Speaker 1: Hello everyone and welcome back to my channel. In today's video I'm going to share with you 15 things that I wish I knew sooner in my PhD or before I started my PhD. As a final year PhD student, which in Europe is fourth year of my PhD, I'm definitely being able to look back on the first couple of years of my PhD and consider what points of knowledge would have made things a lot smoother going forward and now I am hoping to share those with you so that you might, if you're early in your PhD or even any stage in your PhD, hopefully you will benefit from these. I made a similar video in first year of my PhD but because I was in first year I still didn't know a lot about the process of doing a PhD so I'm hoping that this will be a nice addition to that video. If you're new here, my name is Ciara, as I mentioned I'm a final year PhD student based in Dublin, Ireland. I also run a business which is a speech and drama school based in Ireland and I have this YouTube channel. So on this channel I talk about all things to do with being productive while doing a PhD and how I balance all of these things. If you like that content be sure to subscribe and hit the notification bell so that you never miss a video. One thing that I wish I knew before starting a PhD is how a PhD is actually assessed. I don't think I had actually looked into this or really found out the answer to this before starting a PhD and now that I'm in the final stages of the PhD it's definitely something that I wish I had known sooner in a way. This is how it works in I think most European universities. I don't know if there's a difference between the European ones and the US ones but essentially you will submit your thesis to your examiners and they will have a couple of weeks or maybe a month to read through your PhD thesis in great detail and then you will have your viva. You and your supervisor can choose the examiners that are examining your thesis. There will be one internal examiner which is someone from your own university and then there will be an external examiner from another university and I'm not sure, I don't feel like you get to choose the internal examiner. They're usually set up when you start your PhD and if you have something similar to what I have in my university which is a stage 2 transfer it's often somebody who is on that stage 2 transfer or PhD one year assessment exam board that is going to be your internal examiner. Then your external examiner will be someone from a different university who is in a similar field and you and your supervisor can choose that person. I think the minimum a viva can be is something like 30 minutes and the maximum it can be is 4 hours but it's typically somewhere between 1 and 3 hours and at the beginning of that you will give around a 10 or maybe 15 minute presentation about your PhD. Then there will be a really long question and answer period. Often times that can be a great discussion between the PhD candidate and the examiners and it can often give people things to think about and things to maybe bring into future work. I definitely am concerned about the PhD viva because I would find the questions portion quite difficult. I would usually see it as some sort of criticism and I definitely find it difficult to take criticism so I definitely think I will struggle a lot with that but that is essentially what the viva will entail and I've definitely heard people's reports that it has been a very positive experience because they get to really talk about their research in such great detail that they usually wouldn't get to and it can be a really good opportunity for that but it is something that I am quite nervous about. And then in terms of passing or failing, one potential option that will happen is that you will pass without any corrections needed. This is really really rare and I think I only know one person who has done this so that's not the typical case. The more likely case would be that you'll pass with minor corrections and I think they've said that minor corrections is adding up to like 5 or so pages to your thesis so it could be things like missing a paragraph somewhere, having some typos, small things that don't require a huge amount of work to be done. This will be passing with minor corrections and when you come out of this, even though you have minor corrections and need to resubmit your thesis, you're still considered a doctor. So you've still been considered to have passed your PhD. Then what can happen as you go further down is that you might fail one portion of either the Viva or the PhD thesis and that will require a longer period. So I think with minor corrections you get up to 3 months to fix them and then with more major revisions you get something like 6 months or so for those. Then there's of course the option of potentially failing and by that point you come out of it with a master's, a research master's. So that's definitely not the option anybody wants but at least you do get something at the end I think in most cases. I think I knew elements of this going into the PhD but not really all of this information and I think it would have been good to know sooner. Another thing that I wish I knew before starting a PhD is that a PhD is a lot more than the scientific contribution. This is some advice that I got from doing a doctoral consortium event recently where the person was really talking about how when we're again being assessed for our PhD they're looking to see are you going to be able to independently do research going forwards. So the PhD thesis is a representation of that but it's not just quantifying how much you have contributed to the scientific field, it's really understanding the level of the research you've conducted and whether you are going to be capable of conducting research going forward. I think that's definitely been kind of a weight off my shoulders because it's really hard to tell if you are doing enough in terms of scientific contribution how much you really need to do but at the end of the day it's really more about the process and a lot of the times in university things are about learning a process and not learning a particular thing. So here you're kind of just learning the process of being a researcher rather than that one thing that you've contributed to the world of science or knowledge. Another thing I wish I knew sooner was that no two PhDs are the same. Obviously that has to be true for the idea of making a unique contribution but in terms of the PhD journeys everyone is going to be different and so there's really no way to take advice a lot of the time from people who've done PhDs because everyone's situation is going to be different and for sure with that you need to absolutely never try and compare yourself to somebody else because your PhD is different to theirs. Everyone's journey and everyone's kind of process of how they get to the end of a PhD is going to be entirely different. The challenges that you face and the roadblocks that you face are going to be different. I had a really great start to my PhD in first year. I took definitely second and third year was a lot lower and now I'm sort of back up towards the end but other people will have the complete opposite journey to me and if that person was trying to compare themselves to me they would have felt maybe not as good in the first year when I was doing better than them and then if I was comparing myself to them I don't feel as good in second and third year. But overall we're both going to end up in the same place which is finishing our PhDs and that's really the thing that we're looking for at the end of the day, not how well you do compared to other people along the way. Another thing that I wish I knew sooner was that everyone doing a PhD pretty much is going to feel inadequate and that feeling doesn't really go away. So I've talked before about imposter syndrome and the idea of feeling like you don't deserve to be there or that you're not smart enough to do a PhD and I think pretty much everybody who's doing a PhD will feel that at least sometime during their PhD if not all of the time and this was something that I figured oh well when I get to this point I won't feel like that anymore and then I get to that point and I still feel like that. And I've heard professors who are very accomplished talk about the fact that they still feel like that. So that just showed me that no matter how much I try that feeling probably isn't going to go away unless I just accept the fact that everybody feels that way it's just some people hide it and some people don't. It's the difficult challenge of being at the edge in terms of knowledge is that you're always not going to know stuff and therefore you're always going to feel like a bit of an idiot from time to time. Something I wish I knew but really couldn't have known is that unexpected delays are going to happen and there's just no way to plan for them. There's no way to imagine the things that can get in the way of doing your PhD. For me like a global pandemic happening only a couple of months after I started my PhD was something that there was no way I was going to be able to predict that. If you had asked me you know what I thought the likelihood of that happening was I would have said it's very unlikely. Unexpectedly taking over running a company again just under a year into my PhD not something that I anticipated. If I had known these things going into my PhD would I have still done it? I don't know. I'm glad that I'm getting to this point where I'm still able to have finished my PhD soon and I've been able to do it but yeah it's one of those things where it has had an unprecedented effect on my PhD. As somebody who likes to do well in things it has taken away a lot of the time I can spend on my PhD. I just feel like I'm not doing enough a lot of the time and that's just a difficult thing. So I feel like I could have done a lot better in my PhD had I not had those things happen but there was no way to plan for those, no way to expect those and just something that I ended up having to deal with. Something that I did know before I started a PhD but didn't really appreciate was that keeping a research diary is so important. Actually tracking what you're doing and what the results were and why you did what you were doing is so important because when you come back at a later stage to try and write up things there will be times where you're not sure why you took a particular approach and if you don't have somewhere where you've really tracked your personal thoughts and personal interpretations about what your research process is you will be sorry. I definitely have had this occur from time to time. I'm typically quite good with keeping notes I just didn't really keep my research diary very well but I definitely have felt that times coming back when I'm like why did I choose to do this over that and then going back and having to spend that little bit of time checking on the other thing and then coming and ending up doing the same thing again and realising oh yeah that's why I couldn't do that. So if you have a better system of keeping your research diary which I have since come to find it will really really help you a lot in the long run because when you go to write up things it's just so much faster and it means you're not really staring at a blank page when you start to write up things because you can just copy in a lot of those things from your research diary. On a similar playing field is that organising your code if you are someone who does code or maybe files if that's more important. Organising your code is so important, so important it's really only something I learnt to do in the last year so a lot of the code that I wrote earlier in my PhD is shockingly organised and that is part of what happens when I think you are more self-directed in how you learn programming is that you don't really know a lot of the good programming principles which I have had to learn the hard way from things just not being well organised and I can see when I look now at notebooks that I use that are more organised it's so much easier to look back on and it just takes way less time when I'm trying to revisit old work when there is a clear structure there and clear organisation of the code. Something that I didn't embrace early enough in my PhD is that you absolutely need a digital note taking system. As you might know because I started off my channel sharing research diary in a bullet journal on paper I started off I think at least the first year and a half maybe of my PhD I wasn't using a digital note taking system. That's because I felt like my organisation levels in general weren't very good and I felt like I wouldn't have been able to use a digital version as well. Obviously now that has changed a lot since I am a big champion for notion and since then it's been so much easier to go back over things. When you are looking for something that you wrote on a particular day and you know it says something or other you know kind of a couple of the words that might be in there in physical notes when you have so many of them it's going to be really hard to check through those no matter how good your system is it's going to be a lot harder to check through them. Whereas I use my iPad for a lot of my handwritten notes and it's really easy to search in the notebooks for particular things. I typically will also hashtag things with either project names or a type of note those are easily found as well and then I will move a lot of these into notion so that I have them somewhere else and again it's so much easier to find them on a digital system because the search functions tend to work very well compared to when you use something that is on paper. So that's a large reason why I transitioned from the actual physical notebooks to the digital notebooks. People ask me a lot of the time like why I don't make those videos anymore and that's why and in terms of why I keep them there it's because I know there are going to be people starting their PhDs who are on the paper journey and will need a bit of time like I did before moving on to something digital. Something that I almost can't believe about a PhD is that it actually goes by really really fast. When I signed up to do a PhD and I thought wow four years is such a long time and I'm sure a lot of people in first year will be feeling that. Now that I'm in fourth year it's crazy to think how fast it's gone and I think when I was telling people about doing a PhD they just felt like that's such a long time why on earth would you sign up to do that after already spending four or five years in university but when I tell those same people now that I'm in final year and I'm going to be writing my thesis soon they're like wait how has this much time passed? I guess it's just at this age things do start to go by a lot quicker. You'll think that it's going to be a really long time it's not. You will just inevitably see as you get further along I think the time goes by faster and faster and now I definitely feel weeks and months just slip away so if that's something you're worried about right now that it's going to feel like forever pretty soon it won't. An important thing to remember is that in a PhD you won't be able to do everything that you want to do. That is just part and parcel I think with research. As you do further projects you will always have more ideas about how you can do things differently and eventually you will not have time to do all of these things and you will just have to park it and end where you are. This is sort of where I am right now because the data that I have I could work on for decades and I'll never be able to do all of the projects that I would like to do with that data in my PhD but I need to start writing my thesis so I need to stop I need to just park the rest of the ideas and include them in a future work section and that is a really tough thing to do because you really want to keep going but you can't. It's something that I think is important to remember that even though you have all of these ideas you might not be able to do all of them so try and pick out the ones that are most important and most essential to your PhD before doing ones that are maybe nice to haves and not must haves. Another thing I didn't appreciate about doing a PhD is that the supervisor relationship is so important. For my Masters thesis I didn't really have a great relationship with my supervisor just that I didn't see them very much. We didn't spend that much time together so I didn't really appreciate going into the PhD how important it was going to be and how much more involved a lot of the time a PhD supervisor can be and because my relationship with my supervisors is so good I'm so appreciative of it compared to any time I talk to people who don't have the best relationship with their supervisor I can really see how much it negatively impacts people and I just feel like I'm very blessed with the ones that I have. Part of that is because I did investigate them a good bit before and I think that's definitely an important thing to do if you can and because I do have a network of supervisors so I have two PhD supervisors and then further advisors so it means that I have more people to look to when things go pear shaped compared to if you just have one supervisor and nobody else really to talk to. So I think early on trying to set up that relationship and set up that network is a really good thing to do especially if at some point you end up not having the best relationship with your supervisor you'll be able to turn to other people. Something that I'm only really just appreciating now about doing a PhD is that you will become an underachiever. I think a lot of people who do PhDs will have from some point or another in their life been some sort of academic overachiever or really having a high drive for achievement and wanting to achieve and inevitably in a PhD you'll be faced with challenges that will turn you into an underachiever. In a PhD it's really not about the number of papers you get or how many citations you get or this or that but it's about doing the PhD and there is really just one thing at the end of the day that's important and that's that you finish your PhD. So you'll go from that person who maybe always would have wanted to get an A in something to just wanting to pass because there is no A in a PhD there is just pass or fail and that can be a definitely difficult thing to deal with if you are the type of person who wants to achieve on a high level. A thing that I definitely didn't know and would have liked to know is that when you're doing a PhD anyone who hasn't done a PhD or isn't doing one will not really understand what you're going through. When you tell people that you're a PhD student and that's your job people will be confused. When you tell people that you're working on your PhD people will assume a lot of the time that you're like a student who can do then things whenever they want and that you don't really work full time at this. In a way that's somewhat true because you can be a bit more flexible in your schedule but it very much is a full time commitment and people don't appreciate that it is a job. You can't just you know drop everything and do something. I think that's just been the number one thing that I've found and then as well people will constantly be asking you when you're going to be finished and saying that's terrible it's going to be so long. I just feel that with no other job do people respond that way. People usually don't kind of be wishing for you to be finished something and seeing what you're doing right now is the biggest pain in the world. It's just people's perception of your job will be that it's it's so hard and the worst thing in the world they can imagine which is weird. One of the best things that I've learned throughout doing a PhD is that taking the time to plan something will save you time. As you might know if you're on my channel I do like to talk about planning and productivity and I tend to spend a lot of time planning out projects before getting started with them. Inevitably that has saved me so much time because otherwise there would be so much time and I've had this happen before that I would be spending staring at my computer screen not knowing what to do and so that has caused me to procrastinate or just avoid the work because I haven't clearly defined what it is that I'm meant to be doing. Whereas when I take the time to map out the project, map out the action steps that I need to take it becomes a lot simpler because I have clear actions that I need to do and then I just want to do them and get them off my task list. And even though it might take a couple of hours initially or the first day of work of a week to do that then the rest of the week is really smooth sailing compared to other weeks I've had where I've just been putting off the work or not getting as much done as I probably could have. And a final thing that I have found only really recently that I think I could have known sooner and it would have helped me a lot to know sooner in my PhD. Learning how you work and how you learn is so important. I have learned that I find it difficult to just go ahead and do any of the actions around programming until I have written out things. For example at the moment I'm working on my dataset chapter and I've found that writing out the steps first and going to the pieces first and then realising oh I need to do this, I need to do that, I need to do that. Then writing up the tasks I need to do and then getting to the programming has been the way that I learn the best about what I need to do compared to if I was to just get in and start doing the programming work often times I can get really stuck. And this has now helped me a lot because it seems very backwards I think because it seems like writing should be the last step but because my way of learning is reading and writing that is the best thing that I can do. So if you are more of a practical learner then you might find just getting in and getting into the programming or whatever it is that you need to do is the best thing. I definitely don't. If you're a kind of audio learner you might need to talk things out loud and talk to somebody about it first or talk to a recorder on your iPhone first. But this has definitely been the number one thing for me and it's now been saving me a lot of time so I'm glad I think going into the thesis writing it's going to help me quite a lot. I also feel I'm very motivated when I have something written up compared to when I just have a blank page that I then have to go and fill in afterwards. So those are 15 things that I wish I knew sooner in my PhD or I wish I knew even before I started my PhD. If you have things that you wish you knew before starting a PhD or sooner in your PhD I would love if you would comment those down below and help out some other people going forward. Thank you so much for watching. Thanks to my wonderful members as always. If you got to this point in the video maybe consider subscribing and hitting the notification bell and I will see you all in the next video.