Struggling During Your PhD

A #PhD can be an amazing journey for many, but it's also inevitably a time of significant struggle(s). What that struggle is can take a near-infinite variety of forms, from health issues to relationship breakups, and from home sickness to mental health.

But beyond these relatively well known challenges, there are other types of struggles that affect a significant proportion of PhD candidates, at least in my experience supervising dozens of students and informally advising many hundreds more - these are the topic of today's #HackingAcademia video, "Struggling During Your PhD".

For those who come to a PhD early in their life, it is often the largest and most substantive professional project they have embarked on. Grasping the scale can be challenging to get your head around, especially when previous projects - like a final year undergraduate project - have been completed in just 6 or 12 months, and only part-time.

Related to the scale challenge is the lack of structure problem: moving from a structured course with timestamped milestones and definitive assessment to an unstructured research environment, where the outcomes are uncertain and unknown, can be be quite confronting.

Whether you come to a PhD as a fresh grad, or after a successful professional career (just two of many potential pathways in life to a PhD), starting back at a level where you're fumbling around and not very good at many things can be humbling. Before embarking on this journey, you need to "prepare to suck, for a bit" and have the humility and patience with yourself to get better. This can be especially challenging when you're transitioning from a former role where you were highly accomplished.

How can you step up to these challenges successfully? Good due diligence before you start the PhD, both by yourself and in terms of briefing by your prospective supervisor, can help prepare you.

But beyond yourself, probably the most important element will be the people around you.

These fall into three main categories:

1) your cheerleaders (often family, friends, partner), who are unwaveringly positive, 

2) the compatriots, your fellow PhD student living similar experiences with whom you can vent and learn, and

3) your supervisory team, who are there to support and guide you, but also to nudge you in the right direction every now and then with constructive criticism as appropriate.

A PhD can be a wonderful part of your career, but having a clear eyed understanding of the potential challenges before you embark on one, and appropriate support mechanisms in place to better deal with them along the way, will radically improve the chances of a happy and successful journey.

💻 YouTube link: https://lnkd.in/ejuqBSCb

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