More Than a Dissertation: What My Ph.D. Really Taught Me

When I received the news that my doctoral dissertation had been selected as one of the three finalists in Brazil’s most prestigious Software Engineering thesis competition, my first reaction was: “If someone had told me this a few years ago, I would never have believed it.” Not only because of the achievement itself, but mainly because of the journey that brought me here.

A friend of mine often says that pursuing a Ph.D. is a period of profound self-discovery. Throughout those years, I came to recognize something about myself that I had never understood so clearly before: I struggle to divide my attention among different priorities. Whenever a project or activity occupies my mental space, it becomes the center of my routine and my thoughts. Everything else still gets done, but almost on autopilot. The problem is that a Ph.D. demands a high price from someone who works that way.

Whenever a project occupies nearly all of my mental space, I tend to make rapid progress on it. But a Ph.D. is not a hundred-meter sprint; it is a marathon. At some point, research has to coexist with work, family, children, and the unexpected turns of life. For someone who naturally concentrates on a single priority, maintaining that balance never came naturally. At the same time, living on autopilot is not enough either, because research requires repeated moments when you must rise to a new level. During the early years, my Ph.D. evolved in cycles: periods of low productivity followed by bursts of almost complete dedication. Eventually, however, life forced me to learn something different—to keep moving forward even when it was no longer possible to live at either extreme.

When I started my Ph.D., I was still building my house. In other words, I began already trying to catch up. Anyone who has gone through the process of building a home knows how much time, energy, and worry it demands.

Before I realized it, almost all of my mental energy had shifted to the construction, which became my dominant priority, while my doctoral courses slipped into the background. For the first time in my academic life, I failed a graduate course. Ironically, it was the one taught by my advisor after accumulating too many absences and missing several assignments. Until then, I had always taken my graduate courses very seriously, so that experience affected me deeply. Even after completing all the required Ph.D. course credits in the following semester, I chose to take the course again. I no longer needed it to satisfy any program requirement, but I felt I needed to prove to myself that what had happened did not reflect who I was.

Only then was I finally free to focus entirely on research. That was precisely when the COVID-19 pandemic began, which needs no introduction. Like millions of others, I found myself confined at home, constantly afraid of infecting my wife and children, mourning the loss of people close to me, and trying to keep my research alive amid uncertainty.

The isolation affected me more than I expected. I have always been a naturally communicative person, and suddenly all the informal interactions that had always energized me disappeared. Looking for a way to stay intellectually engaged, I began attending online talks, interacting with Software Engineering researchers from around the world, discussing research problems on social media, and exchanging ideas far more actively than before. Those conversations not only helped me stay connected to the research community, but also played an important role in helping me discover my own research questions.

Those online interactions also exposed me to different styles of Ph.D. supervision. Since the same professor had supervised both my master’s and doctoral studies, I had little basis for comparison. Listening to other researchers describe their experiences made me realize how different my advisor’s approach was. Many supervisors closely monitor their students, constantly pushing for productivity. I usually function well under that kind of pressure, perhaps because of my years in industry as a software developer. My advisor, however, has always taken a different approach, giving his students considerable autonomy while remaining remarkably responsive whenever I seek his advice. Instead, he is remarkably responsive whenever I seek his advice. Every meeting left me with the reassuring feeling that, no matter how difficult the problem seemed, he would always help me find a way forward. Looking back, I realized that our different working styles complemented each other remarkably well.

At the same time, my dissertation topic was still taking shape. I began by collaborating on research led by more advanced Ph.D. students, and gradually my own questions started to emerge. Looking back, that strategy proved invaluable. My dissertation eventually grew from the limitations I kept identifying in previous studies, while those collaborations also resulted in some publications in high-quality journals (as second author) and workshops (as the lead author).

The COVID-19 period, however, was far from consistently productive. There were months of meaningful progress, but also long stretches of procrastination. Toward the end of 2020, for example, the release of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X completely captured my attention. I suddenly found myself spending countless hours discussing their technical specifications online, participating in podcasts, and immersing myself in a world that had little to do with my research. Looking back, I realize it was a way of escaping the uncertainty and anxiety brought by the pandemic. Ironically, even that detour reflected the same pattern I had begun to recognize in myself: whenever something occupies my mental space, it tends to become my dominant priority.

After the COVID-19, then came my first rejections as the lead author at highly competitive conferences. Looking back, I now recognize how much those rejections contributed to my growth, but at the time they brought insecurity and discouragement. That was when I realized that earning a Ph.D. requires much more than knowing how to read and write papers. It demands methodological confidence, a deep understanding of the state of the art, and the ability to position your own research within the broader scientific landscape.

It was precisely during that period of uncertainty that generative AI tools became widely available, and I embraced them immediately. I was also fully aware of the ethical discussions surrounding their use in research. Rather than delegating intellectual work to AI, I started to used it as an assistant. Whenever I wanted to discuss statistical methods for my data, refine a paragraph, or challenge an idea, I would ask for its perspective. The decisions, interpretations, and conclusions always remained entirely my own, but having an intelligent assistant available at any time significantly improved my productivity and helped me regain momentum. New papers followed, one of them received a Distinguished Paper Award, and I had the opportunity to make my first international trip to present my work.

It was also around that time that a question began to follow me.

I had papers, but did I have a dissertation?

For a long time, I saw my publications as disconnected pieces. Only later did I realize that the real challenge was not simply publishing papers, but constructing a scientific narrative capable of connecting them around a central theme.

Just as I finally began to recognize that common thread and had gathered the conditions necessary to obtain the last experimental results, connect the papers, and write the dissertation, the greatest challenge of all emerged.

My mother developed a highly aggressive degenerative disease and, naturally, she became my priority. For nearly a year and a half, I accompanied her through medical appointments, examinations, and hospitalizations. As her legal guardian, I also became responsible for many of the practical decisions involved in her daily care. I never saw this as a burden. On the contrary, it was an opportunity to repay a small part of everything she had done for me throughout my life.

At that moment, I believed my Ph.D. had come to an end. I had already exhausted every extension granted by the graduate program, and I could not imagine where I would find the time or energy for another period of intense dedication to finish the dissertation. Yet I also knew I did not want to give up. For the first time, my strategy of alternating intense periods of work with long intervals simply stopped working. I had to learn how to make progress little by little while balancing my mother’s care, my research, my job, and my personal life. The challenge was no longer to move quickly, but simply to keep moving.

It was in that context that I decided to begin supervising formally registered research projects with scholarship students, especially high school students. I thought that even if I could no longer devote all my energy to my Ph.D., continuing to mentor research on topics closely related to my own would prevent me from becoming disconnected from my field. It worked far better than I had imagined. I was still bit far from my dissertation, but I no longer felt far from research. New papers followed, along with conference trips, distinguished paper awards that even led to a television interview, and, above all, a renewed sense of motivation. The following year, I expanded the group by welcoming more students, and that initiative ultimately became one of the main reasons I was able to find my way back to the dissertation.

Then, just as I entered the final stretch, life decided to impose one more trial.

My grandmother passed away.

She was one of the people who welcomed and supported me most throughout my life. I lived with her for couple years, and I remain deeply grateful for that time together.

It was a very particular stage of my Ph.D. The research projects I was conducting with my students had begun to connect directly with my dissertation. Three papers were progressing simultaneously, all sharing the same theoretical foundation. Every paper I read, every experiment I conducted, and every new reference I discovered strengthened not only one manuscript, but all of them, including the dissertation itself.

Perhaps that is precisely why, after returning from my grandmother’s funeral, I sat back down in front of my laptop and continued writing. It was as if all the accumulated pressure of those years made it impossible for me to stop, even in the midst of grief. Even today, I find that feeling difficult to explain.

Only a few hours after my grandmother’s funeral, my mother became critically unwell and had to be hospitalized again. For ten days, my brother and I took turns staying with her. I brought my laptop to the hospital, and it was there, in her hospital room, that I finished writing my dissertation. I completed the manuscript on my birthday, the very day she was discharged. Three days later, she took a turn for the worse again and passed away on her own birthday. My mother and grandmother had died just two weeks apart, a sequence of losses I could hardly have imagined. My mother’s death, in particular, came after a year and a half of living with a degenerative disease that progressively worsened her condition.

Before my dissertation defense, I rewrote the acknowledgments to honor both my mother and my grandmother. I also discreetly hid photographs of each of them, and even of my little dog, who had passed away in my arms the previous year, as small Easter eggs within my defense slides. It was not superstition, nor a search for good luck. It was simply my way of acknowledging that the accomplishment represented by that dissertation could never be separated from the losses I experienced along the way.

The defense was successful, and I left with the feeling that an important chapter of my life had finally come to an end.

Today, after learning that this same dissertation has been selected as one of the three finalists in the country’s leading Software Engineering thesis competition, I realize that it represents far more than research on code readability. A dissertation records more than scientific results. It also silently preserves the period of life in which it was written. Mine captures a time when I had to learn how to reconcile science, work, family, loss, new beginnings, and responsibility. It was also the period when I had to go against my own nature. I had always functioned at the extremes, but I discovered that there are moments when you simply cannot choose one priority over another. I needed to be present for my mother while also keeping my dissertation alive. In the end, perhaps that is exactly what my friend meant when he said that a Ph.D. is a period of self-discovery.

He was right.

In my case, the greatest discovery was not about research.

It was about myself.