Earning a PhD is a quite challenging experience.
As of all the challenges you face in life, they change you (hopefully in good) and as computer science PhD I can tell my experience.
The main changes I realize in me regard two aspects:
1- my profession
2- my personality.
1- In my profession as an industrial engineer, I learned to do many things I thought were impossible.
I can list things like :
-speaking and writing in English,
-learning to write good code in Java and R,
-understanding different math models and learning how to apply them in my research work,
-presenting my research's results in different conferences and in front of many other researchers,
-learning to communicate those results in a clear way and communicate in general with business and accademia people i interfaced during everyday work.
-teaching assistance for different computer science courses and helping engineering bachelor students.
Other challenging things include working in team and integrating your work with that of other people.
But what’s most important you learn to change attitude in your work. You basically change your mindset on how to face your research work and in general your duty as a PhD
2- As a person earning a PhD helps you discover your limits.
Everyone have their limits so do you and as a consequence your duty is go beyond those limits.
For doing this is very important to believe in yourself and work hard. However no matter how hard you work, here is fundamental your PhD supervisor's help. I was lucky to have a great supervisor during my PhD period and still have the pleasure to work in his team.
Another experience which can be very rewarding and changes you a lot is travelling. As a PhD student I travelled in different countries to present my research work results. I think that was one of the best parts of being a PhD and in the same time the one that changed me in better.
