Conducting research, particularly during a PhD, resembles refining a rough diamond: shaping raw material into something valuable through a vision shared with mentors. This process unfolds at its own rhythm, which easily collides with today’s hectic software engineering research pace. Researchers face a choice: resist this pace through pause and reflection, or embrace it and develop strategies for keeping up, sometimes exploiting the system. Both options carry consequences; neither is inherently right. I began my academic journey in 2023, entering an era in which publication quantity had already eclipsed the quality of contributions, and “more is better” was shaping careers. Over the past year and a half, large language models have become the de facto go-to productivity tools, increasingly influencing how researchers manage and value their time. In this position paper, I share reflections from my PhD journey on the consequences I have observed of academia’s recent relentless pace, a pace that reveals a system under pressure. It feels as if there is never enough time to conduct research, as if we are collectively forgetting how to use time for what truly matters: research that requires patience, care, and depth, to be meaningful and impactful in the long term.

@inproceedings{paperbot12658,
  title = {Smoothing Edges under Pressure: A PhD Student's Perspective on the Software Engineering Research Pace},
  author = {Carmen Armenti},
  booktitle = {ICSE},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.1145/3793657.3793899}
}