How can a new PhD Student objectively evaluate how well they are doing? I'm a relatively new PhD student, and I'm faced with a new (for me) situation. Before, I always had grades and the likes to tell me how good or bad I was doing: if I was at or near the top/bottom of my class, if I passed my exams or not... were all more-or-less objective indicators to tell me how I was doing.

But now that I've started to do research, I have none of that anymore, and it's quite discouraging. It's not that I need constant validation to boost my self-esteem, but rather I'm afraid that I'm not working hard enough, not learning enough... and that it's all going to crash down on me at the end ("welp, your funding has run out and you've produced nothing good enough, no PhD for you"). I sometimes find results, but they always feel rather insignificant. And the fact that I used to be good as a student whose only job was to learn about well-established topics from good professors doesn't mean I'm good enough at research, either.

I've read several Q&amp;A's here (How should I deal with discouragement as a graduate student?, “I've somehow convinced everyone that I'm actually good at this” - how to effectively deal with Imposter Syndrome) and they've been helpful, but simply telling myself that maybe it's just the impostor syndrome talking isn't helpful &ndash; maybe I'm really an impostor, too...

Of couse I can ask my advisor from time to time, but if I start asking every month I don't think he's going to appreciate it, and if I ask that bluntly he may not want to hurt my feelings and tell me the truth. So how do I, a PhD student, can evaluate how well I'm doing?
The reality is that it’s impossible to evaluate how you’re doing in an entirely objective manner once you progress beyond the stage of doing problem sheets with well-defined answers. Once there’s no objective right and wrong, it becomes a question of what is valued and who assesses it. For example, people try to assess PhD students in terms of all kinds of things:


How many papers they’ve published.
Where their papers are published.
How many people have cited their papers.
How much impact they’ve had on their field.
How often they’re invited to give talks.
Where they’ve worked.
How successful their collaborations have been.
If they teach, how successful their own students are.


The reality is that all of these things measure something, to some extent. Different people will value different things, and assess them in different ways.

If you want to go into academia ultimately, and you’re asking because you want to know what the people who will assess you for academic jobs will value, a good place to look is at academic job specifications - they’re often very detailed and make it quite clear what they’re looking for. You can also ask your supervisor, who will probably be able to give you a good idea of what’s involved.

If you want to go into industry, they may be looking for very different things - again, you can find out by looking at the job specifications, and the skills of the people who work at the relevant places.

Ultimately, this is a good point in your life to realise that now you’ve moved beyond standard taught courses, you’ll never again have the same kind of “objective” outside feedback that you once did. Thus far, you’ve been optimising towards someone else’s objective function; from now on, you have to find your own. Other people can tell you what they value, or even what they think you should value, but no one can decide what you value but you.