Speaker 1: Do you really want to do a PhD? Or is it something else that is drawing you to the idea of having a PhD? I see so many people make this mistake where they're actually sort of like in love with being the clever person or being known as someone who's capable of doing a PhD. What they don't realise is that this, the PhD environment, the thing that I sort of trudged through for three years, is just so boring in so many ways. It's boring, it's frustrating, it's anxiety inducing. It's all of the things that we try to avoid in life and a PhD is a little kind of concentration of all of those things. So you've really got to ask yourself, do you like the idea of having a PhD? Or are you actually interested in the process of getting a PhD? Not enough people know about the process of getting a PhD and just are in love with being called Doctor. I mean, I am Doctor Stapleton, but it wears off after like six months. This is a long time actually, but after six months you're like, yeah, all right. Was it worth all that effort to get this title? It didn't even really open up any doors for me other than going to a postdoc, which is arguably like a really rubbish academic job that you need to get a PhD for. It's not paid very well considering that I could have gone out into industry and got more money. So anyway, don't get distracted Stapes. It's all about making sure you really want to do this. And my biggest bit of advice would be to make sure that it's the last option for you. Like have a look at other options in the world before you settle on doing a PhD. Have a look at getting a job. Have a look at going into government. Have a look at starting your own thing. Time is on your side if you're entrepreneurial. So make sure it is the last option in a list of options that you want to do with your life. If you go through all of the other ones and go, no, I don't want a job. I don't want to do all these things. I'll do a PhD because, and then you have to sort of like come up with the real reason because you actually love the research. You want to know more about a particular part of the world. That is why you should do a PhD. Not just because you like the idea of getting to the end, wearing a floppy silly hat and being like, I've got a PhD so I can respect and love myself. Oh, that was dark. Liking a subject is not enough. Trust me. If you liked a subject, even in undergraduate, even in Masters, you don't necessarily like the process of doing research in that subject. So you need to understand what an actual PhD in that subject looks like. What does the daily life of a PhD student look like? The problem is, is that we quite often give quite a romantic idea to what a PhD student is. We're like, I'm in the lab. I'm doing amazing things. I'm coming up with amazing ideas. When in fact that is like 0.01% of the daily life of a PhD. It's the boring stuff like getting stuff prepared, speaking to the right people, making sure the admin's done for your for your experiment, whether or not it's safety, whether or not it's ethics, whether or not you need to do a presentation, whether or not you're writing up something at the moment, whether or not you've got to do this course that you have no idea about, whether or not you've got to learn new skills to make sure you can do your research. All of those are the actual process of doing a PhD. And the problem is liking a particular subject is not enough. So don't do a PhD if you're just like, oh, I really like this subject. It is not enough. Delve deeper into what actually doing a PhD in that research field is like before you make a decision to do a PhD. One of the biggest mistakes people make when deciding to do a PhD is they don't spend enough time thinking about the research group and the supervisor they're going to work with. It is so so depressing to see these really bright enthusiastic students just be completely cut down by a really unsupportive supervisor or principal investigator that you work under during your PhD. And the problem is this is quite an easily solvable problem that no one actually tells you about. No one says stalk the shit out of a PhD supervisor. If you need to know how to do that, go check out my course where I talk through all of the steps, the 12 pillars of sort of success that you need to look for in a particular research group and supervisor and therefore PhD because not enough people know where to look. The indicators are out there. They're online in places that you can sort of like find for free, but not enough people choose a supervisor correctly. They just go, oh, this person's doing this little thing over here that I kind of really like. I'll just join them and then they speak to them and the supervisor's like, hmm, yes, more, oh, one second. Hello, good morning. Thank you very much. All the best. And then you end up speaking to your supervisor and they're like, oh, yeah, come and do my biddings. Like they need you in the lab to further their own career. So they're not going to say, oh, actually, wait a second. Am I the right person for you? I've never ever heard anyone doing that. So make sure that you stalk the shit out of your supervisor in the right way. Go check out my course. It's for a special deal at the moment because that is so easy to get around, but no one does it. Do you think you're clever? Do you think you're special? I certainly did. Do you think that you're better than everyone else? Some people do PhDs because it strokes their ego. And look, I am probably part of that. It's that I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder. That was just telling me like I didn't do particularly well in high school. I did pretty good in undergraduate chemistry. But the problem is I always had this chip on my shoulder that I was like the clever one and I had this kind of like anxiety all built up around this identity that I didn't really feel like I had the right deep down to have, you know, so I was using a PhD as a way to tell the world like, oh, I'm the best at this. I'm really clever and I can do all this stuff and it just is the worst reason to do a PhD. Now don't get me wrong. I enjoyed my PhD in the end or maybe it's just hindsight because it was so long ago. But overall, I think I enjoyed my PhD, but I think it was my ego driving me to that decision initially. So really it's hard, isn't it? Because you've got to really delve deep and find things that you probably don't even like about yourself and be like, is it the ego driving this? If it is, then you need to ask whether or not a PhD is something you really want to do or whether or not it's just to make yourself feel better because deep down inside you don't feel worthy of being known as the clever one. So therefore doing a PhD will prove to the world that you are the best and also then you can prove it to yourself as well. Ego. F*** your ego. Another thing I want to say is don't rely on PhD supervisors for advice in this realm. I've touched on it before, but this is the important thing is they will never ever tell you to not do a PhD with them because their whole career, their whole life relies on sucking in PhD students to do their bidding in the scientific world, create papers so that then they can improve their own career. So I've never ever heard of a PhD supervisor be like, oh no, I'm not the right person for you. Let me know in the comments if that has actually happened to you or you've heard of it. I've never ever heard of it. And so speaking to PhD supervisors, people that have been sort of like absorbed into the academic world just aren't credible impartial advisors. And so you need to go in and you need to understand that these people will try to trick you into their lab. I've heard so many people being told they're capable of doing a PhD and they're all capable, everyone's capable, but they use that word to be like, oh, you're special, you're capable and they kind of suck them in that way. So please don't listen to PhD supervisors if you're looking for PhD sort of like advice on where to do it, who to do it with, the topic selection even, because getting you to do a PhD is so very much in their interest that I don't think they can give you real advice. So don't listen to any PhD supervisor who approaches you because I think it's just their own interest speaking. If you like this video, go check out this one where I talk about the 10 brutally honest lessons that I learned from doing a PhD. You'll love it.