What Reddit’s PhD Questions Reveal About Doctoral Life (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Today I'm reacting to some of the most common questions about the PhD journey in Reddit. Everything from mental health to AI use to writing and funding concerns and even memes. So let's take a look and dive in. Alright, four years of PhD turning into six or eight and snowballing and never ending. Look, this somehow gets normalized but it's a sign that something went wrong. This shouldn't happen. So if you do feel yourself slipping into the never-ending PhD, I'd encourage you to get support and maybe do our PhD health check. Okay, look at this research proposal. End result. I think this is trying to play off the Game of Thrones meme that the last season was just a disaster. Don't want to dive too deep into that but this isn't really the case. I don't see that transition happening on research proposals to a weak end result. If anything, the process of a research proposal should be moving towards more clarity. Not telling what you're going to do. Having a clear gap and an idea that comes in contact with a gap in a feasible way. Using our GIF method. Got a link below to check out our best training on research proposals. We got notified today that our paper got its first citation. It was by us in another paper. Yeah, I've seen some recent analyses that the median number of citations for papers in the first two years is zero. That's just devastating. That just means the vast majority of research that's published has no early impact. Has no clear sign of urgency that it's needed. So this is funny. Self-citation. Another story of people citing themselves to drum up their citations to try to boost their indices and promotion. But yeah, this is sadly true. And behind a lot of these memes, the reason they're funny is because there's a kernel of truth in them. Daniel Gould here posting, asking me when I finish my PhD as an act of violence. Yeah, I think it's this mismatch between people's expectations and when someone asks, are you finishing? It's well intended, but it caps into a sense of not being good enough. Non-linearity in research. The timeline's not straightforward. Seems to never end and can trigger feelings of guilt and even shame. And that also is linked to sometimes feeling just a lack of a sense of control over your own future. If a question like this does kind of knife you in the gut, probably a sign something's wrong. Four out of five people enjoy thesis defenses. Look, the thesis defense can be a pleasant experience for the vast majority. Once you get to the defense stage, it's already decided. Usually the supervisors will not pass you on to the defense unless it's going to go through. They will hold the gates. Get your money's worth, enjoy the defense and maybe set up to have some nice drinks after. I think a mistake I made is I didn't set up the fireworks to happen after the defense. It just felt a little flat. If I had it to do over, I would definitely celebrate the win and plan for a win if you're at this stage. PhD student is someone who forgoes current income in order to forgo future income. You know, PhD is delayed gratification. That is the name of the game here. You are sacrificing the ability to go straight out and make money for something that is potentially more valuable. People like to cite stats that PhDs make more money on average than masters. I don't think that's the reason to do a PhD. I mean, you do a PhD when you have a hungering passion for your field. You want that self-growth and it's about for you making a difference, bending the arc of history in your area. And if you don't have that passion, just don't start a PhD. A lot of the researchers who I see struggle get into a PhD thinking, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I'll just bide my time and I'll stay as a student and do a PhD. Terrible motivation. Don't do a PhD if your play or thinking here is this about optimizing money. That is the wrong, wrong optimization for leading you into the PhD. So I may be reading the cards wrong on this mean, but this is beyond the scope of this paper. It's actually really nice defensiveness. I can't tell if this guy's feeling a little bit of relieved or some pain here, but I read it as this is just one of those limitations you put in when the reviewers are asking you for everything and you just draw a hard boundary and say, no, that's what we need to do in future research. Every conference, please buy our product. Please give me a job. The researchers that I work with, I encourage to think about conferences like marketing. You want to show off. You don't want to go there without purpose. Again, you're investing time and energy. It can be a lovely experience. It definitely helps you build your networks. I think you get so much more out of conferences when you have the speaker badge and you go there as a player, not fly on the wall, especially because some of these conferences can be quite expensive. I don't know about sycophantic, please give me a job, but definitely go into conferences with the idea of network because a lot of the academic jobs you get, I can look at in my own trajectory, come from your second order contacts, not the immediate people in your network, but the one friend of a friend. So a professor who's linked with your professor, that's a much bigger network, but it's still close to you. That's been my anecdotal experience that the second order network is incredibly powerful for the job market. Okay, let's take a look at this one. Is the PhD... This is freaking annoying cloud. Okay, let's take a look at this one here. Is the PhD really that bad? I'm not sure if I'm too naive, but I wanted to ask a few things. Some people regret having done a PhD, but if that's what you need to have the career you want, why would you still regret it? Great question. I think this has to do with the structures of the market, and this is the macroeconomic critique of PhDs that there are more being trained than there are jobs for. If you look at other fields, say in the US in medicine, the American Medical Association, they're carefully trying to calibrate the numbers of doctors trained to the numbers of doctors who are needed. There isn't that clear kind of professionalization that ensures an equilibrium between what's coming in and what's coming out, and some people critique the numbers coming in of a PhD as being a pyramid scheme because so many professors need lab hands or workers, and it's hopelessly producing ones who will never be able to find an academic job or get on a never-ending cycle of postdocs, one postdoc to the next, that never turns into a tenure track position. It could also be that they had maybe grand illusions about what science, doing science would be like, and then they get in the lived reality of chasing after grants, chasing after publications, heavy teaching and admin, and that's very disappointing and breeds job dissatisfaction. And the final thing is pay. I see a lot of senior academics who are secretly discontented that their undergrads will come out and make more money than them. There's nothing surprising here. I mean, academic pay is pretty transparent in what you're going to get, so that's a choice you made. My father, back of my mind, would say, son, you made your bed, you got to sleep in it. But that's a choice you made. Don't complain about it. Three. Why is it so soul-taking, soul-destroying? It's because studying, which you only personally do, I treat mine as 9 to 5, but no weekends, no late-night work. I understand some periods have deadlines, but it isn't a balanced 9 to 5, and for the most part, doable. I think it's that there's an asymmetry and that you see the downside of what you're giving up and the hard work you're doing for an uncertain upside. There's no direct correlation between hard work in and success out for many, especially when researchers start going in circles. There are no feedback loops to tell you that you're getting it right, apart from supervisors, which, good ones, create those short feedback loops because the PhD, when done correctly, follows an apprenticeship model. But as I've argued in other videos, that has broken down. The lack of those short feedback loops can lead you to feel adrift and lost at sea, and that disconnect can really be soul-destroying for many. I like the analogy that someone else said here of treat it like a job. The difference here in treating it like a job is when you're working for somebody, they want to get something out of you. There is a direct and important alignment there. In this case, the boss might perceive you as somebody who's detracting from what they want to do. You could be seen as a burden if there's not good supervisor alignment. Here's a good one. Can a PhD research become obsolete before completion? A lot can change between three to four years. Can I be obsolete? Perspective applicant genuinely curious? Absolutely. Especially in fast-moving fields like AI. Look, the state of play in AI research is unrecognizable now from just a few years ago. So yes, that can be a good thing. If your field is moving that quickly and evolving, that is a sign of growth. And I think you'll have an easier ride doing a PhD on something hot than on a field that's stagnant or dying. If you want to do a PhD on medieval literature, that is a field that is arguably stagnant or even shrinking. That research won't be obsolete. It will stand the test of time. But it's also a sign that your market prospects are going to be slim to none. And in some of those fields, people will literally voice that they are waiting for professors to die for jobs to become open. There's a notion of replacement rates in the academic drug market. That is, how many positions open up for each that gets taken away. That applies to a lot of fields. So it's worth knowing for yourself, to calibrate your academic market prospects, what that replacement rate is in your field. OK. I like this question a lot. Early PhD student struggling with AI use and academic integrity. In the era of AI, I found myself relying more and more on it to help funnel make sense of my thoughts. Even when I'm not actively using JetGPT, a simple Google search or library database now involves AI in some form. Even email platforms have AI built in. I'm starting to worry that my own writing thinking processes are being affected. This is probably a boring and over-asked question, but I thought it's still worth raising. Yeah. So I think this often does, again, speak to a supervision gap. People learn best when they're being shown rather than told what to do. In a lot of PhD programs, there's generic methods courses that will teach you tools, but it doesn't train research judgment. So people, when they're not getting short feedback loops or feedback from their supervisors, tend to outsource this judgment to somewhere else. They start hunting around on YouTube. Might be how you landed on my channel. They start asking AI to plug that gap. And AI leads to some predictable failure modes when used in this way. I encourage you to check out this video on that. But this is not that you're broken in any way. This is a symptom of a broken system. So that said, AI is not all bad. It just has some use cases. Well, it's going to speed everything up. And so AI is lowering the cost of research wrong faster than it lowers the cost of doing it right. What do I mean by that? In our theory of error with AI, it's accelerating early stage researchers who can fly very far with structurally flawed research. It flies past the normal friction points that would hold them back so they can get very deep into a mess. And it's something where, say, your literature review you've been working on for months, only later on to realize it's incoherent, it's unviable, you gloss past and move past some early steps that would have prevented you from getting too far. And it collapses like a house of cards. AI helping you learn the methods, the tools, the skills, that's fine. But AI doing the writing for you, obviously not fine. AI is going to accelerate everything. But you don't want to hit the accelerator unless you've really got control of the steering wheel. And at the early stage, you're still getting control of the steering wheel, learning how to drive. So I would encourage you to get the fundamentals right. And this on how do unis genuinely detect AI use? It's not. It's very imperfect at the moment. We've got some cases here, like in this video where a PhD student was banned for using AI. And in that case, it doesn't appear that the university tried to turn it in or some of the other measures. But there's a lot of false positives when trying to detect AI use. For example, somebody popped in JK Rowling's Harry Potter, which was written before AI and found a high degree of AI content, depending on which generator you use. I found this to be the case with also one of my pre-AI manuscripts. So at any rate, this is imperfect. But the fact that you're having such doubts tells me that you've probably used AI in a way that you shouldn't be using AI. This here, this ability to extract and kind of forensically go through a paper. This is our second pass in our triple pass reading method. This is a certain type of read. You very rarely need to read a whole paper start to finish. This is very important. But there are certain use cases that can be helpful. We've got a full AI enhanced lit review training. I'd encourage you to check out that injects AI at the right places, but does not replace the importance of human judgment in that process. It accelerates what machines can do better than humans. At my university, there's a policy that requires a disclosure in the dissertation. Yep, 100% err on the side of transparency if you are going to use AI. And that is exactly what academic journals ask for. The journals are not saying don't use AI, but they are saying don't use it to develop the innovation or the core idea. And if you do whatever you do, declare it. So minor editorial stuff with AI, totally okay. The deeper innovation or value added of the paper or full interpretation of the data with AI is problematic. But with a caveat, if you fully cite it, then you're on the side of angels. Okay, let's look at this one here. Prof told my classmate I do easy research. A little hurt after my classmate told me that one of her professors said I only do easy research and don't contribute much to the literature. This is the first time I heard this. One undergrad told me to be careful of this professor. I'm a fourth, I guess fourth year PhD student with 11 publications. My field is mostly secondary data analysis, and I was fortunate to have very good mentors early in my career. So there's a lot going on here. Let me try to unpack it. I remember when I got on the tenure track Harvard, there was a senior professor, fuddy daddy, who said to me that all I do, all I go for is low hanging fruit. And I said, yes, I love low hanging fruit. There's a so-called Matthew effect in science where early wins lead to future wins. So it's important to get on that proverbial fast track because success begets success in research, much like the rich get richer. And so his generation, that was not the logic. The logic was you could do that decade long project over different academic timelines than what we face today. So I do encourage those early wins. And it sounds like the student's been doing a good job of this, getting publications. Now, quality over quantity does matter for the job market. Often in a secondary data analysis field, I'm assuming could be economics. Quality is privileged. You might have one job market paper. And there are two critiques going on here. One says don't contribute much to the literature. So if you're seen as doing something derivative or not having a big value add or gap, you're also going to see that reflected in the quality of the publications, the impact factor, the tier ranking of the journal. If it's a Q1 journal, it's ranking in the field. You'll see that as well. Without looking at your CV, I can't know. But yeah, they're all respected, but maybe not top in the field. Definitely considered upper tiers. So I think you're on solid ground. The other thing that can be behind this is even jealousy. So sometimes you can be seen as a threat. And that's something I didn't fully take stock of when I first started out. There's a cliche that A people hire A people, but B people only hire C people when they perceive some kind of status threat. And this definitely happens where the PhD is a star and will outshine even their own professor or supervisor. Oh, this is a good one. Is this imposter syndrome or am I genuinely not cut out for this? Let's take this one. This is huge. I ask every year. I love to ask my graduate students anonymously if they've ever felt like a fraud or they weren't good enough or they were going to get found out about relative to their peers. And every year, it's more than 70% say yes. And it's more common in women. And obviously, that can't be the case. If everybody's sitting in the same room in this cohort or their PhD feels like they're not as good relative to their peers, you can see that this is psychological. It's not real. I've never felt more incompetent or stupid in my life. It is normal that you feel small. Totally normal. You know, you're going through this transition that sometimes people don't realize. Everything you've done leading up to this point, what you got you here will not get you there. So you've done coursework, your classes, everything's laid out step by step. And there's a right answer. There's a wrong answer. Now you're thrown into a world of uncertainty, of research judgment. No one right answer. Having to learn a whole lot of new skills and feeling very small and often being left to just figuring out on your own for the very first time. You're going from consuming information like you've done in most courses, you might consume and then regurgitate for a test, to now you have to produce information that pushes the frontier of your field. That is hard. And that is often the basis of why you get these feelings of self-doubt. So check it out. I'm going to leave a link below for a quick trial to our mindset course, including some sessions with me and our mindset coaches. Let me know. I would love to hear what you think about that. And one other note, you're in your thirties, you have a decade of work experience, but it still hits you. And this is exactly what it is. You don't feel anything like that in your work. It's a domain where you know what you're doing and then you get hit hard by this. In fact, some of the people get hit the hardest. I find that who I work with a lot are doctors. They're at the top in their fields. They're used to high standards. And so they come in at the very beginning in a field and being a neophyte and something just doesn't happen in their daily life anymore. And that they can often bring perfectionism with them. And so it just leads to paralysis and inaction. It shows up. The visible manifestation is procrastination of that underlying perfectionism. Remember, being a beginner is a necessary phase. Everybody's got to go through it. You haven't been a beginner for years based on your work experience here. So yeah, I encourage you to move forward with that awareness. Curious to hear what you think. Let me know in the comments. Okay, any positive PhD experiences out there? I want to see this. So here's someone who's thinking about doing a PhD, but is reading the thread and saying, gosh, everybody's negative. What's going on? Well, remember, there's a bias that people are posting on Reddit from bad experiences, not positive experiences. And that can give you lead you to believe there's an inherent skew to most having bad experiences. It's just that is what's more visible in these threads. So yeah, if you're going to go in, though, I would set yourself up for a positive experience. So you can't nonchalantly stumble into a PhD. You actually need to do your homework, figure out the success of their students, because their success is going to be the closest correlate to your success. Ask them what it's like to work with that faculty member and try to directly talk to both do site visits first, know what you're getting yourself into. And just doing that due diligence will eliminate 90% of the hardship and surprises people stumble into down the road. And when they come to me in tears and want us to pick up the pieces. And here you can see so much of the positive experience comes from my PhD has been my PI, has been more supportive of my career goals and personal circumstances. That is mentorship and really echoes. You've got to find a mentor to have a smooth and easy ride. If you don't, you will encounter frictions along the way and hardship. Does it make it impossible? No, but it makes it a heck of a lot harder. Oh, this is a tough one. My PhD and marriage have ruined each other and my mental peace. Wow. Okay. I've married the love of my life in the beginning. My PhD was very supportive until last year. I will not say it's all his fault, but I won't say it's my fault either. The PhD has tested me in my relationship in ways that I have never imagined. Yeah. I mean, relationships get tested through hardship. Bonds get refined through fire and injecting a PhD into a relationship will test the relationship because you will be under pressure. You will be under stress. A very high proportion of PhD students experience mental health problems, and that will inevitably spill over to the relationship if that is not contained. If you aren't able to enact boundaries for yourself, I'm not saying you're at fault at all, but it is a change and hard things happen in life. So I'm very sorry to hear this has happened. I know there are some academic departments or schools of medicine that will even pride themselves on a 90% divorce rate. And that's just toxic and unhealthy. But if you're put in a situation where you're working 120 hours a week, it's inevitable. Your relationship is going to suffer. So this is where I think it helps to have a roadmap. And we have our researchers develop a personal research operating system. And remember, it's something that for your partner can feel like it's happening to them, that it might not have been their choice. So give them some agency in the process and maybe create the space for that kind of communication between you so that it can be something that brings you closer together rather than drives you apart. So look at this one. Never cried more in my life. Ah, okay. I'm happy about this. Okay. This happens a lot. I see this with researchers. I remember when I first got feedback on some of my writing, I was rejecting it. I didn't want to take those edits that somebody was making on my writing, and I tried to fight about it. And it took a while for me mentally to separate the attack on the work and what felt like an attack on me. And so treat feedback as a gift, even if it's very harsh and critical. Just separate. I see what this person's saying. I can handle criticism, but this was next level. Keep that in mind. Now, sometimes if that criticism actually is becoming personal, then there's a problem. Like here, I'm a burden and nobody will ever be happy unless I can get money. Everything looks so sloppy and every other sentence needs to be reworked. I haven't looked at it. Okay, so separate the ones that are personal. But what this person's saying is like you are not hitting the standard. They're setting a boundary and saying this is not up to par. Is the way they're saying it the best? No, but treat it more as a gift and an opportunity. Now, the thing that gets infuriating is if they say this, they tell you there's a problem, but they don't show you how to do it. And I think that's the gap that's often missing. Because think about it as a supervisor, it takes a lot more energy to show you what to do rather than to point and just say there's a problem, right? It's very easy to be a critic. Like food critics can critique food, but they can't cook necessarily. Maybe some can, but usually they're in the critic space. They're not the chefs themselves. So yeah, this is hard. It'll hit you like a knife to the gut. But if you're writing and the sentences need to be reworked, check out our peer writing system here. In five minutes, it's going to transform how you write. Maybe here, if everything's sloppy, you need an outline, your paragraphs need topic sentences, they need to make one point only rather than mushing a bunch of points together. This is kind of diagnostic for me that there's some problems with the anatomy of your paragraphs and the structure of your writing and get some real support. So it sounds like this person will fire off critiques and welcome that feedback, but come up with a realistic game plan on how you can go as far as possible to integrate that feedback. And when you start doing that, you will change the tone of your conversation and you can change the relationship. I've seen this happen with many mentees I've worked with. Seem like they're in this terrible relationship. Their supervisor hates them and thinks that they're worthless and completely turn it around. And all they needed was to connect to the right training. It wasn't that they weren't capable. They just hadn't been shown how to do it. And we're trying to figure it out on their own for the first time. And that's hard for anybody. Again, try not to take this personally. I admire your resilience and stay strong and get connected to the right support and get somebody to show you how. Okay, this researcher says not enough publications to graduate lost and depressed. So three first author journal publications, much like a PhD by publication. I like PhDs that are increasingly structured around outcomes to get publications. So that's great. Right. So you got two, but only one was counted. It is hard to put the standard of getting it actually published because some people think that, well, if I produce three papers, I can get my three publications. Right. But the peer review process, no one can guarantee you which journal or when. The peer review process can take a long time. I've had papers get accepted in as few as three days. Fast track another story. And I've had some that have taken up to two years after multiple rounds of say desk reject or sent out for review and then doing revisions and getting rejected and sending out again. So to guarantee your three papers, don't fall in the trap that you need three papers. You actually need about seven or eight papers in the system at all times to get your three papers just based on the the simple arithmetic of average acceptance rates and peer review times. So I don't want you to feel like you have all your eggs in one basket, but I would encourage you to develop more more publications. And if they're not meeting their criteria, this is something that you would have needed to understand and get clearance from with your supervisor beforehand. So when I work with researchers doing a PhD by publication, we make those goalposts clear. So I think you might have fallen into the trap of thinking just publication is enough. But no, often there is a tier cut point criteria. Only certain journals will make the grade. The fact that you haven't published though is a very good sign. So that should breed some confidence. But I think you probably need to double the papers and work with somebody who's going to help you craft the gap in value added so that you can punch into higher tier journals. Wow, I don't deserve to pass my defense. This kind of self-reproach or self-loathing is really interesting. I do see this sometimes. In the defense, people take different philosophies on approaching the defense. Sometimes you'll have, I would say this one, maybe somebody was invited to Cambridge as an external examiner and because they were at Cambridge, they wanted to look smart to the other professors. Most of the researchers I work with, it takes me two minutes to ask questions and I will expose the edge of their knowledge. And you could make them feel very small. I choose not to do that because I don't think it's positive or healthy. So taking the PhD in a way is the end of the beginning. It's like you just got your driver's license. Doesn't mean you're an experienced race car driver, but you're a card carrying member of the field now. So yeah, senior professors are going to know a whole lot more than you. Don't beat yourself up. Remember, flip it again. You just won the prize. You got the PhD. You passed. Ultimately, they've judged and said your work has contributed to our field. You have advanced the frontier. Welcome to the club. So that process of not knowing or if they've exposed the edge of your knowledge, that's okay. This is a journey that towards deepening your understanding that never ends. And you are in the next chapter now. Hope that helps. But I see that you've taken the right stance. They're reframing it as a learning opportunity and nothing to feel ashamed about at all. And instead, beam with pride because you've accomplished something few people are able to achieve in their lives. All right, this meme, I just I have no idea what's going on, but I give up. This is funny. Okay, this is a cool one. Eight years doing a PhD. Here's what I learned. Resist viewing your PhD as wasted years of your life. Now, it can be rational to view them as wasted years of your life if you didn't achieve what you wanted out of those years. So I think it is I think what you're saying here is that for you, you made that trade off and sacrifice because it was worth the transformation of what you got on the on the other side. For some people, that may not be the case. But let's look here. Embrace the cliche journey, not the destination. Giving up formative years will never feel worth it. Yeah, exactly. Again, if you're giving up those formative years of your life, you need a payoff at the end of it. If you are sacrificing, say, your 20s, you want your 30s to be better. So let's see here. Don't tell yourself you'll wait. Yeah, this is true. This is true. So you want to contain the sacrifice and how it spills over into your life. Open eye, save money. For most grad students, good luck with that. Just the reality. I did a lot of consulting as a graduate student just to eat on the side because stipends were thin where I was at Cambridge University. Yeah, I mean, somebody's disagreeing with the save money tactic. Ultimately, I'd encourage you to get clarity for yourself on what the costs and benefits are. And don't just haplessly dive into a PhD. It is a big investment in yourself. You are paying a lot for it. There's always a cost to doing something and a cost to not doing something. And here, that cost of doing the PhD is you are giving up working. You're giving up other things that you can be doing with your life, other ways of investing in yourself. So, yeah, it's a very serious decision, and I wouldn't stumble into it. Whew, that was a lot. Listen, guys, if you enjoyed this, let me know. And I take your comments and questions in live workshops every week. And I will continue, if you enjoy this format, I'll continue taking some of the most common questions that I see on Reddit and other forums going forward. And I'll see you guys in the next video.