In most of my videos I focus on ways to cope with the problems faced by PhD students, but today I’d like to focus more on the positives because, believe it or not, PhD research can — and I would argue should — be rewarding and enjoyable.
As a PhD student, you get to take a really deep dive into a subject you’re interested in, you get to develop valuable skills and expertise, and you get to work with and learn from really smart people. It can also open the door to a career in research where you get to pursue your own ideas and use your creativity to contribute something to the world.
Yes, it’s difficult, but the difficulty is what you sign up for and it’s in the difficulty that much of the reward lies. If you were able to just make a plan, execute it perfectly and get exactly the results you expect then you wouldn’t learn anything and it would probably be a sign that you haven’t been ambitious enough.
But there’s some nuance here… it’s not just about facing difficulty and working through it… How you navigate the challenges of PhD research makes a world of difference.
If you want to enjoy PhD research, the first thing I’d suggest is to acknowledge that you’re a beginner and that you’re not here to prove yourself, but improve yourself. So if you have those nagging thoughts that you’re not good enough or that everyone knows more than you, try to see it as an opportunity.
With impostor syndrome, nobody wants to admit that they don’t know something for fear of being found out. The natural tendency is to want to hide away, but if you hide then you can’t move forward.
But if you embrace the fact that you’re a beginner, that you’re not expected to know everything, that even after you graduate or even after 20 years working in the field you’ll still be learning, you can approach your PhD with curiosity rather than fear, you can say “I want to know that”, rather than “I should know that” and you can learn from those with more knowledge or experience or natural talent instead of comparing yourself to them.
If you’re open about what you don’t know, nobody can find you out, and it’s a much more secure and confident place to be.
The second point I’d make is to expect things to go wrong. This might sound pessimistic, but if you’re doing something you’ve never done before, or something that nobody has ever done before, it would be arrogant to expect it to work first time.
Even when you have experience, things can and will still go wrong, and you’ll still make mistakes.
This is one of the most important shifts in mindset as you move from undergraduate study to postgraduate research… whereas mistakes are penalised and permanently recorded in your grades at undergraduate level, they are an inevitable and necessary part of research at postgraduate level and beyond.
The good news is that it doesn’t really matter how many attempts it takes to get it right. In fact, it might make you a much better researcher if you adapt and learn from each iteration.
And here’s the secret… If you want to enjoy research and get good at it, you need to be excited by solving problems. You need to be at your best, most energised and most engaged, most curious and most creative when something hasn’t worked out the way you expected or when you don’t know how to do something, because this is when both discovery and skill development happen.
But what a lot of people will do is disengage from the problem in front of them, either through procrastination or by multitasking and switching their focus to something else—an approach that guarantees they stay busy but without solving any of the issues that arise.
Instead, when you face a problem, try to slow down and focus your all of your attention on it, perhaps breaking it down into smaller problems and tackling them one at a time if there’s too much to process.
Even if you break it down into small problems, it might take several attempts to get it right, but then it feels great when you do. And success in a PhD isn’t so much about the big milestones, but these small victories.
And, finally, if you want to enjoy your PhD, try not to take it too seriously.
There are times when a bit of pressure can be a good thing to help with the motivation, and there will be times when you have to be professional and show up and do the work even when you don’t feel like it. But if the stakes are too high, if you see it as life or death – and people speak of it in those terms – it can make it harder to focus, harder to think clearly or creatively, harder to get things done, which just increases the pressure.
So it’s about finding a balance, where you take it seriously enough that you show up and do the work, but lightly enough that you don’t tense up or panic.
There’s a saying I came across years ago in the days when I was a martial arts nerd, in a book called the Hagakure, which said:
“Matters of great concern should be treated lightly, matters of small concern should be treated seriously.”1
The way I understand this is that if you’re too worried about the big picture, then end result and what it means, it can stop you doing the small things you need to do to succeed. But if you forget about the end result and just focus on doing the small things with care and attention, the big important things are more likely to turn out the way you want them to.
But if not, you’ll be OK! And that confidence, that belief that you can cope with whatever happens is so powerful because when you start from a place of unconditional self worth, it’s so much easier to do the work and have fun at the same time.
I think that’s a good place to wrap up, but I’d love to hear your perspective in the comments below. What do you love about your subject? What do you enjoy about PhD research? And I’d be especially interested in hearing if there’s anything you’ve done or changed that’s helped you enjoy your work
So that’s all from me, thank you so much for listening, and I’ll see you next time.
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PhD: an uncommon guide to research, writing & PhD life is your essential guide to the basic principles every PhD student needs to know.
Applicable to virtually any field of study, it covers everything from finding a research topic, getting to grips with the literature, planning and executing research and coping with the inevitable problems that arise, through to writing, submitting and successfully defending your thesis.
All the text on this site (and every word of every video script) is written by me, personally, because I enjoy writing. I enjoy the challenges of thinking deeply and finding the right words to express my ideas. I do not advocate for the use of AI in academic research and writing, except for very limited use cases.
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