Speaker 1: You've had the full PhD experience if you need to lie every time someone asks you how is your PhD going? Now inside you just feel crushed like it is a long hard slog to get your PhD but when someone asks you that question you just go oh yeah no it's really good thanks very much oh yeah no it's the lab stuff is really good I'm really passionate about what I'm doing. You really don't want to open those floodgates because if you do you are releasing a tsunami of negativity into their life. So you just go oh yeah it's going really well thanks and you just let that single tear roll down your face. You've had the full PhD experience if you leave your supervisor meeting more confused than when you went in. Now I've experienced this a lot. You go in looking for clarification about a single thing but the supervisor brain does not work like that. They give you far more information than you wanted which just actually confused the situation. Now I've actually been on both sides of this where someone's come to me and asked me for advice because I was their supervisor and I tried to make it as succinct as possible but the problem is as you're talking and solving issues you are kind of making it up a little bit on the spot and so you end up just kind of like doing a brain dump to try to solve a problem and then you make it worse. So I understand why it happens but you've had the full experience if you go in to seek clarification and you end up being more confused than ever when you leave. Now stay around to the end because these get a little bit dark and serious and it's something that every PhD student experiences at some point. This one I love. You've had the full PhD experience if you've been stood next to your poster presentation awkwardly for ages while no one's asking you questions. A PhD poster presentation is just so weird. I don't understand why we still do them. I think it's to make people feel like they're part of the conference. They've contributed something but poster sessions for me have never been valuable. You stand there with your drink. You're kind of like a weird queen's guard for your poster where you're just there and people kind of awkwardly walk past you with their drink and they're trying not to make eye contact but if they do then they're obligated. They're obligated to stop and ask you some awkward questions about your poster while you just go, all right, I know you're not really interested in the poster but we made eye contact. Here's what you need to know. And sometimes they don't even look at your poster. I've had people come up to me and go, so tell me what your poster's about and I'm like, do you know how long it took me to make that figure in PowerPoint and now you just want me to talk about it. Look at the figure. You've had the full PhD experience if your supervisor starts correcting their corrections. Oh, I love this. This was a moment in my PhD, in my postdoc where I just really relished the kind of experience of watching them correct their corrections because you know at this point it is ready for submission whether it's your thesis, a paper, but I remember having two or three supervisors on one project and they would start correcting each other's work. Like it got to the point where it was just this weird kind of back and forth because someone said, okay, I don't like the way this is written and then I'd send it to the other supervisor and they'd say, oh, I don't like how that's written, change it and then it would just go back and forth and it got a little bit embarrassing to the point where I had to say, you know what, you're just correcting each other's kind of corrections at this point, so I think we're finished and that was my job to be like, okay, I think we're done here with all of these corrections. You've had the full PhD experience if at one point your thesis has seemed like the most obvious genius thing that you can do with your life and then even within the same day, it becomes the most repetitive, boring, obvious piece of work you've ever written and it just feels like it's going to be the most obvious piece of work you've ever written and it just feels like it is not PhD worthy. This is called the thesis rollercoaster. At one point, it's like, oh, I'm a genius. I have come up with all of these amazing new ideas and I'm going to tell the world about them and I reckon sometimes even a few hours later, if you're a bit hungry or something, you look at it and you go, oh my god, this is just so obvious. This is not new. This is not novel. This is not interesting. This is trivial bits of work forced into a conclusion that not even I believe at this point and this is the thesis rollercoaster. At one point, it's like, oh, I'm a genius. This is kind of the reality of research. It is not new and interesting to you because you've just spent three, four years of your life doing this research project and so what happens is you start to convince yourself it's not novel new because you've made all of the logical connections to get where your thesis is at the moment, whereas someone coming in from the outside looks at it and goes, ah, okay, this is new and interesting and you go, what? Are you reading the same piece of paper I am? Anyway, thank you very much for watching. I'll see you in the next one. Bye. Anyway, thank you very much. I'll take my PhD. You've had the full PhD experience. If you know exactly what substances to take to get you through certain activities, for me, I would have to have a bucket load of caffeine to get through any significant writing period. That would be like energy drinks that I do not drink at any other time other than when I'm writing a thesis, lots of sugar, and actually, I sort of matured a little bit during my postdocs. If I had any ideas, I would have to go to the health food store and get some dates from the health food store. They are still full of sugar, but it was something that I had to do to push my brain over that activation energy so that I could actually sit down and write. Caffeine to focus, sugar for that burst of energy, and then lots of lots of alcohol when I was younger to counterbalance all of those effects. You have had the full PhD experience if when you submit your paper, your thesis, or whatever you've been working on, there is a deep sense of emptiness that washes over you. And I really not really ever understood why. And I think it's just because there is no fanfare. There is no like finish where someone pats you on the back and goes, that's great. It's always like, what is next? And so even though to you, this piece of work has been important. It's absorbed a lot of your time, taken some of your life, and then you submit it, and there's kind of nothing. There's just, it just goes into the world. And that's it. And also with a lot of these things, there is no definitive kind of like moment where you say, yes, you've done it. And you go celebrate, you know, maybe we all viva is a good point to do that. But if you submitted a paper, there's all this like annoying to and fro from editors, from publishers, you know, do you celebrate when you submit? Do you celebrate when you see it in print? Do you celebrate when you see it laid out in the kind of format for the first time? Who knows? And it's that kind of like ambiguous gray zone that just makes all of this a little bit dull and empty. So yeah, that is the true academic experience. And it's certainly something that a lot of PhD students discover during their candidature. If you like this video, go check out my other one where you can go here or here, where I talk about the PhD advice you do not want to hear, but you need to. It is a really important video. So go watch that one next. So there we have experience. Those are all of the things that you need to experience to have the full PhD experience. What a lot of ways to say experience. Also, let me know in the comments what you would add. And remember, there are more ways that you can engage with me. The first way is to sign up to my newsletter. Head over to andrewstapton.com.au forward slash newsletter. The link is in the description. And when you sign up, you'll get five emails over about two weeks. Everything from the tools I've used, the podcast I've been on, how to write the perfect abstract and more. It's exclusive content available for free. So go sign up now. And also go check out academiainsider.com. That's my new project where I've got my ebooks, I've got my resource pack, and I've got a blog that is over 100 blogs deep in information and useful advice for making your PhD and academia work for you. All right, then I'll see you in the next video.