show your work - complex problems need complex solutions

i used to HATE it when my teachers told me to show my work - why would i slow down and write down steps that are so obvious i could do them in my head? turns out that making physical records of your thinking - even if they're messy! even if you have to redo them! - is really helpful, especially as your work gets more complex. and what's more complex than the work you have to produce in grad school?? 

my new group coaching program - the campsite - starts september 15. small groups, ten weeks of support, people who get it, and a coach who is with you every step of the way. 

sliding scale and payment plans available - learn more and sign up here!

Grad School is Hard, But...is a podcast by Dr. Katy Peplin of Thrive PhD! learn more at thrive-phd.com - can't wait to get to know you better, or get access to my free falling planning workshop here!

Transcript

  📍  Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar. 

In this season,

I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.

And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it



 this week's episode is called Show Your Work, and this is advice that I give all of the time, despite being personally frustrated with it many, many times. If you were to zoom back in time and look at elementary or middle school or even high school, me, I would be sitting at my desk refusing to show my work.

Because why would I slow down and show all of the steps that I took to solve a math problem? If I could look at the paper and know what the answer was, why would I take extra time to write unnecessary thought processes down so that people could follow them after the fact? I don't like going slowly. You might not like going slowly, but as in math class and in the PhD, there are a lot of benefits to showing your work because even if you can do it in your head, there are so many reasons why it can help to write out your thought process. 

One, it can trace your thinking after the fact. You might be able to, in the moment, in the middle of a calculus class, write down  all of the, the answer to that derivative. But if you go back 10, 15, maybe more years later, it might be helpful for you to trace the steps back. You might not remember all of the things that you did in order to solve that derivative.

It was clear to you at the time, it might not be after the fact.  Slowing down and showing your work helps you be more intentional. It gives you a chance to let your brain work at a different pace and see all of the places where you might be getting stuck  and.  As any person who maybe didn't do as well in math class knows you can get partial credit, right?

Like you can say, okay, I understood this part and not that part.  The same benefits apply here.  In your PhD or your grad school process because showing your work gives you a physical record of your thinking. I don't know about you, but I know that when I come back to my notes after a couple of weeks, maybe even months away from a project, I'm almost always grateful that past me took down some. 

Because even if it felt really clear and fresh when I was in the middle of the project, sometimes I unexpectedly have to put things down and having a record of what I was thinking and why is more valuable than I can say.  Next complex problems demand complex solutions. You might not need to show your work for simple arithmetic, but you definitely might for something more advanced like a calc proof.

So why wouldn't the same be true for your PhD? Why wouldn't it be true that there are simple things that you can do in your head, and there are other things that it is helpful to let yourself slow down and work through complex ideas on paper.  This also can help you when you get stuck because you'll be able to see where exactly the wheels are coming off your particular thought process or problem.

I know that oftentimes I sit with clients and I say, okay, like let's walk this through step by step. First you did this and then you did this, and it often becomes clear when you start to write down those steps. That actually this is where I got stuck, or this is where I have a choice that I'm not sure I know how to make.

And when you're just sort of ruminating on it in your head and it's that constant ticker tape of anxiety just running through your brain at all times, it can be really hard to slow down and say, okay, this is actually what's feeling stuck. Instead of just being like, ah, I don't know how to do this.  It also can let other people see your thinking in a more tangible way. 

A math test is one thing. You might get it, start it, finish it all within the space of an hour, there are very, very few tasks in your grad school career while you will be given the task, and then you will sit down and finish and then get feedback right away within an hour.  So it's helpful to have a physical work product that you can show other people, a writing group, an advisor, even your future self, so that you can make some of that internal work a little bit more external and make it easier to share. 

Okay, how's this gonna look? Katie? I understand what it means to show my work in a math problem, but what does it mean for my PhD? This might mean that you take some notes during reading. Some of us are pen fiends and we really like to take notes because it's a chance to use our notebook or our fancy obsidian setup. 

And the idea of taking notes is totally great. Others of us would like to just read. And get on with things. If you are a person who does not normally take notes, I encourage you to maybe develop a lightweight note taking system.  It doesn't have to be fancy, it doesn't need to be extensive. You don't have to print things out, but a place where you can just sort of record the complex thoughts that I guarantee you are going through your head as you read other pieces of scholarly work or primary sources or secondary sources, or any of the things that you have to during your grad school process. 

This might look like free writing. I am a big proponent of free writing because I think that it helps us practice the writing muscle outside of the higher stakes of, oh my gosh, I'm in a draft. So maybe showing your work is sitting down at your desk and trying to write maybe say, 300, 400 words about a specific problem. 

I just wanna normalize the fact that your free writing could be messy and completely not for public consumption. Almost all of my free writing sessions start with at least two to three sentences up top about how much I hate free writing and how much I wish I weren't doing this. But often as I kind of get that muscle going, it's like the first couple of minutes of a group workout class where you're like, Ooh, I really wish I wasn't here.

But then after you're there and you're experiencing the structure, things flow a little bit easier.  This might look like tentative outlines or physical tools like index cards to shuffle around and play with the structure of an argument that stuck. I can't tell you how many times when I was trying to draft or revise a chapter that I had to physically sit down and make my piles of books or write things down on pieces of paper and shuffle them around, have other people look at my outline.

Look at the blocks and say, yes, this makes sense, or no, this doesn't. Somehow using something tactile made it feel more real to me and it made it a little bit lower stakes. I'm just making an outline. I am just shuffling note cards around on a table, but it made it so that it wasn't just in my head, it existed somewhere else. 

This could look like early drafts or writing an abstract for a paper that's not done yet, or drafting out some figures just so that you can see what that chart or that table might even look like.  You know, it's not gonna be the final product, you know that there's gonna be four or five other versions of it probably, but it gives you something physical to look at your thinking from a more external place. 

This might also look like on the kind of higher order scale of things, conference papers or journal articles or guest lectures where you know that you're working on a big multi-year project, like a dissertation or a book, and so you chunk off a little piece of it to teach to your undergrad. Or to present in a grad seminar for a friend or to present at a conference paper or to submit for that book chapter.

It's a way to take a smaller piece of that process and make it more real, more concrete so that you can keep moving forward.  Showing your work is vulnerable. It's messy. It forces you to slow down. And a lot of us like to go fast because deep down, we all think we have to move fast all of the time because there's so much work and there's never enough time to do it all.

But I promise you that even some messy work, um, a. Outline in a notebook that you might never look at again, a series of note cards to help you shuffle through some big terminology or organize a a lit review.  It is going to be messy. You might never show it to another soul. You might, uh, rip that page out of your notebook and start again.

But it helps you build a drafting mindset. And so many of us are in grad school and finding it difficult because for the first time, the tools that work for us. In earlier phases of our educational career aren't working as well anymore. You used to be able to sit down and write a pretty good first, or maybe even a pretty good final draft within a few days or maybe the night before something was due, and all of the sudden you're being asked to work on something that's multiple orders more complex than what you're used to.

It might be multiple orders, more length than you're used to. It is. In a style that's unfamiliar. It's so many reasons why grad school work can be hard.  Giving yourself a chance to practice the idea that there is a lot of work that you create that isn't the final product only helps build that drafting mindset. 

I know that the most prolific the most on time, the most comfortable writers.  And that I know of are the ones that produce a lot of work for every word that ends up in a final draft. And that's not them wasting time. That is them externalizing all of this complex thinking that I promise you that you're already doing and making it so that it's tangible, it's measurable, and it'll help you move things forward just a little bit. 

I hope this helps and I can't wait to see you next week.

 📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com.  Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show.  Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!