Out of all the things, why a PhD?

"PhD is not a 9-to-5 job", said one of my senior professors during an informal conversation in his office. "It is a 24-hour commitment everyday. You are trying to tell a story which has not been told before. Sometimes, while you are just finishing the conclusion, you realize that someone else has already come out with it. And then, no one wants to listen to you, no matter how hard you worked."

The words put me in a state of alert, if not alarm. After the conversation, I was repeatedly asking myself "Why should I be doing this crazy, 24-hour thing if it could be so frustrating and unrewarding? Could I not work 9-to-5 in a consultancy, and make enough money to visit the world twice a year, on a cruise?" Out of all the things that I could do, why was I enrolled in a PhD program? And would I be able to stay on for 5 long years?

Answers are sometimes not so forthcoming, and you simply have to get on with the situation that you are in.

A couple of days later, I found myself deeply engrossed in preparation for the thermodynamics mid-term. The chapter was related to the variation of free energy of a substance. I was reading how a substance's free energy tries to minimize itself in spontaneous processes around us. While reading about the variation with respect to temperature, I tried imagining how things would be like if pressure was the variable. Using intuition and understanding, I got a relation which was written on the next page of the book. The small thing - seeing an same expression I had derived - gave me a unique sense of satisfaction, which comes when we understand something new, discover something new or realize something new.

This is a small start, and future is going to be full of unexplored opportunities.

Now I know why I am doing a PhD. It offers me unparallelled joy of understanding the world, which is personally much more precious to me than the 9-to-5 job.