Speaker 1: If you want to win your PhD in 2024, here are the things that are so important. Each one is going to be a bauble on my beard. Check this out. So the first thing we need is a success thesis. A success thesis simply follows the structure of this. If I do these things and then you put in these things there, then it will be unreasonable for me to fail. And so those things you need to think about maybe three to five activities that actually sort of like contribute significantly to the success of your PhD. Too many times we get sidetracked by things that our supervisor is telling us, by things that we think will look good on our CV, when in fact getting a PhD is all about a really sort of core set of activities, coming up with ideas, doing tests and experiments about those ideas, analyzing the results and then using that to inform what you're doing next. And you need to do as many cycles of those as possible. There are other little sort of side things that really are important too. If you regularly meet up with your supervisor, if you regularly go through the literature, these are core things that if you do enough, it would be unreasonable for you to fail your PhD. So you need to come up with your success thesis. I'll put the structure of that success thesis in the description box and really think about how you can use it to make sure that you are going to be super successful. It's time to get super serious with your supervisor. Supervisors are having a ton of really stressful things put on them. It is more stressful than ever to be an academic, to have to get grants, to have to supervise students. Uni teachers were already among the most stressed. COVID and student feedback have just made things worse. These are our supervisors as well. So there's been mass force redundancies. And the recent review on Australia and New Zealand academics was that they had high levels of occupational stress well before COVID and recent upheavals only added to the problems. This is likely to jeopardize recruitment and retention of staff. So it is really, really sort of treacherous out there for them at the moment. They have loads and loads of stuff on. So you need to take control of your PhD. It is time that you are in the driver's seat. What do I mean by that is you organize the meetings with your supervisors. You sort of come up with the agenda that you want to talk about. You do all of the things that really make your PhD move forward as quickly as possible. I used to chair my supervisor meetings. I used to have a slide at the beginning saying what we agreed last time, how I met those things and at the end where I want to go next, not where my supervisor wants to go next. So it's really important that you are super strict with your supervisor at this time and you say what you need, how you need them to support you and you chair your supervisor meetings to get the most from that time because they will quickly hijack a supervisor meeting because they haven't really thought about it before and they're thinking about it as you're actually in the meeting and that can really just lead to some really bad decisions being made. Another thing that's super important is, oh that broke. Another thing that's super important is using AI tools. We know now that we are past that kind of like scary stage of AI. Academia doesn't move very fast and anything that threatens it gets shut down immediately but luckily there are now journals, really prestigious journals that are doing a U-turn on the use of academic AI tools for writing and preparing papers. They're not saying you should use it for the generation of results but what they are saying is you need to use or you can use it for generating text, for helping you come up with your abstract, for helping the really sort of like boring and tedious parts of writing a paper. I think that we'll be seeing more journals make it easier for academics and researchers and PhD students to use AI tools. They will solidify all of the rules and regulations they create around using AI tools but we're starting to relax. So make sure you are familiar with all of the AI tools that you are able to actually use and it goes well beyond these days of chat GPT. I am amazed about how quickly it has come on and there are loads of tools for you to choose from. So if you're unsure about which ones exist, this is the Academia Insider, that's my new project where I've got this blog post, it's at the top of the blog, it's pinned and it's all of the best AI tools for research and I've just listed them all here. All for literature review and mapping, all for looking for research tools, all for reading peer-reviewed papers easily, they're all there for you. So I will be updating this throughout 2024 so that all of the best AI tools you need to know about are on this blog. So go check it out and it is going to be such a double-edged sword I think for Academia. On one side it's going to increase our productivity, I think however the expectations of what you're able to publish and how quickly you'll be able to publish will increase. I hope that it acts more as a useful aid than as a competition catalyst and accelerator. We shall see, but there's no doubt that the people who are not embracing AI tools will easily get left behind. You need to plan your exit strategy. There is no doubt that Academia is more competitive than ever and you need to make sure that you have a career that you want and you're not just forced out at the end because you have to. Look at this, even though there are loads and loads of people that are still in Academia after completing their PhD, the amount of time that it takes for them to get an actual career is increasing. It's hardcore. Down here this professor told the Times Higher Education that drawn out PhDs in a series of lengthy postdoc positions which previously are not required are now becoming the norm. There are very few opportunities for even the most talented young scientists to advance on a fast track. He added, most academic systems are very slow and bureaucratic. Why is this a surprise? Of course, this has always been my experience of Academia. So we've got to make sure that we are working for our own best interest for our careers. It is getting harder and more frustrating to get into Academia and therefore we need an exit plan. Too many of you out there don't know what you want to do after your PhD. The way you win a PhD is making sure that it works for you. That at the end of your PhD you're able to go into a career that you want or that you're able to escape. I made connections in industry and I was able to become an explosives chemist in the mines in Australia. I didn't really like it but it didn't matter. It was that next evolution of my career that I was in charge of. So have an exit strategy. Even if you're in your first year of your PhD in 2024 you need to be thinking what do I want to do at the end of this PhD. Build the skills. Write a list of the things you need to know and need to connect to, i.e. people, i.e. skills, i.e. different networking events, whatever it is. Go out and find it so that it works for you. Winning in a PhD is all about embracing failure and I don't just mean like oh you need to fail a lot to actually get a PhD. What I mean is people will be actively rude to you and failing you and rejecting you throughout your PhD and one of the biggest skills you can learn is to accept it, shrug it off and move forward. You have to be persistent with your own progress otherwise you can easily get sidetracked if all of a sudden you start to feel sorry for yourself because you've been rejected. Rejection is part of the academic game and in a PhD you really get to embrace that and you need to know that your rejection is not anything special. We've all been rejected many, many times and this article here was brilliant. This is all about a guy who has been rejected a load and here this is what I need you to know and this is true for every academic is that for every job I have been offered, every fellowship I've been awarded, every piece of research I've published, I have probably been rejected several times before achieving success and every rejection hurts but you've got to not give up. If something fails, if your paper doesn't get published, if there is someone out there that is intentionally rude to you, you need to learn to shrug it off and move forward as quickly as possible. Feel the feelings but then try to not let them dictate how you feel about yourself or your research. Everyone's going to face rejection and failure. You need to learn to push through it. That is the only way you're going to succeed quicker and get through your PhD with your mental health intact is by realising that everyone in academia has multiple failures but like social media, you only show what the best bit of your career is about. So these people aren't going out being like, oh I got this award but remember, by the way, I got this one, this one and this one rejected. But I've got this shiny new grunt, aren't I brilliant? They don't tell you about all the failures and so you have to go into this knowing that behind every successful academic are mountains of rejection letters, a mountain of horrible comments by stressed out academics and you'll be no different. So learn to embrace failure and rejection for what it is, which is the ability to move on to that next opportunity. I reckon I can get one on my hair, my very, go on, oh my god, yes, I'm happy with this. Ah, beautiful. So there we have it, there's everything you need to know about winning your PhD in 2024. Let me know in the comments what you would add and if you love this video, remember to go check out this one where I talk about all of the academic advice you don't want to hear but you need to. It's a really important watch. If you're doing a PhD, thinking of doing a PhD or you're at the end of a PhD, go check it out because it's super valuable.