Transcription
There are so many things that cause PhD students to suffer. And spoiler alert, it's actually nothing to do with the day-to-day research. Here are the real reasons PhDs are hard.
The first thing PhDs have got to realize is it's their supervisor that dictates the success or the smoothness of their PhD. It is nothing to do with how difficult things are in the lab. The most of the time it is actually your supervisor who decides how nice they're going to be throughout your PhD so that you have a good, a bad or a mixed time.
Now there are a load of ways to actually choose your PhD supervisor. And one of the worst ways to choose your PhD supervisor is by saying that person's a good lecturer. I'm going to have them as my PhD supervisor. Because a supervisor as a lecturer is a completely different beast to a supervisor for research. So you have to do a little bit more digging. You actually have to go and see their output. What sort of papers are they producing? Is this something you're genuinely interested in? Have they got a good lab culture? Have they got a good um sort of like vibe in the lab? Are they supportive? Do they get you back stuff on time? These are things and by stuff I mean like writing, edits, first drafts. All of these things are so important.
And I do actually have a course on selecting a PhD supervisor, but you don't have to go buy it. It it's not really sort of like super popular, but it is super valuable if you're in the early stages of selecting your PhD supervisor. So, the first thing people realize a little bit too late often is it's the PhD supervisor who dictates how happy you're going to be throughout your PhD. So, choose your supervisor wisely. Don't just go for the first supervisor who bloody lovebombs you.
The second reason PhDs are a massive pain in the behind is that it is your first exposure to the game. The game, the academic game. Before this, you think academia is this kind of wonderful life of just exploring the things you want to explore, getting tenure and dying uh in No, that's that's not nice, is it? Refusing to retire because you love your work. so much but in fact academia has become a game that is gamed. There are ways to bolster the important metrics for your career and the incentive structure in academia actually means that people who game the system who game the game actually end up doing very well and that's frustrating.
So in academia the first time you realize that the game is being played is during your PhD. That game goes like this. You need to get as many peer-reviewed papers as possible. And then you need to get as many people to site those papers as possible because we've convinced ourselves as academics that the H index is the perfect measure for describing your impact. But in fact, that can also be gamed. The amount of peer reviews that have come back to my paper and said, "Oh, actually, can you site these papers?" Which is their papers. They're gaming the system. They cite their friends papers. There's little publishing cabals that uh publish together, cite each other's work. That is the system being gamed and that is a very frustrating part of doing a PhD is the fact that you are now playing that game whether or not you decided to play that game or not because it is a vital part of academia.
H another really poopy part of being a PhD student is that you are now deemed by other people outside of academia as smart. you're the smart one. But let me tell you this, inside in your own internal monologue, a lot of the times you feel anything but smart. So you end up with this weird facade where people are like, "Oh, you're doing a PhD. You must be so smart." And you're like, "Yeah, okay." But inside you're like, "I don't understand anything. Everyone's far clever than me and my research is going poorly." So you end up with this kind of horrible depressive feeling inside when outside everyone's like, "Oh, you're the best." You know, outside of academia looking in, they're like, "Oh, you must be so smart." And you feel anything but smart.
And that's because a system is designed to wear you down a little bit. This kind of like constant um reviewing process that you undergo as a PhD student, you get reviewed constantly. Um is your research going to plan? Is your supervisor giving you what you need? Then your supervisor is highly critical of your work and then people outside of your research group are highly critical of your work. It is a zero sum game. If you get the rewards and the ex and the the um the money, the grant money or the prestige, someone else doesn't get it. So it turns it into quite a toxic game. And so feeling smart is very very difficult. And feeling very proud about what you're doing is very difficult because the external pressure is constantly criticizing you. And then the outside world goes, "Oh, you must be smart." And inside you're like, [sighs] I feel anything but.
When you start a PhD, there's loads of presumed skills that you have that you don't have that the university system and the education system hasn't trained you to do properly, but now you're expected to do it on your own without supervision. The biggest one of that is like a literature review. Now, in honors, in undergraduate, you've done small ones, you've done little ones, go find a few papers, write a little bit about it. Great. But now, you're expected to go find the best research in the world, critique that best research in the world, and then write about it in a succinct and uh orderly fashion. And that is something that is so difficult. And universities don't train their students to do this. you're just like, "Okay, go do a literature review."
In your first year of your PhD, you're normally like, "Okay, I'll go do a literature review." And you're like, "What is this literature?" Like, don't get me wrong, it's getting easier with AI tools and this channel, uh, you know, reviews a lot of those tools, but really there's still this horrible confusion that goes on as a PhD student where you're expected to do these things and you're like, I can't blooming do them, can I? But you've got to pretend you can. And it's kind of like learning by panicking over what you should be able to do. You can learn from other people and I think it's getting easier to say, "Look, this is really difficult. Can you help me out in these ways?" But it doesn't change the fact there's loads of presumed skills.
Also, like all of the lab management stuff. I remember when I did my PhD, it was like, "Okay, here's a lab. Go and do some stuff." And like don't get me wrong, you've done a little bit of that before, but now you've got an entire lab with different things in it that you're not allowed to put next to each other and this isn't allowed to be over there. And you've got to label this in this very specific way. And really the only way you find out you're doing it wrong is when you get told off. No one really ever sits you down properly and goes, "Okay, this is how you run a lab." Lab management 101 doesn't exist. There's all of these other skills and there'll be other ones for your specific discipline as well that just mean you just feel stupid and it is really baptism by fire. Hm. Presume skills. That's annoying, isn't it?
And the last reason a PhD is really tough is because of the time pressure. Now we all know we go into it and we need to do it within 3 to four years but unfortunately that time pressure doesn't always sort of like filter across to your supervisor and so your supervisor is on a different timeline they have got their job maybe their tenur and they are like yeah we can just do this just submit this in a couple months do and they don't feel the urgency like PhD students feel that urgency to have to get results have to write it up and the problem is is is that you are just sort of like fighting against this immovable or slowm moving object which is your supervisor. So because those two timelines don't really match up, the PhD student feels the time pressure and the supervisor doesn't at all. So they're like, "Oh, I'll get this back to you or maybe we can like, you know, in a couple months time we'll we'll publish that work or in a couple months time we can try that or how about you try this extra thing which then will snowball into the other things." It's just a nightmare, an absolute nightmare.
So, you have to make sure that you're extremely strict with your PhD supervisor. This supervisor needs to understand that there is a finite time and you are fighting against the clock. There's no point in the first year just relaxing. Oh, enjoy it, whatever. No, you really do just need to keep constant progress. Remember, it's a marathon, not a sprint. You hear that? Or the blooming time. But ultimately, supervisors do tend to drag their heels when really they need to keep the energy up because you've only got three to four years. H there are loads more reasons why PhDs are difficult and people needlessly suffer. Let me know in the comments how you're suffering right now and together we can get through this.
All right, then if you like this video, go check out this one where I talk about why academia is toxic. It's an old school video, but it still rings true today. Go check it out.