Speaker 1: The first thing I wish I'd known about grad school is that you are leaving behind a world of certainty. In your undergraduate years, you have to sort of jump through hoops, boing, boing, to the end of a degree. And that means there has to be certainty in place for you to pass or fail. That means when you learn something, you learn something as truth, as this is the way it is done. This is the way you need to show us how something's done or explain something. There's a certainty, there's a right and wrong answer to get through those hoops. But when you enter grad school, all of that changes. You no longer jump through predefined hoops necessarily. You have to start to explore the uncertain side of the world and academia. And for a lot of people, this can be very, very confronting because all of a sudden, they're really great at passing exams and getting the right answer, but now they're entering the unknown. This is where you have to come up with ideas, formulate things, things are gonna go wrong, things are gonna go right, mostly wrong. Things are gonna sort of like unexpectedly change about your research and you need to be agile and adapt as you go. And a lot of people find that change from certainty to uncertainty very, very challenging. Get that out of the shot. So I wish someone had sat me down and just said, you know what, Andy? This is just a big pile of steamy uncertainty that you need to dig through to get to your grad diploma or to the end of that research project. That is what it's like, digging through shit. Second thing I wish someone had told me is that academic relationships change. The relationship you've had with an academic before your grad years is very much teacher-student. They're at the front, they're lecturing, they're marking your stuff, and we're happy with that. That student relationship is kind of set in stone in high school and we're very comfortable with it. But now you get to seek and look behind the curtain at what academia is really like and you'll be working much more closely with an individual academic. More on that in a little bit. But here's the thing, is that the relationship you build with your academic sort of principal investigator, the person you're working closely with during your grad school years, means that you are going to understand them in a completely different way. A researcher is a completely different beast to a lecturer, even though they're the same person. A lecturer, it's a very defined kind of relationship. A supervisor, an academic supervisor, is, ooh, a hard one to define. Sometimes they're happy, sometimes they're sad, sometimes they're surprised, sometimes they're angry, and you do not quite often know which sort of supervisor you're dealing with on a day-to-day basis. Now, here's the thing, is you will sort of build up a relationship over time, but that relationship will get closer, you'll understand the ins and outs of academia, you'll probably get to hear a lot more of their personal opinions about what they think about certain things in the university. It's just part of the academic kind of politics that exists. So try to not get too involved in that in grad school because I think it'll just muddy the waters a little bit for you. But there's no doubt relationships between students and academics changes when you enter grad school, and there's a massive shift in kind of the closeness and the amount of information you get to be intimately familiar with about this certain person. Good, bad, depends on the person. The number one most important decision you need to make before entering grad school, particularly if you have a research component where you align yourself with a particular researcher and work in their research group, is the academic choice. Which academic are you going to work with? Now I have an online course where I talk about how to really find out what an academic kind of work culture is like under a particular principal supervisor, and that course talks you through all of the different things that you need to go through to make sure that you are starting your PhD, your grad school, your master's on the right foot because they leave clues out in the world about what sort of supervisor they are. Are they a micromanager? Are they a hands-off? Have they got a good sort of like lab culture and a group culture? All of these things you can find out before you start working with them, but not enough people spend enough time really digging through supervisors, academic researchers, and whether or not you'll be able to work with them because we're two different entities. You've got the supervisor on one side, and then you've got the student, and if they don't match, I have seen disastrous results for both people. So spend a lot of time working out what this supervisor is before you enter in any sort of agreement or arrangement or research project with them because it will define your grad school experience, and go check out my course where I've got the ultimate PhD kickstart which will help you choose a right supervisor for you. You know what? I think that someone should have sat me down

Speaker 2: before my grad school years and been like, you know what, Andy? Even though this is gonna be challenging, even though this is gonna be probably some of the hardest intellectual moments of your life, try to enjoy it. And I don't think too many people really say that

Speaker 1: dead on in the face of students because it's just sort of like an afterthought for a lot of people. You're too busy. So in grad school, it's really hard to just take a moment and just reflect on the sort of position you are in at the moment. And quite often, that is one where you are intellectually stimulated. You've got a peer group around you that quite often share the same interests and you get on quite well with. I very rarely see people argue amongst the sort of like grad students they're with. And also, you've got a certain amount of freedom that doesn't exist outside of academia. And so those three things mean that every so often you should just look at enjoying the process of grad school. And that can be really challenging because you've got exams. You've got really complicated, hardcore exams. You've got different research components and you've got all of the other pressures of life. But I wish someone had sat down and just said, you know what, Andy? Just take a moment to enjoy these next few years because after that, the world is a kind of scary, weird place where you need to make money doing maybe something you don't necessarily like doing but you have to pretend you like it to your boss so that they give you money. And that doesn't quite exist in grad school. So remember to enjoy it. One of the last things that I think every PhD and grad student should know is that they need to focus on what they are going to do in the future. Too many people do not spend enough time sat down really thinking about what they want to do. There's all these external pressures that kind of like influence our thinking in academia because when you're in academia, you start in grad school, it's a slippery slope. Two, doing a PhD, to trying to become an academic. Now you need to ask yourself, do you want that? Too many people are lured in by the sexy appeal of doing research, of working with a supervisor in a university. I completely get it. I did that. I just did one thing after the other and then I got to a certain point, I was like, oh my God, this is not what I want to do. And I wish I had spent a little bit more time in my grad school years going, you know what? Forget prestige, forget the sunk cost fallacy of me saying, well, I've spent so many years to get here, so I must continue. What do I actually want to do? And it took me a number of years after my PhD to find something that I really am passionate about that I love and it sort of like, you know, put me on the path to creating this channel, creating the blog and a number of other things I've been really, really sort of like happy and enjoyed the process of that career. Because before that, I was doing stuff that I thought I had to do rather than stuff I wanted to do. So in grad school, it's the perfect time because you're hopefully working on something you want to work on. You've got a little glimmer of the future. You're young and hopeful and you've got all your head of hair, I guess. And you are able then to say, I want to do this. I don't want to do this. But too often, we're swayed by thinking I must do this or it's expected of me to do this. Just take a moment, grad school's the perfect place to stop and find out what you really want to do. If you like this video, go check out this one where I talk about what I wish grad students really knew about grad school.

Speaker 2: Check it out.