How do you actually finish a PhD? For many students, this is the most difficult and most stressful part, so in this video, we’re going to go through some of the practical and emotional challenges to help you finish your PhD faster, finish to a higher standard, and maybe even enjoy the process.
Well there’s the obvious practical side, in that writing a PhD thesis just takes a lot of work, but if it that was all there was to it then it would just be a matter of working hard until it was done.
But a lot of students work hard, without seeming to get any closer to finishing. And this often comes down to psychology.
If we think about what it means to submit your thesis, it means that everything is in its final, fixed form and you can’t make any more changes. You can’t add any more data, you can’t add any more references, you can’t change the structure of your argument… whatever you submit, that’s what you have to defend in front of the examiners.
This means committing to your content, making irreversible decisions about what you include and how you present it.
It also means cutting off all other possibilities, all the extra work you could do if you had more time, all the other potential interpretations of your data, all the other references, all the other areas of theory, all the different ways you could structure or explain your argument.
And making these decisions can be scary, because unlike an undergraduate degree where you take several exams and build up a cumulative grade, in a PhD everything rests on the contents of that one document.
This pressure, or fear of failure or judgement, leads many people, consciously or not, to put off these key decisions and leave their options open for as long as they can.
But this means that if you have a deadline, you then have to make all those difficult decisions at the very end when you’re under the most pressure. You might be able to pull it all together at the last minute, but it’s a very stressful experience, and it’s unlikely to be your best work.
And if you don’t have a deadline to force you into making decisions, you can end up stuck in a draining and demoralising cycle of endless drafts and revisions, wanting to finish, putting in effort, but never quite being able to make final decisions and commit to your content.
First, let’s recognise that;
With that in mind, we can then break down some of the key decisions you ned to make, the first of which is…
Very few projects just reach a definitive answer and then stop. There’s almost always more you could potentially do to gather more data or analyse it in different ways, and there are almost always open questions either left over or created as a result of your work.
And the more strands of research you’ve done (or begun), the more potential avenues you’ll probably see for more work.
You’ll never be able to pursue all of these ideas, so the only way it’s possible to finish is to draw a line somewhere between what you’re going to include in your thesis and what you’re not.
This means letting go of potentially good ideas and leaving some things undone.
You might think that this would make your thesis weaker, but this isn’t necessarily the case. Adding more can dilute and distract from your best content, while also making it more difficult for you to write and for the reader to make sense of.
Whereas deciding not to do certain things allows you to focus and do a better job of the content you do include.
If you’re not sure where to draw the line between what to include and what not to, then deciding how much time you’re willing to invest can really help.
I was quite lucky in this regard, because my supervisor set a date when I’d no longer be allowed back in the lab. Whatever data I had by that point, that’s what I would have to work with.
This was the best thing he could have done because it forced me to prioritise and make difficult decisions about what I would try to finish and what I would have to let go, based on the time available.
I had to do a kind of triage, where I set a few top priorities that absolutely had to get done. Then there were a few things that would be nice to have, if I could get the experiments to work in time, and some that were obviously not possible in the time available, so I didn’t waste any more time or mental energy on them.
And deciding not to do certain things meant that even though I had limited time and had to work hard, I didn’t have to rush and was able to do the most important tasks to the best of my ability.
If you don’t have that kind of external deadline, I think it’s important to set one for yourself.
If you feel some resistance to doing this, or to adhering to a deadline you set, then I think it’s worth thinking about the costs of leaving it open-ended, not making decisions and not finishing.
These costs could be financial, in terms of university fees (which many universities are very happy to keep taking) or lost earnings, or they could be personal, in terms the effects on your mental or even physical health.
And then there’s the cost in terms of your time. This is probably the most valuable resource we have, and once it’s gone there’s no way to get it back.
So even if you’re not sure about specific decisions in your research, it’s worth thinking about how much more time you’re willing to invest in your PhD, then use that as a basis for making subsequent decisions.
A lot of the common writing advice will tell you to just get all your ideas down on the page, then you can start to edit and sort it out once you have a complete draft.
They’ll also tell you, if you’re stuck, to just write about something else to keep the momentum.
There are too many problems with this to go into all of them here, but one of the most damaging is that, again, it allows you to avoid making decisions while you write the initial draft.
But then you have to go through it all again and take care of all the details, make all the decisions and deal with all the difficult sections that you previously avoided.
But if you’ve trained the habit of avoiding these difficult decisions, it’ll actually be more difficult than it would have been if you’d taken care of these things the first time round.
It’s far better to make some key editorial decisions in advance, thinking about what to include, what to leave out and the key points you want to get across, which then allows you to make subsequent decisions about how to structure those points and what details you might need.
As a general rule, when making these big editorial decisions, you should stick to what you know best and what’s most relevant for your project, rather than trying to guess what the examiner wants to see or just including information to try to show how much you know. This will be much easier for you to write and much easier to defend.
Then, the way I advise students to work through the thesis is to start with the introduction and work through each chapter and each section in the order they’ll be read, and finishing each section to a submittable standard before moving on to the next. By submittable standard I mean taking care of all the references and formatting, and making sure there’s an unbroken flow in the text with no gaps or notes to yourself to come back and finish something later
The reason for starting with the introduction is that that this sets the stage, establishing the purpose and motivation for everything else. If this is unclear, then nothing else will make sense.
And the reasons for working in sequence are that it means you never have to decide what to work on, and it means you always know what you’ve already said, which is important to avoid unnecessary repetition. It also forces you to deal with difficult sections, instead of saving them all up for the end.
And as for finishing each section to a submittable standard before moving on to the next, there are three main reasons for doing this.
First: It trains you to take care of these decisions and details instead of avoiding them. You’re going to have to do them anyway, so you might as well do them at the first opportunity.
Second: Some of this work gets easier the more you do it. For example, if you invest the time early to get your referencing system working properly from the start, then it’s very easy to add references as you go (certainly much easier than adding them all at the end).
And third: It creates a tangible sense of real progress. If you tend to get a section sort of done and then move on, you might have written a lot, but you won’t have actually finished anything. Many students I speak to will tell me their chapters are all 70% complete (for some reason it’s always 70…), but not a single section of any of those chapters would actually be submittable, and they often underestimate how much work it takes to complete that last 30%.
It’s a bit like when you move house. You might think that the large furniture takes the most work, but it’s actually the thousands of tiny items, all of which require some mental effort, that are often the most stressful to deal with if you leave them all to the end.
But if you actually finish sections as you go, you can then relax about them, knowing that even if they’re not perfect, you could submit them tomorrow if you had to. And the more you write this way, the more complete sections you have, the greater the confidence that you can actually finish the whole thing.
It also feels good to overcome the challenge of finishing a section, especially if you initially felt resistance to it, and this makes a big difference ion terms of maintaining motivation.
Because writing a PhD thesis is such a big task, what you do on any given day only has a small effect. If you have an amazingly productive day, it’s only a tiny fraction of everything you need to do. Likewise, if you do nothing today then there are no immediate negative consequences, and you might be able to convince yourself that you’ll make up for it tomorrow.
But success or failure are cumulative results of what you do consistently on a daily basis.
So it doesn’t matter whether you feel like working on the thesis, or whether you’re distracted, or what excuses your brain comes up with: You have to show up and do the work.
As for how much work, well you can easily work out if you’re getting enough done by dividing the amount of time you have by the number of chapters you plan to write.
To make the maths simple, if you have six months and six chapters, then you have a maximum of one month per chapter. If it takes you a week to write the first page, then it’s just not going to happen unless you significantly increase your output on a daily basis. This might be by increasing the time spent writing, or making better use of that time, by reducing distractions and being more focused and decisive.
When I’m writing, I always block the internet so I can’t procrastinate online, i focus on one section of writing, and I stick with it until it’s done. If I’m going too slowly or over-thinking then I’ll often set myself a short term-word count target (say 100 words in the next hour), so not going as fast as I possibly can without thinking, but just prioritising speed a little more.
Now you can do all of these things, finish and submit your thesis, but you still don’t know how the examiner will react or what the result will be.
When I was writing my own thesis, I decided that I didn’t care what the examiners thought, I was just going to do the best I could in the time available. I might fail, but I wasn’t going to fail by not putting the work in or not submitting on time.
And if I did fail, it would be unpleasant, but I would be OK. I trusted in my ability to cope with whatever happened.
This freed me up to just do the work without fear, which in turn made it easier to make decisions, which made it easier to finish sections, which further boosted my confidence.
It might sound counter-intuitive, but not worrying about the end result or what my examiners would think was one of the reasons they liked my thesis. Because I was able to make clear and confident decisions, that clarity and confidence carried through into my writing.
We can never have absolute certainty of the outcome. But if you want to finish your PhD, then you have to accept that, yeah, someone else might not like the work, but do it anyway, do it with commitment, confidence and pride
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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JAMES Ortiz, Ph.D. says:
Excellent advice!!! Dr. Hayton, as you are aware, the Ph.D. programs are a bit different in the U.S. and vary with each university. However, the same concerns and problems exist with all Ph.D. students. In my case, I was working full-time and did my Ph.D. on a part-time basis. A very long time to finish during the days when the internet was still in its infancy. I wish that I had your resources available back then. Again, many thanks for helping Ph.D. students complete their dissertations (theses).