I wrote these “wisdoms” when I was freshly out of the PhD and I think they’re still relevant.

Some of this you will already know, some will not be relevant to your particular experience and circumstances, and by the end of your degree, you’ll have a whole bunch more you can add to this (and I hope you do!). But you may find some of this comes in to bear at different points, and it may be helpful to know someone else has experienced this before you.  

1. Writing a PhD involves long periods of time without any wins. Youdon’t get regular grades, or awards, or gold stars, any of those external things we may have come to rely on as motivators and positive reinforcement in other degrees. There may be long periods where all you hear is that you’re doing it wrong. It may be several years before you can get a publication or even a conference presentation in. (The flipside is you get a bunch of super big wins at the end). You may need to make wins for yourself, like by sending something you’ve written to a friend who you know will give you encouraging feedback, or keeping some smaller side projects that you can find wins in. Or you may just need to accept that sometimes nothing good is going to happen for a long time, but it will be worth it for all the super goodness in the end.

2. Sometimes all you will have to go on is faith in yourself and perseverance. A PhD means you’re forging a new theoretical path, and this means bush-whacking your way up a mountain blind with no sense of where the top is or if you’ll ever find it. This is scary as heck. Even if it only takes you three days to find the top of the mountain, for that three days you had no idea whether it would be three days, three years, or never. All you have is faith and perseverance. Then, as soon as you get to the top of one mountain, you see the bottom of the next one (the top is hidden in fog). Now you have experience finding the tops of mountains, though, and this bolsters your faith that you’ll find the top of this one. You will climb mountain after mountain, until one day you reach a summit and look down and suddenly there are no more mountains and then you know you’re done.

3. If you’re not used to finding things academically hard, then dealing with finding things hard is the hardest thing. This was a big adjustment for me. My whole identity was built around being academically competent. On a related note:

4. Just because you find something hard, does not mean you can’t learn to do it well. If you’re either the kind of person who has always found academics easy, or only focussed on what you can do easily and let stuff you find hard slip away (*cough*, statistics) then this may not be something you have learnt before.

5. Do something you can feel really competent at on the side. A PhD is really hard and it is common to feel inadequate or worry that you won’t ever figure it out. I found it super useful to balance this out by doing something I could be really good at. For me, it was language classes, which for me were something I found very easy (not because they were intrinsically easy – others really struggled – but because I came with a lot of prior language-learning experience and some natural aptitude). It was a really helpful ego-boost to have something I could get straight A-plusses in without a huge time/effort burden. And I got some of those wins that I was missing out on in PhD-world.

6. Figure out what you need, and find people or resources to get it from. Just like your partner can’t fulfil your every need, your supervisors can’t be everything to you either. In my experience though, there were lots of people around who could offer me what I needed, whether it was a friend in the same boat who could commiserate with me over email, or another faculty member to could reassure me that what I was experiencing was okay

7. Figure out how you work best, and work that way (and negotiate with supervisor, if needed). In my first year I learnt that I need a clear purpose, structure, and to break big overwhelming tasks into manageable-feeling pieces in order to be most productive. This was probably a more important thing to learn in my first year than any of the actual theory or literature I was exploring! If I had been more actively reflecting on what process worked for me, I may have figured this out a lot earlier and gotten much more value from that first year.

Your process may need to be negotiated around your supervisor’s process too though. My supervisor always wanted work from me a week before we had a meeting scheduled. I could never meet this deadline, because I wasn’t experienced enough to estimate accurately how long something would take to write. We ended up settling on a pattern whereby I had a loose deadline, but we would only schedule the meeting after I had sent in the writing. This was a process of figuring out what worked for me and then compromising.

8. Find and use models. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Get hold of previous student’s work to use as models for anything you can: your ethics application, your proposal, your participant information sheets, your thesis (they would’ve done the same thing with their predecessors).Look at how they are constructed. Get more than one example of each so you can compare approaches. Choose well-regarded PhD theses so you know what you’re aiming for. Ask for recommendations.. If they’re relevant to what you’re doing then that’s a bonus.

9. The PhD will hook into whatever issues you have undealt with and dredge them to the surface. So find a good therapist to have on standby, and be prepared to do some work on the self.

10. When you appear competent, people assume you don’t need support. This is not to suggest that you should hide your competency, but just to note that you may need to ask for what you need more directly because people will not always recognise when you’re struggling.

The next three wisdoms come from a university counsellor:

11. Everyone else is struggling too, and you are normal. The PhD is supposed to feel really really hard.

12. Play to your strengths. Everyone else will be doing all sorts of other things and you might feel like you should be doing those things too. But don’t try and fit your work into a round hole if it’s a square peg. Its squareness is what makes it unique and strong. Do what you do best.

13. It’s okay to do the intensive brain work for only a few hours a day. The 40-hour work-week construct has unfortunately created the myth that humans can and should work productively for eight hours a day. This is unrealistic, and unsustainable for the kind of focused brain-work that a PhD requires. The great writers of the past (Darwin, Dickens) all wrote about four hours a day, and spent the rest of the time doing easier administrative-type work, going for walks, doing relaxing activities, etc.

I always found that once I got my brain up to ‘5^th gear’, or level of processing power to do this kind of work, it was very hard to bring it back down again in order to sleep. The lack of sleep meant the next day would be a write-off in terms of productivity, and then guilt and panic would put me into further anxiety and sleeplessness. The counsellor gave me the revelation that I should be aiming to spend about a third of my work-day on very intensive brain work (focussed reading, thinking, and writing), and that I should set aside a good 4-5 hours before bed for winding-down the gears. 

In the end, working for 2-5 hours per day, 6-7 days a week, worked much better for me than working eight hours a day for five days a week. I walked or swam, played computer games and watched Netflix a LOT. And I finished on time. It’s a marathon, so you have to pace yourself.

And my final piece of wisdom….

14. Build Lego. It’s a great activity for relaxing and refreshing your mind as well as using a different part of your brain (mental rotation of objects). They’re tactile, they’re fun, they give you a sense of progress and accomplishment, and you form an appreciation for how much design-work has gone into building foundations which no-one sees from the outside.