Speaker 1: I asked 177 PhD students what the real PhD experience is like and this is what they said. Here's the good, the bad and the downright sad. Here are the sort of like splits. So this is year one, year two, year three, year four and then five plus. So you can see we've got quite a few in their second year and also a lot of people doing PhDs beyond the fifth year. This is quite common in the States. So the first thing I wanted to know was the best parts of doing a PhD. I wanted to start on the lighter side of this questionnaire. The problem is, is that the university's prospectus for PhD students contains all of these faces. Faces like this and professors going and just people having like brain orgasms throughout their prospectus like this. But that is not the reality of doing a PhD. This is the reality and the best parts of doing a PhD. Let's have a look at this word cloud. Here we are. It's research, work, people, new, learning, things, PhD, so much freedom. I think these are genuinely the best parts of doing a PhD. In my experience, it's about that learning. I love this thing down the bottom, the learning, learning new things. I still learn new things to this day. It's like a little sort of brain scratch every time I learn something new because it's just so rewarding. I think people that do well in a PhD love learning new things and sort of like being self-starters. A lot of people actually love their topic as well. I think that's really awesome that people get to decide in a PhD that they like this tiny bit of the universe and they want to become an expert in it. That is one of the best parts of doing a PhD. I love getting new skills and freedom. You get freedom to explore your ideas most of the time if you don't have a micromanager supervisor. You also have freedom after like when to turn up to the lab. Do you want to turn up at like really early at like seven in the morning? Do you want to stay really late at night? Do you work best late in the evenings? I know PhD students who had the freedom to just sort of like explore when they wanted, which means they could work best where they worked best, which was really great. So freedom comes in many flavors and people. I think that a lot of PhD students actually end up sort of like becoming so close to the cohort of PhD students around them and that's because you're going through hardships together. You're helping each other. Even in your research group, you have different struggles that you can help each other with and that just brings people together. Just give them a big old hug next time you see a PhD cohort and say, thank you. You don't have to kiss them, but if you do ask for permission and here's some quotes for you. So the unexpected results and the happiness of achieving something that no one has ever done before. It sounds cliche, but those were the moments when I was like punching the air with success because it is just so rewarding when something works, especially when it's that something that you don't think will work at all. I would eat that up for breakfast every day. This one's interesting to me. With an absent supervisor, I spend a lot of time figuring things out on my own, which is both a curse and a blessing. Oh, we're already in the gray zone of the PhD world. Some supervisors are completely hands off and they quite often say, well, I'm just training you to be an independent researcher, which is a bit of a cop out sometimes I think. Once you get over those hurdles on your own, the feeling is much more rewarding, no doubt. And also this last one, I love it. Getting paid to study and do research, absolutely. That was one of the things that amazed me. I was very interested in doing science and research. And then when I was like, oh, I can get paid to do this? Yeah. Where do I sign up? Give me the money to essentially be a student. I'm an excellent student. I want to do this research. It was a no brainer. So getting paid to follow your interests is really a fantastic sort of opportunity. That's the word I wanted. Okay then. Now, I looked at the other side of this coin, the bad things about doing a PhD. Oh, this is where it gets a bit spicy. Okay. The toughest parts of doing a PhD. There's no doubt a PhD is tough. And this is the word cloud from the 177 responses. Here we go. Big one down the bottom. Supervisor. Yes. Supervisor choice is so very, very important in your PhD. They will make or break your PhD. They will be the biggest blessing sometimes during your PhD and they will be an absolute curse and nightmare arguably most of the time. But supervisor, it does not surprise me that that is one of the big ones right down the bottom. Time. Time slips away from you surprisingly fast. Even if you're doing a longer project for say five years, it just feels like you'll never have enough time to finish. And I think that's part of the PhD sort of like mindset is realizing that this time pressure will be there. It will never feel finished. So literally finishing is deciding to stop at some point and it's really hard to decide to stop, especially when you've got your supervisor going, oh, just do that extra little experiment please. Writing. Writing is a big one. Writing, academic writing is a massive pain in the ass. It's not sort of like pull any punches. Is that the phrase about that? Because it is dense. It is horrible. It is full of technical information and language that is just so impenetrable to most people. And you have to emulate that. Congratulations. Now you write like that. Because to be accepted into peer-reviewed papers, it needs to be rigorous writing and that's what we love. And what else have we got here? Feel. Yeah. You feel a lot during your PhD. You feel sad. You feel depressed. You feel happy. You also feel as if it will never, never end. And here are some quotes. The toughest parts of doing a PhD is research and funding and resources. Every single application feels like a battle for survival. Absolutely. And this doesn't change even when you finish and graduate from your PhD. It is about convincing research bodies to give you money because it is survival. I know someone who got one grant after their PhD, become a postdoc, got relatively successful but could not find funding after that and left academia. So it is a battle for survival. Supervisor drama. When my original supervisor left the university, it took months to find a replacement. Supervisor drama comes in a whole donut of flavors. That's not a very good saying. But it is just sort of like supervisor drama after supervisor drama. Luckily, there are some amazing supervisors and that's why you have to be really careful about who you choose. So go check out my course where I talk about the ultimate PhD kickstart where it's talking about the important decisions for actually starting your PhD strong because there's some of these things you can actually get a hint of before you even start and we want to avoid all supervisor drama if possible. Another one. The uncertainty of research outcomes and the pressure to publish in high impact journals despite the exploratory nature of my work. Yeah, I think some research fields are particularly suited to the pressures of modern academia, i.e. do an experiment, write it up, publish. Do an experiment, write it up, publish. But others are like, oh, here's a massive field that may contain some information. Go and find it. Whereas that is much, much harder to publish. So yes, the modern day academic needs to publish, publish, publish, publish, publish. But it's not suitable for every field and that pressure is different across those fields. So in science and research, quite often you can change one variable, look for a little research gap and go, yeah, I'll do a little thing on that. Great, great, great. Boom. Done. Whereas in other fields, it's not that easy. So yes, choose a research field if you want to go into academia that is publishing its ass off. Coping with stress and reminding myself why PhD research is important when results don't go as planned. Failure is, or at least will be, your best friend in your PhD. And as high achievers that quite often go into PhDs, it is really hard to see that failure as progress. But it is, it is, it is. That's all I've got for you. It is. Keep going in the face of failure. Remember, you're either failing and learning or moving on. Flirn. Flirning. Fail, learn. There we are. There's one for you. Flirn. I also asked 177 people what their daily PhD schedule looked like. I mushed them all together in a big old orgy of words and timelines, and this is what they've come up with. So here we go. At 8 a.m., a lot of people start the day with a quick breakfast, but with a flexible starting time. There's no one starting time for PhD students. Some people are like, the best thing is turning up at 10 a.m., and I did that quite a lot. You work with what's best for you, but quite often that is the set by the sort of like research supervisor and the culture in the lab. 9.30 a.m., focus work, reading, day analysis, writing. Morning was quite often a productive time for focus work. I actually switched that around in my recommended daily schedule. That is, you do this focus work a little bit later on, say in the afternoon, whereas in the morning I was in doing mode. I was like in the lab. I was collecting results. I was doing experience because if I did it the other way around, the afternoon lunch kind of like slump and tiredness just really got to me. So it's interesting that most people do it the other way around. Supervisor meeting at 1.00 p.m. or lab work or software development or field research, and this is where they provide guidance, feedback, and planning. So that's good. Like I said, I quite often switch that around, but that's fine. 5.00 p.m. after doing all the stuff during the day, administrative tasks and preparing for the next day, and this looks at funding applications, presentation prep, and all that. So 5.00 p.m. if you are leaving, it's a great time to just kind of go, you know what? This is what I've done today. Put a line under that. What would make it better? I'll do that tomorrow. So that is the daily PhD schedule of a modern PhD student in 2024. Let me know in the comments if that rings true for you. Quick fire round. Okay. Let's go. Do you have a work-life balance? Whatever that means for you, I ask. And then most people, 53.1, I don't know if that's statistically significant. If we can say half of people say yes, half of people say no, but it is a large amount of people that say no. So if you're going into a PhD, be very careful. Make sure you select a PhD supervisor that doesn't mind you having a life outside of the lab or your research, but you can see that 46.9% of people work more than they play. There we are. That's what you might take away from that. Carefully. Next one. Do you use AI tools as part of your research? We had most people, 60% or so, say yes, and then these people, no, and I want to learn how to use them. And if you're not using AI tools, but you want to, or you want to improve how you use them, check out my new course, link is in the description, where I talk about creating an AI toolkit. It's about becoming a better academic writer using AI tools. It's about creating a nice little kind of solution for all of those writing issues that you face, coming up with workflows. All of that is talked about in my course, so go check it out. It's for a reduced price at the moment, so getting quick. And this next question is one of the most important ones that I ask PhD students, and that is, would you do it again if you could go back in time and start over? And most of them, a big 57.7% say yes. And that aligns with what most people have told me in the past. Despite the hardships, despite the supervisor issues, despite the constant failures, the wins and the experience you get quite often are very, very valuable. But there are people that are undecided, 28% say maybe, and 14.3% say absolutely not. So you have to be very careful when deciding to do a PhD, because you don't want to be in the 14.3%, and you can do that just by sort of being a little bit more selective about which PhD topic, which PhD supervisor, and which PhD sort of like culture you enter. That is all very, very important. If you like this video, go check out this one where I talk about why you need to think twice if you want to become a scientist, and why PhDs are regretting that choice. It's a great watch, go check it out.