Transcription
Hi, this is David Stucker from Fast Chat Grad. And today, I want to share with you how to get a PhD fast.
Many people I know want to get a PhD, but they don't want to spend five, six, even more years to finish it. I have developed a system that I've used with my graduate students at Harvard, Cambridge, and Oxford to help them complete their PhDs fast. And in this video, I want to share with you the four strategies for success if you want to finish your PhD, like I did, in as little as under two years.
So let's dive straight in. The first thing you need to do, and this is fundamental, and it's often something that we overlook, but it is the essential ingredient for finishing your PhD fast, and that is passion. You have to have a topic that you have a burning desire to get out of bed to take on. The first thing you do, you wake up, you erase your coffee, and you get in front of your computer, you get to the lab, wherever it is, you do your work. You have to have that passion. That's almost like you have something inside you that needs to get out to do that research because times are going to get hard. You're going to have a roller coaster of ups and downs, and when you go through those down cycles, you'll need that passion. You need that passion to have that grit to keep on going.
Number two, structure. There's a clear structure to a PhD that enables you to go forward efficiently. You know, sometimes I see people instead of going straight from point A to point B, if you zoomed out and looked at their path, it looks like a bowl of spaghetti. They're going a bit to the right, a bit to the left, up and down. I mean, it might be like a cool dance move, but it does not work for a PhD. What you want is the most efficient and direct route to get the job done fast, so you can get on to making money, get on to a postdoc, get on to a job in industry, wherever it is you want to go.
So, structure. What does that structure look like? Well, the path that I've done for creating a fast PhD for the people I've worked with starts always with the quickest route to your first publishable paper. And this works across the board, no matter what field you're in. And that is a systematic review. So, a systematic review is different from a literature review. A systematic review is effectively a structured and reproducible way of doing your literature review. And so that's really what sets us apart as scientists when we do research. It's reproducible. So if you take these steps and follow them meticulously and mechanically, you can share those steps to somebody else, that can take the same steps and arrive at the same conclusions and same findings that you did. So that's what a systematic review is.
Now, how do you go about doing that? I have a separate video that takes you step-by-step in how to publish a systematic review within two months. Look in the link below, and it'll take you to that video. What you need to do is come up with a clear, concise topic that you're passionate about, that's going to have a few nouns and a verb linking them. So one of those nouns needs to be some outcome of interest that you're looking at, and this is really the topic of your PhD. And the other needs to be another noun, it's going to be some factor or intervention or exposure that's linked to it. And that third component is a verb that causes, increases, decreases, correlates, something that links those two factors of interest. And then you're going to take these key terms, you're going to refine them, and you're going to go to systematic search repositories, not Google Scholar, because that wouldn't be reproducible because we live in filter bubbles, and your search is going to be different from my search. So somebody couldn't follow the same steps you did and get exam conclusions. You have to go to things like Web of Science, PubMed, Scopus, Embase. You'll know which is the right one for your field. And with that, you start carrying out your systematic review.
Now, a systematic review is so important because this sets your foundation. Completing a PhD is a bit like building a house. You need to have a rock-solid foundation to build on. It's not the exciting part, but it's the most important part because if you have a crooked foundation, your house will crumble, and you will not get to where you want to go at the end of the path of your PhD. So when you set this foundation with your PhD as part of your structure, it's critically important because it's going to help you. It's going to show you what the lay of the land is in your field. It's going to show you where the gaps are. It's going to show you what the areas are of big debate. And it's going to help you identify where can you make the biggest contribution with the skills you have in a short period of time.
I'm going to repeat that because it's critically important. A systematic review will show you where can you make the biggest contribution with the skills you have in the quickest time possible. The systematic review, your foundation, is going to tell you where to build the tower of your house, where to build the roof, where does the front door go. And that's really important. So, a systematic review is your first chapter. Anybody can do it with the skills you have, and it's going to point you to what data needs to be collected, what subsequent studies, what methods need to be employed for you to then go pick up and fill out the rest of your chapters.
So, having done that paper, you can immediately, and I'm talking in your case, within two months, submit that for publication to a peer-reviewed journal. You can then go on to craft out your other studies. And what you want to do with these studies is you want to pick three criteria to optimize those studies to be the next two to three chapters of your PhD. And those studies need to meet the following criteria.
One, they need to be feasible. So I want you to make a big list of your studies, and I want you to score them because many of you have a lot of great ideas, and you don't know which one to go with. I want you to score them on each of these criteria and pick which one to go with. So it needs to be feasible. Can you do it with the tools you have in a short period of time? If you want to go to a big randomized controlled trial in another country, that can be well and good, but it might take you many years, and your objective is to get your PhD fast.
The second thing that you need to do is tap into a debate. It's getting very hard as a PhD student to do Nobel Prize-winning work that's going to open up a whole new field. You may do that, but you're also choosing a path that's going to be harder. It's going to be a more winding road, and it's not guaranteed to have success. Stick with something tried and true and dive into where current debate is in your field. And I've said it before, and I'll say it again, you need to have passion in this space, or you won't get very far. And I've seen it time and time again.
So those three areas: feasible, there's a debate, there's passion. And lastly, that you can make a contribution with the skills you have. Right? I wouldn't be able to go, I'm not an auto mechanic. I wouldn't be able to go fix somebody's car with my bare hands. I don't have the skills, I don't have the training. So if you want to get it fast, you need to tap into skills you already have, whether that's using mass spec in a chemistry lab, or that's using Stata to crunch data sets and mine large databases. You need, or maybe it's doing some structured interviews and going out and talking to people. Make sure that you have triangulated these skill sets, and that will put you on the right path to finishing your PhD fast.
And then the final secret I want to share with you that is brand new, innovative, and I'm incredibly excited about it, is the route that's even faster, and that's a PhD by publication. It's very common in Europe, less common in the US, but it is by far the fastest route to getting a PhD in as little as a year. Because in this route, once you have published papers in respected peer-reviewed journals indexed in these large databases, those databases which you're going to search in your systematic review, once you've done that, you can package them together and submit them for a PhD by publication. And you can shortcut the entire process.
Look, if you want to learn more tips on how to get a PhD fast and understand how I have helped tons of students, with no exaggeration, to get there in half the time, follow the link below and join our groups where I'm helping people just like you. Thanks for watching.