the critique is fair and valid, you should accept it. But if you know that it’s incorrect and you have the evidence to show that, make that clear in a polite response to the examiner in question. (Nobody will like it if you lose your temper, even if you’re right.)
This extends to the post-defence revisions (if there are any): don’t let yourself get pushed into changing more than necessary: your job is to make the required changes, get any required approval, and submit the dissertation, no more. If someone wants you to change your work into something they would have written, they can go write their own paper/book instead of hijacking your work.
Go celebrate once you’ve passed! Sure, you have the revisions waiting for you, but you’ve also survived what feels like a multi-hour interrogation and shown whatever impostor syndrome you have that it’s totally unjustified (in relation to your research and writing skills, anyways – no comment on other issues). Get a drink with friends, have a nice dinner with family, go read that 1,200 page fantasy novel sitting on your e-reader, whatever floats your boat! Plus, chances are that you’re in no state to actually start working immediately anyways – better to take the time to recover first.
Mark's Policy Musings 
