At the very start of my doctoral training, I remember my supervisor telling me: “you must learn how to ask interesting questions”. In my mind, that got intuitively translated—rightly or wrongly—to “a great PhD student asks interesting questions”. Curiously enough, this view was further supported by what I observed in EPFL (Switzerland) where I was a visiting doctoral student. I quite marveled at how PhD candidates around me would ask so many relevant questions. The head of the laboratory herself expected us to ask questions (lest we pay a meal on one occasion – I managed to get out of that!).
The problem is that I did not have it in me to ask normal, non-interesting, perhaps even irrelevant questions in the first place. So, I thought to myself: “do I lack curiosity?”, “do I falsely believe that I understand everything?”, “am I that slow in the head?”. That really put a lot of pressure on me: “what is wrong with me?”.
Looking back, it seems to me that, because I tend to whole-heartedly and whole-mindedly engage with what is being said to me, I need time to process and digest the incoming information before I can come up with questions. And so, leaving no room for interpretation, let alone skepticism, I tend to focus on gathering all the pieces of information handed to me to assemble them in a big picture. Questions arise subsequently from the big picture (or difficulty to create it!) much later. It took me four years to realize that was my way of functioning.
Nevertheless, I still believe that fear of ignorance and mistakes held me back from asking questions, at least partly. A professor in my lab’s group chat wrote recently: “The best way to learn is by making mistakes”. I think that is solid advice. I wish I was told that before rather than way after the end of my PhD studies. I wish I was told at some point: “If you want to ask interesting questions, you must first get in the habit of asking any type of questions. In doing so and making mistakes, you will learn to find the juste-milieu between ‘I need to build the complete big picture first’ and ‘I will ask anything and everything’”.
Come to think of it, during my fourth year, I did manage to put the shame of coming across as ignorant aside and ask something as ridiculously sounding as: “what even is a research question?”. While that did denote some form of courage in myself back then, I think I was mostly able to ask that question because I felt safe enough to do so; I knew it would be received with grace rather than judgment.
Ultimately, I think it all boils down to two fundamental elements in research (and beyond): self-knowledge and humility. For self-knowledge breeds legitimate self-assurance. And, in turn, that self-assurance creates room for humility – the humility to make peace with the fact that knowledge is an ever-expanding circle no one can sense the limit of. Naturally, this applies to both the one who asks and the one who is asked.
I would therefore suggest, rather than considering questions as a means to combat “shameful ignorance”, to consider them instead under the brighter light of feeding curiosity? In other words, rather than saying “I ask because I do not know all”, we should perhaps say “I ask because I am curious to know more”!
