A 5-Part ‘Spine’ Check to Fix a Stuck PhD (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: If you're a PhD student and your project feels harder than it should even though you're working really hard, then this video is for you. You might be reading constantly but not feel like you're getting any clearer. You could be revising over and over but still feel something's off and you're getting lost and losing motivation. You might even be thinking, I don't know where this is going anymore or what I'm trying to show or do. Look, these signs are incredibly common and they don't mean that you can't do research powerfully or that you're not good enough or that you're failing. It typically is a sign that something has drifted. Drifted out of alignment in your PhD and like a broken arm or a broken leg, your PhD might be broken. But don't despair. I know that sounds terrible and daunting to look in the mirror and think my PhD is broken but it's fixable and it happens all the time. It's just right now if it truly is broken, like imagine a broken leg, you don't want to start running. Right now you don't want to try to work harder to fix it which is the common impulse. In fact, that often makes the problem worse and leads to a burnout cycle. So in this video, I'm going to help give you a framework that's going to help you spot where breaks in the PhD commonly happen. I'm going to help you click it all back into place, kind of like an osteopath, massaging, manipulating your PhD. We're going to do that to help you understand what the spine is of your PhD and every PhD has a spine. And we're going to use our North Star alignment sequence that we actually use inside our FastTrack mentorship program to help you diagnose the problem. And you're going to be able to use this by the end of this video as a quick five-minute health check to see whether your PhD is broken and get greater clarity to help you diagnose the spot that's gone off and fix it today. If you're new to the channel, I'm Professor David Stuckler. I've been a professor at Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge and published over 400 peer review papers, but I've also coached hundreds of PhD students who get stuck. And again, it's not because they're not capable. I mean, the PhD is an arduous journey. It's just all too common to experience this drift that leads to misalignment and ultimately causes more and more pain. And it's a big reason why more than one in three PhDs never finish and burn out. If you're interested in working together, click the link below. Let's see if we're a good fit. Now let's dive into the video. Every PhD project has a spine. It has a backbone. And when that spine is aligned, yes, progress feels hard. It is a PhD after all. If it was easy, everybody could do it. But it's manageable, as steady and smooth the project moves forward. When that spine is not aligned, everything just feels heavier than it should. And to understand this, the spine of every PhD has five main components that we've seen. Whichever PhD, whichever field, has five main components. The first, the anchor, is the gap. What's missing in the literature or in your field that you're trying to address. The research question could be one, two, or multiple on how you're going to try to deliver and address that gap. This needs to line up to what you want to show, which is often your core claim or idea or research question. It links to your research question or it's your hypothesis. And these first three often crystallize into what some universities ask for as a problem statement or a thesis aim, which takes your claim but makes it realistic, scoped, and deliverable. Often if you've done a research proposal, universities will want to see this before you go too far. And from here you need a bridge to your methods. You're going to have to have some realistic way that you're going to test or demonstrate or make some progress on this thesis aim. And it should usually feel kind of inevitable, like it's the right choice. When these line up, again, progress is smooth. If one of these bends or misaligns, you get friction and pain down the chain. So first, before we dig into the kinds of breaks that happen with some real examples from researchers I've worked with, you need to make sure you've actually defined each of these elements. That you've got your gap, your research question, you've got clarity on what you actually want to show, you've got a thesis aim, and you've got a bridge to your methods that fits. If you haven't defined these, well, you're just missing ingredients in in your PhD spine. So go back to the drawing board and get clarity on these first. Next, we're going to go into drift at each of these. So when students start struggling, to me it's a telltale sign there's drift. Yes, struggle can be because it's hard, and that's an okay kind of struggle. It can trigger imposter syndrome, feeling like you're a fraud. Yes, you're being stretched in ways you haven't before. It's normal to feel some internal mental resistance to that process. Check out our video on imposter syndrome. Almost everybody who goes through grad school is feeling it. It's a necessary phase of the process and it's a sign that you're growing. And yes, struggle can happen because things are just technically challenging and you might have to learn new skills and techniques. But that still will play out. There's progress, there's moving forward. When students really start getting into a deep struggle with some of the pain of confusion or endless revision or loss of motivation or procrastination, it's usually because there is something misaligned in the chain and downstream in that chain this pain happens. And it's usually a quiet process. It's not like there's a moment where everything just broke. That's why I use the term drift. It's usually because things have drifted off and you only notice when this pain starts to get unbearable. So drift can happen for a number of reasons. It can be that feedback from a colleague or a supervisor has pulled you in a different direction from where you originally thought you were going to go. It's pulled one element in the spine out of alignment. You can get shiny object syndrome, maybe a promising side idea, a side quest that you went down that drifted from your main core of your alignment spine. That happens. I see a lot of curious researchers especially go down these different rabbit holes. Sometimes they're spurred on by AI that can seduce their attention into a shiny object or chasing a squirrel that they really need to stay focused on their main spine. The scope can sometimes expand. You can start trying to do too much and they've got the decade-long project, not just the PhD project, to get the driver's license and get on to the next stage in their career. Sometimes too this feedback can be from supervisors who are just busy and they don't see the whole picture of where you're trying to go, what you're trying to do, what you're trying to show. So they optimize one step of where you're at and that may make sense with the data that they're looking at but it doesn't actually fit with a whole like the coherent whole of your PhD spine. When this happens you can be working really hard, you have high effort, but the coherence starts to break down and eventually things get stuck. Students sometimes come to me just saying like I'm just no longer, I'm not interested in this anymore. So let me give you a concrete example of where somebody came to me they had gotten stuck, they'd gotten their proposal passed through the system, but they're right at the point where they had to get to the methods. And the student was about to go into the British archive, the British library, and start collecting data from the archives that same afternoon, but he kind of felt lost. He felt like he was going to walk into the library and look around at books and not even really knew what to pull out of it. And so, you know, just a few questions in, it became very clear that there were things off in the spine. I was asking, well, what are you extracting? How are you, how are you going to code it? That wasn't clear. His project was very theoretical but he had gotten pushed into more empirical work from his supervisors in a method he really hadn't wanted to use and it wasn't actually answering his core claim. And so, I mean, his was really broken because lots of things were misaligned and so he wanted to go collect data to make progress, but the answer was to say, hang on, wait a second, we, even if you do this perfectly, it's not going to speak to what you want to show. We need to stop, rebuild the spine, and only then let's move forward to the data collection phase, get into the methods, and get into the nuts and bolts of implementing this project. I'll come back in a second to be more concrete about this example with Jeremy. So, let me give you a couple examples, further examples of drift at each point in the spine. I think that'll help make it more concrete in a way that you can use. So, a first point in the spine is that the gap just isn't strong or isn't real or isn't clear. So, I had a researcher who wanted to look at the nexus of physical activity and sleep and came up with a study design. And on the surface, it looked pretty good, but we ran a simple duplication text. We went and looked for a paper that was very close to hers and we found three or four of them. And the problem is that we found here, the problem wasn't the writing, it wasn't even the analysis, it's just that the whole anchor, the gap, wasn't a clear gap, didn't exist in the literature, and this was going to be unpublishable and dead on arrival. Check our dead-end topic trap video here, that's really going to help you validate your gap. And everything felt hard because the project just didn't have anything it could add over and above what had already been done. So, the researcher kept trying to narrow and look for real methodological subtleties that got more technologically sophisticated and harder to implement. And the whole thing was just going down a rabbit hole and we needed to take a step back, put the gap into a place that was going to be more low-hanging fruit, it was going to be easier to deliver on and also higher value, and the spine started to snap back into place and she started making progress. In a second example, I've seen researchers come up with research questions that don't come into contact with their gap. So, one common expression of this is I see somebody who their gap is asking a question about maybe institutions, but the research question is about individuals, and no amount of revision is going to be able to fix that. You've got to get the research question into alignment with a gap, so you need your question to be something that you can actually answer and speak to the gap. I've got another example that I'll share with you. I had a researcher who was interested in culturally responsive education practices in rural areas of the United States, but her research question was asking about rural urban educational inequalities. And it's not that the research question was wrong, it was perfectly valid research question, could make a good PhD on it, but it wasn't aligned with the gap that was just behind it. They were actually misaligned. These were different research projects, but they were in a similar topic neighborhood. So, we ended up in this case, we figured the real anchor here, the gap, was right. We just needed to tweak the research question to bring it back into alignment. And once we did that, it was much clearer to connect to what she actually wanted to show and have a bridge to the methods down the stream. The third example in the chain, where you get to what you want to show, is really, really important. And I find people really start to lose sight. They kind of get, they can't see the forest anymore through the trees, to use that cliche, that they've lost what they want to show, which really is part of your North Star, what it's all about. You've got a claim, an idea, a hypothesis, and that should link, that should speak back to your research question. And what happens here is then people can start answering their research question, but it's not really what they're passionate about or what they set out to do in the first place. And that can be really deflating and demotivating. And that's a real kink in the alignment spine. So coming back to Jeremy, who was getting lost, when I went to him, he was struggling, he was just, he was very theoretical. And that's why the push to empirics, he's the one I mentioned earlier, was throwing him off. When I stopped and asked him, what do you want to show? It rapidly became clear that the whole structure he was building wasn't going to deliver him what he wanted to show. I asked him and he said, well, my real interest, he was very interested in using some theory to understand the far right. It was really quite vague and it kind of had slipped through and got approved as a proposal. But even though things get approved as a proposal, doesn't mean that the alignment spine is right. Sometimes, unfortunately, there's institutional incentives to just push you on because it's harder to fail you than actually error correct and take a deep dive and stop you before you go in too far. But coming back to Jeremy, his interest was in actually making an argument. He told me he wanted to, his big interest was like, well, for him, I don't want to get in the politics. He said, well, why haven't we solved the far right? And he didn't, he didn't like the explanation saying that people are just turning to the far right because they're inherently racist. And he wanted to make a structural argument that modernity was leaving a vacuum in our social institutions that the far right was opportunistically trying to fill. At any rate, pairing this down away from the theoretical language to a very simple what do you want to show was exactly what we needed to help him get clarity on where we really wanted to go. And once we had that, we were able to snap back in the chain like an osteopath. We were able to get the research question and get the gap more clearly in focus. We had greater alignment and John was able to unlock progress. And what that meant is, it's going to come to our next example, was building the bridge to the methods. And this one I see happen all the time, is that the method can't actually answer the research question. So this will happen when somebody's maybe trying to prove causality but they only have descriptive data. Or maybe they want to achieve a policy change but they have a very small minor case study that isn't really generalizable. Or they're trying to build a grand theory but without any evidence to test it. So on paper, sometimes you can make things in your proposal look aligned but it can still feel wrong because it can't deliver on what you actually want to say. And this is what was happening with Jeremy again. What he wanted to show was about individual political attitudes. But his method, he was about to go into the archive and try to look at party manifestos. And that could answer a different question that could still be linked to what he wanted to show but we needed to kind of massage that spine to get it into alignment. Because the party manifestos could help with a part of his story but what he was missing was he wasn't going to be able to tell him what individuals believe. Whether those individuals who were supporting the far right were really racist or not or something else was going on. And that's what a broken bridge looks like here. So no matter how well executed, the study was never going to be able to deliver the claim. And so when John switched to survey data, he literally left the library, the project suddenly made sense. Same topic, same interest, method aligned. So listen, here's a check you can do today. The fix for drift is not working harder. It just creates more friction and it just causes more pain. It's realignment. You need to go back to your PhD spine and get it in order. So ask yourself, does my gap pass a duplication test? Is it a viable gap? Is it a strong gap? Ask yourself, does my research question speak to this gap? Are they directly in contact with each other? And this research question, is that connecting to what I actually do want to show with all this hard work that I'm putting in? If I answer this research question, is it going to come out on the other side with something that I'm truly interested in and want to build? Is my thesis aim properly scoped and integrating the elements of my gap research question what I want to show? And finally, do my methods, can they actually deliver? Can they demonstrate all this in a way your methods should feel like the inevitable result or an excellent way to deliver and show what you really want to show and test your research question? Once you get this down, this may feel abstract, but once you get this down, it will help you see where the bottleneck is. Clarity returns fast. And it's not that the PhD is easier because PhDs are hard, it's because it becomes coherent again. So listen, let me know in the comments below if you've ever felt that your PhD has been broken and if you were able to pinpoint where in the chain something went off and fix it. That really helps inspire the entire community who often do go down and look at those comments themselves. And if you do want to see more how we make this alignment more concrete and explicit and apply our North Star alignment sequence to your project, all the way from choosing the topic through to executing and finishing and even getting published, that's the work we do inside our mentorship communities. I encourage you to click the link below, see a short video about how we work, see if it resonates, and if so, let's get on a call and have a chat to see if we're a good fit to work together. I will see you guys in the next video, and don't forget to watch this dead-end topic trap video before you go yourself too far down the rabbit hole.