The PhD Journey Nobody Warns You About (The 5 Stages)

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In this episode, I will break down the five transformational shifts every PhD student goes through and why your doctorate feels nothing like your previous degrees. We will walk through the six-stage journey:  from early confidence through disorientation, overcompensation, reality checks, and finally establishing your identity as a researcher. 

Transcript

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Your PhD probably isn't what you think it is. And that can lead a lot of researchers early on in the research journey to get confused, lost, and get plagued by self-doubt and worry. So if you're at the beginning stages of your PhD or even just thinking about doing one, then this video is for you because what I'm gonna do is break down the five main shifts that every PhD researcher goes through and map how those fit into the predictable arc of the journey of transformation that every PhD researcher goes through. This is gonna draw on my experience of having coached, mentored, and supervised hundreds of students in my time as a professor at Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge. And what's important here is it's gonna help you see more clearly and pinpoint exactly where you are in the journey and know what to expect. So you don't have surprises along the way. And if you've ever thought, why does this just feel so much harder than it should, this is really gonna help things click. So when people often start out, they think PhD is an advanced degree. I've done an undergrad, maybe I've done a master's, and this is the next step. Except it's unlike any degree you've ever done before. So at undergrad, you get rewarded for kind of absorbing knowledge, professors deposit knowledge into your mouth, you consume it and maybe regurgitate it, and the prize is good grades. At the master's, you might start to apply that knowledge and even get your feet wet with research. But the PhD is a punctuated shift. It's fundamentally different because here grades mostly disappear from the equation, and you are learning a craft and stepping into an apprenticeship to join the field like a member of a guild. And sometimes I say getting a PhD is like getting a driver's license. Right. By the end, you're not expected to be a the top race car driver on Formula One. You're just expected to be able to drive safely on the road. And so other members of the field, kind of like your driver instructor who evaluates you, is trying to establish can you can you drive safely and can you drive competently at a level of the other drivers on the road that's safe? And so in the PhD, you're expected to demonstrate that you can produce at a level that pushes the frontier of your field. None of that vaguely resembles coursework or anything you've done before leading up to this point. And that's why a PhD can just feel so brutally disorienting. So to help break this down, let me share with you five shifts that are transformational, right? It's not just about a binary, you didn't produce research, now you produce research. You've got to make five big shifts along the way. And and the first one I've already alluded to is you are shifting from being a consumer of knowledge to producing it. And this is often the first shot because many people still operate with that embedded, ingrained degree logic. You read, you summarize, you show that you understand something. But with a PhD, you have to add something new. You have to identify gaps, things that are missing in the field, and say things or see things that no one else has before. The second major shift is you gotta go from a student who is guided to a self-directed researcher. Here, that whole structure that you've had before disappears. In your degree, you have step-by-step logic. You have an assignment, you have clear tasks to do, you have a clear assessment of is it right or is it wrong, with sometimes being shown what to do. Now you're kind of thrust into the deep end of the pool. You get light supervision, feedback is vague, and you're sometimes told things like, you know, this isn't at the standard, this isn't there yet. Go figure it out. And not having a roadmap. What's really happening is you're no longer being taught in that step-by-step fashion. You're expected to define the problem yourself and often come up with a solution on your own. And this is where this kind of ambiguity can enter the equation. You're not sure if you're doing it right or not. You feel like your feet are not on solid ground. And for many, depending on your psychological dispositions and resilience, this can trigger a lot of anxiety and self-doubt. Third shift. In the past, operated in a situation where more work in leads to more progress out. But this is a painful shift. This is because, well, for a couple of reasons. One is research, progress is nonlinear. So if you just aim for the outcome, a successful experiment, well, there are many things that have to happen in place to get to that successful experiment and there's uncertainty. You're doing the research because you don't know what the outcome is going to be. And so you can control input and effort, but that doesn't necessarily lead to a successful result. The other thing that can happen is when progress stalls, people often work harder. They put more work in. But if things are not aligned in your PhD, that more work in will not trigger more effort out. So one way we conceptualize this is that every PhD has an alignment spine that goes from your gap, which is an anchor in your project, to a research question that should come in contact with it to link to that question. It's kind of like a hypothesis. It should feed into what you want to show. And this should ultimately bridge over to your methods that directly connect with it. When that alignment is off, it's a bit like trying to play a sport with a broken arm. You can try harder, but it's gonna hurt. There's gonna be a lot of friction and you're not really gonna thrive. If if you want to check out more on PhD alignment spine, uh check out this video here I've got for you, Bob. But this shift, this is a stage where overcompensation happens, and I'll come to that in a minute, and where the process of burnout often begins. Fourth shift is a shift from getting grades to surviving critique. So up until this point in your career, the feedback has felt very personal. You might benchmark yourself, I got an A, I got a B with others, but feedback was in grades, pass, fail, good, bad, smart, not. And that can feel very personal. But research feedback is not grading, it's more institutional, right? When you get comments from reviewers or supervisors, they're more signals of what to do, where to go. It's it's research judgment. It's not always black or white. And this feedback, a lot of researchers take personally and can be very hard to absorb. And often there's an impulse to reject that feedback, to reject that critique, or um imposter syndrome can kick in. You can start feeling like a fraud, like you're not good enough, you're never gonna make it. Although the irony is uh almost everybody feels that way. Who goes on to become great is a necessary stage, and it usually means you're growing. But it's at this stage where you've really got to learn to separate your identity from your work. And that's different from the way you may have processed feedback before. The fifth shift is you are being evaluated by maybe a teacher or a professor, and now the authority is kind of more amorphous, it moves outward. It's the field, it's anonymous experts. You see this when you have a dissertation defense, anonymous experts are invited. You see this in peer review that your paper is sent to a pool of reviewers, and you get a draw from the distribution of who's gonna review your paper. You are being positioned uh within a field. And slowly but surely your confidence changes at this level as you clear this bar. But this is a big shift in the nature of evaluation that you're being subjected to. So each of these shifts are necessary parts of the journey that you're gonna have to overcome. But let me make this more linear, almost like a roadmap for you, so you can see you are here across stages and where you've got to get to as part of this research or transformation journey. So in the first stage, I see a lot of researchers start out with early confidence. You did well in my master's, I did well in my undergrad. Um, I'm gonna figure this out. And this is often early days, maybe before the PhD, uh, especially relevant to those of you who are thinking about applying. The second stage kicks in where there's often a moment of disorientation. It is when you are just imagine that moment where you have just been pushed into the deep end and you're flailing around in the pool. And this is where the shift to producing knowledge and the shift to becoming self-directed really collide. You're often at the stage of figuring out your topic, not sure if it's a good topic, a bad topic, if it's going to be publishable or not, if it's well defined, if it's clear. You're trying to do your literature review for the first time and you might not have clear guidelines on how to do it, and you think you're just summarizing papers and that's not what to do. Maybe you're trying to write a research proposal and the yardsticks suddenly feel unclear. There's there aren't obvious grades. And uh this is where I see that kind of hope to get this right and effort start to decouple and break down. Stage three is where overcompensation can start happening. Again, this is part of a trajectory and transformation arc. Not everybody linearly goes through these stages, but in overcompensation, people start to think, well, maybe I need more theory, maybe more methods, and they try to make things more complex. Sometimes, as I'll say, muddy the waters to make them appear deep, rather than the go the other way uh to keep things simple. So sometimes this plays out as people start collecting a bunch of tools and tech that get big AI stacks, they start to pile on methods and sophistication that they don't fully understand, use a lot of jargon, and especially AI can start to creep in to compensate for gaps and feedback or fundamentals they don't feel like they have when they weren't shown how to do things, they're just trying to figure it out on their own. And this is where I see that peak burnout risk happens. People get stuck here for a long time, and imposter syndrome of I'm not good enough, I'm not cut out for this really gets in the way. And it's when you're working incredibly hard, feel like you're getting nowhere, feel frustrated, there seems to be no end in sight, you're you're aware of the costs, um, you're aware of the time wasting, and it starts to feel like there's no upside. So the big shifts here, again, at this overcompensation stage is really when you encounter this situation of more work is not equaling, more progress, the non-linearity is there, and there is a reframe that you've got to go to and calibrate to make sure you get the fundamentals right, break things down into baby steps, and you uh reward yourself not as much for the outcome, which is less directly in your control, but through the correct and aligned effort that you're putting in. Stage four reality check often happens. And this can be when you get feedback from supervisors or even peer review, and you might see, gosh, this idea, this baby I've worked on so long wasn't even wrong. It's just not publishable. And this can really hit like a knife in the gut. And this really feeds back in this overcompensation spiral where you feel like you're not good enough, you gotta compensate somehow, and you do this in not a productive way. I hope that makes sense. So, this is another one of the big burnout zones where people misread feedback like they're failing, rather than treating feedback like the gift it is to help you improve. And one of the big shifts that happens here is where you start going taking very seriously all the feedback as constructive critique and work very, very hard to address it. If you can get past this stage, you are now at stage five where you've begun to acquire the craft. You start to see how arguments are built, tested, and defended. The the prior shift of absorbing that feedback and critique is stable. Progress here starts to become more reliable. Your PhD alignment spine is probably healthy, and you get smooth, steady, sustained progress. Not explosive progress, just smooth and steady. If you get through this, burnout risk drops. You've got a good operating system for doing research consistently day in, day out. And showing up consistently in this stage leads to the final stage six where you get that identity shift and you feel like you're a researcher. You've completed the arc, you've established your identity. It's not just I study research, I do research now. Your confidence starts to stabilize, you don't need the external validation or approval from others, and your identity as a researcher starts to become solid. You can now read research like a native, and more than that, produce it. So look, identifying where you are in this research journey will help you to see which shifts you've made or not yet make, and help you to not blame yourself when it gets hard, because it's gonna get hard. It's important to realize that this is all part of the transformational journey that you're embarking on to get a PhD, and that this is just not like anything you've ever done before. What you've done for your undergrad, what you've done for your masters just doesn't directly one-to-one transfer and apply here. If you're struggling at any of these stages or to navigate any of these shifts that you've got to make and you want personalized one to one support, I'd encourage you to click the link below and see if we're a good fit to work together. We've helped hundreds of researchers across different fields at different starting points in their journey to get to success and true confidence that stabilizes to establish that identity as a researcher. See you guys in the next video.