The sweetest PhD competition of the year
Earlier this summer, noting that most PhD supervisors were OOO and therefore not distracting their doctoral students from important questions, we asked doctoral students from across the country an extremely important one: if your PhD were a dessert, what would it be, and why?
If you've been to one of our University training days you'll know that it’s our favourite icebreaker to help students to introduce their research to each other but also to remind us all not to take academia so seriously all the time. For this round we introduced a competitive element — the winner gets ice cream!
We received 146 responses - all which floored us by just how much emotion could be packed into a one liner. We ourselves co-founded Kohlrabi during and shortly after our own PhDs, so it remains a very resonant time for our team. The competition responses, from endlessly layered tiramisus to burnt(out) baked alaska, collapsing soufflés and sundaes whose customers were never happy, made us laugh a lot. But they also reminded us just how testing a PhD can be on emotional health.
Our panel of six judges comprised of current and recent PhD students from our Accelerator cohorts narrowed the 146 entries down to a top 10, which then went to a public vote on LinkedIn. Nearly 300 individual votes later (we checked — we’re a dab hand at rooting out research fraud 😉), we had a winner with more than 30% of the vote.
The winning dessert was Klepon, submitted by Fadhil Tarmidizi, 2nd Year PhD student at Sheffield. His PhD based in the School of Chemical, Materials, and Biological Engineering, explores the Hydrothermal Liquefaction of Lignocellulosic Biomass.
Fadhil explained: “I chose klepon because it reminds me of home. It's one of my favourite Indonesian desserts. When I tried making it here, I realised that even something that looks simple requires patience, timing, technique and, most importantly, experience. It turned out to be a perfect metaphor for my PhD: I initially thought I could mix everything together and voilà, but research, just like klepon, takes much more patience and perseverance than you expect.”
Fadhil admitted that he had taken the competition “almost as seriously as a very prestigious competition” because he really wanted the ice cream. We love this insight as it reminds us of something we’ve learnt while settling into our own niche as researchers in the public sphere: academic publishing isn’t everything. There are many ways to share the things you care about and get your knowledge out into the world. Sometimes that involves comparing several years of painstaking research to a small green Indonesian sweet.
Fadhil is shortly to take delivery of a gigantic cool box containing tubs of pistachio, mint choc chip, coconut and coffee ice cream, plus raspberry and mango sorbet, nestled in dry ice. He'll have to tell us whether six tubs of ice cream improves PhD perseverance...
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