Thirteen years. I waited thirteen years to write this post. A few days ago, on Monday, October 20, I successfully defended my dissertation thesis, On the Record: Understanding a Century of Congressional Lawmaking through Speech and Vote Behavior to earn the title of PhD.
On Monday, I have completed all three stages of research education. My PhD studies only lasted for the past five years, but my dream of becoming a researcher is much older than this. It took only a few weeks, maybe two or three months, after starting my undergrad before I was certain that I want to do research. And now I finally made it.
Even after five days of recovery, it still feels surreal that I can now officially call myself “Dr. Hendrik Erz.” Of course, I didn’t suddenly feel like a different person (counter to what we jokingly say to ourselves before the defense). But I do feel a subtle change. It is mostly the stress slowly leaving my body. But it is also the feeling of starting a new chapter of my life: the Postdoc phase.
On October 30, 2020 — to the day exactly four years and 51 weeks ago — I published the first article on this website, titled “New Roads”:
One large suitcase and a ticket to Stockholm: This is all I take with me to begin my PhD in Analytical Sociology at Linköpings Universitet.
Now, almost five years later, I know all of these roads in and out. They are no longer new. They have become familiar roads. It is time to review the past five years.
Let me start directly with this website itself. I have promised the readers of this website — that’s you! — that I would be aiming at writing one article per week. Including this one, I have written 125 articles, and it has been 259 weeks since I started my PhD. This means that, while I was not able to keep my promise, I did manage to publish roughly once every fortnight. Which is still impressive, given that in that time I had to write a dissertation.
Five years is quite a lot of time (259 weeks, or 1,813 days), and so I not just managed to write some articles here. I also published three papers ([1], [2], [3]), helped organize three conferences (NSA 2024, IC2S2 2025, EUSN 2026), became the master of disaster (“webmaster”) for the International Network of Analytical Sociologists2, co-organizer of the Swedish Interdisciplinary Research School in Computational Social Science (SIRCSS), co-supervised three master students, and became a reviewer for Network Science.
I have done my fair share of professional service, and I do it happily. I have built a network of amazing colleagues with whom I share interests, work, methods, and theoretical approaches. I have been able to visit the U.S. two times (Princeton in 2023, NYC in 2025) and Canada once (Montréal in 2024). And I became familiar with a foreign country that, in some respects, by now feels closer to home than my country of origin. I learned the language, customs, and have made many friends along the way.
This leads to another piece of reflection on my dissertation. During my defense, a colleague asked me an intriguing question: “If you were able to start your dissertation all over with the knowledge you have now, would you do anything differently?” I thought for a few seconds, trying to recollect the past five years, and think of an appropriate answer. After a long pause, I answered: “No.”
Later this week, a few colleagues were discussing my defense, and explained to me their amusement at this answer. When I asked them why, they told me that they read this question as one which one may use to demonstrate growth over the dissertation. They would’ve answered the question differently, highlighting potential mistakes they would like to avoid, etc.
I stay by my answer, however. I would have done nothing differently. At least not consciously. Of course, having lived through the experience of a PhD, I now have much more knowledge than before, and I will automatically avoid some of my earlier mistakes. But I believe this is not the point of a PhD. At least not the only one.
I understand a PhD to be an exercise in both doing research and acquiring a decisive set of cultural norms. Of course one is expected to publish an entire book at the end of the process. And of course one should be able to demonstrate that one is capable of performing independent research, publishing papers, and contributing to their own field. But here’s the thing: Many of these things are not instances of some mechanistic knowledge. It is culture.3
How does one publish a paper? Well, for this one needs to know how to write one and perform the required research for this. But the paper writing process starts with coming up with a research question. And already this initial part of doing research requires a lot of unwritten, cultural knowledge. What is a good research question? What is one that will likely be accepted at the best journals of the field? And what even are the best journals of the field?
All of these are questions one can only answer if one interacts with one’s own colleagues and peers; people one cherishes because of shared research interests and approaches to society. There is no walkthrough guide for becoming a researcher. And this is a crucial point: one can learn in a structured way how to do research. How to wield the tools available to the field; the different theoretical schools; and what the field focuses on more broadly. But what one cannot learn through reading and studying alone is all the small details. Things of seemingly no importance whatsoever, but which turn out to be the greatest helpers in succeeding in academia.
Incidentally, this insight is not new to me. After only three weeks of doing my PhD, I wrote in an article:
“Totes Wissen,” or dead knowledge is something you acquire just by hearing or reading something. Dead knowledge are the countless stories of PhD students who’ve thankfully shared their experiences with others like me so that we had an idea of what to prepare for. “Lebendiges Wissen,” or living knowledge, on the other hand, is such knowledge you don’t just possess based on reading, but your own experience as well. It is knowledge that has reified itself. You just know when “dead” knowledge has become “alive.”
And this is, I believe, the biggest feat one achieves by finishing a PhD: Turning mountains upon mountains of “dead knowledge” into “living knowledge.”
To achieve this feat, however, intelligence is not as relevant as one may think. What one needs to learn the cultural norms, the small things, the seemingly inconsequential distinctions, is not intelligence, but an open mind. One needs to embrace the PhD, the field, the research, the journey.
When I started my PhD, I was full of gleeful happiness — and this in the midst of a global pandemic. I wanted to do a PhD. I wanted to be a good student, and become a better researcher. Throughout the past five years, I took every opportunity to learn the ropes of the trade, to network, and to experience academia.
No, I wouldn’t have done anything differently. A PhD is a journey one cannot speed up. This is why it takes so long to finish it. I believe that now I could speed up writing an entire book. But I don’t think that this is the point of being a PhD student.
Just as going to school and university are rites of passage, finishing a PhD is a rite of passage, too. When you finish school, you are not just educated, you are also a full member of society. When you finish university, you are not just an expert in a scientific field, but also an academic. And when you finish a PhD, you are not just at the forefront of a particular part of your scientific field, but also a scientist.
The turn from PhD student to researcher is gradual. You don’t suddenly wake up on the morning of your defense, and turn from PhD student into researcher. No, when the morning of your defense dawns, you already are a researcher. The defense does not mark the transition from student to researcher, it signifies its end. The evolution from student into researcher is a slow process that happens during the PhD. And a large part of why this is, is the fact that you acquire the aforementioned cultural knowledge.
There are only very few reports of PhD students that fail their defense. Many explain that the primary reason is that your supervisor would never let you proceed to the defense stage of your PhD if you were not ready. But when are you ready? For the first four years of my PhD, I strongly believed this to be a mere function of your research output. I thought that one’s supervisor would occasionally take a look at your research output and, once it looked like three proper papers in a trench coat, they would tell you to go on and defend it.
But early this year, I realized that this was completely wrong. No, your supervisor will let you proceed to the defense only once they believe you have become an independent researcher. Once they are certain you have learned all the rules of the game. Of course, they won’t let you defend if the research itself is not ready. But they will take into account your personal character development, and maybe sometimes even weigh it more than your research.
I realized this because I stopped feeling like a student. I started to feel more and more like I know what I had to do. And this was when I realized that it is much more important to embrace the journey in its entirety. After I stopped feeling like a student, the speed of my research increased by magnitudes, and this is something that my supervisors as well as colleagues kept on telling me. Until November of last year I had barely one and a half papers, and even less of an idea of the bigger picture. Only a few months later, I suddenly had three papers, and an introductory chapter that showed a much clearer vision of my work.
You probably can write a PhD without becoming an independent researcher. But I don’t believe this should be your goal. I believe that it is crucial to not treat your PhD as pure employment, but also as the educational journey that it is. Yes, we are being paid to do that work. But we shall never forget that a PhD is still part of one’s education. We are not being paid to simply apply our knowledge to increase some company’s profits. We are being paid to learn.
I still can’t believe that it’s over now. I still feel as if I only started a few weeks ago. But it has been five years. It has been an amazing journey, and I would never exchange this experience for anything else in the world.
While I slowly recover from the stress, I remain in deep gratefulness. I am thankful to so many people who enabled me to have this experience, who helped me along the way, who supported me, shared insight, made me laugh, and without whom this journey would’ve been a tristesse. “It takes a village to write a PhD,” and I feel privileged for the particular village I ended up being in. Thank you all.
As the saying goes:
Tack så mycket, and thanks for all the fish.
2 https://www.analyticalsociology.com/about/council.
3 To be fair, I’m a cultural sociologist, so I’m biased towards seeing culture everywhere.