The Unorthodox Guide to PhD Research

As a recent PhD graduate I occasionally get asked for advice about the experience and how to increase the chances of success. My suggestions are simple: question everything and enjoy the journey. Now, question everything has a clear emphasis on the everything bit, but I noticed that way too often students fully believe everything they are being told by their department, their supervisor, or any piece of data published in journals. In the following paragraphs I will try to come up with an alternative narrative to the mainstream one. It is not supposed to provide a better way to get your PhD, but simply to challenge your assumptions, and yes, to make you question everything.

Motivation

One of the first things to iron out in your journey is understanding the motivation for pursuing the degree. Curiously enough, there are many reasons out there to get a PhD that have no link to the intended sense of love of wisdom. If you want a doctorate because it looks good on your CV, help you get a promotion, or simply because you think working in academia is your only choice in terms of career, my suggestions won’t probably apply. Following the mainstream way is the path of least resistance in this case. However, if you are genuinely interested in knowledge simply for the sake of it, you enjoy solving problems without the typical constraints of office politics, budgets, or chain of responsibility hierarchies, read on… However, be aware that by signing up to this alternative path you will be pursuing a moving target by yourself with no certainty of success. There will be no validation along the way, no one to give you clear answers to your questions, and really nothing you can fully count on over the next few years. Like a classic dicton says: being a researcher is a lonely job.

The Literature Review

I rarely stumbled upon a new PhD student that is not starting their journey with a literature review. This is what they teach you in all the standard guides about doing research, university research methodology classes and so on. Personally, I think that in many situations that’s the path that will hurt your research most. Not only it will hurt it, but it will do it at an early stage and in an irreversible way. So how exactly is the literature review such a terrible thing to start off with? Isn’t your PhD research supposed to build on existing knowledge in the area? Well, yes, that is indeed the case, is just that it should not happen first. I’ve seen way too many times students that don’t really know what problem to tackle, but spend a large amount of time getting biased by reviewing literature. The chances of getting biased by others when you don’t have any opinion about a certain field are much higher. Also, while theoretically journals are supposed to be the ultimate source of truth out there, the reality in academia is that many researchers publish things also due to their personal or departmental agenda. Therefore, some piece of work that you consider amazing and you take its conclusions as facts, might indeed be the result of the university pressing a certain academic to publish before the RAE, or simply someone reframing some of his previous work in order to speculatively target a different journal or conference. Alternatively, I would recommend spending the first year exploring various areas and formulating and testing some of your own hypotheses. If you start from a specific problem you are trying to solve, chances are that solution to it won’t even reside in a single discipline only, which takes us to the next section…

Interdisciplinarity

The traditional way in which research happened was structured in disciplines. There were obvious reasons for that, as literally there was a lot to discover and universities needed some sort of structure in order to focus the effort. Nowadays, most of that is still true, but there are also a lot of problems where the solution can not be placed into a discipline alone. Since academia went into the discipline structure way too far, you will notice how asking a simple question in different departments will produce very divergent answers rooted in various fields. You would obviously want to have a holistic understanding of your problem whenever possible, so you should at least consider the pros and cons of interdisciplinary research in your own context. Also, whenever you review the literature, do not shy away from checking the relevant angles from different disciplines. In order to do that, you will first need to get used to the terminology in various fields, as the same issue can be described using keywords specific to each field.

University Process

So if everything mentioned before would actually make sense, why would universities recommend or even force on students a traditional linear process starting from literature review and carefully planned over four years? Isn’t research supposed to be unpredictable and happen in a circular manner? Well, it’s simply that some of the people responsible in universities have their own targets. Postgraduate degrees are first of all a business in the UK where at least some of the PhD programs are costing more than £100k for non-EU students, and secondly, one of the criteria in the university rankings is related to the number of PhDs that were started, failed, and completed. Therefore, while it might sound a bit sad, the university objective for you is to finish your PhD in the given timeframe. If the research you did is just a minor incremental evolution of the existing body of knowledge, it does not really matter to them, as long as you finish it on time. The question is then what do you really care about most: the quality of your research or fitting in the university’s framework? Thankfully, you don’t really have to choose! It should be quite easy to get on doing research in your own way and also make a minimum effort to comply with the existing rules. As long as you understand their own agendas and KPIs it will be easy to tell them what they need to hear.

Supervision

Many students consider their supervisor as some sort of superhuman. There are good reasons for that, since chances are that your supervisor is your closest ally in your journey. However, this does not mean that he or she is also the ultimate source of truth. If you want, you can think of it as having a personal consultant. You are hiring someone more experienced to help you with advice and opinions, but you are the one calling the shots in the end. Going with their advice might be a good idea, but at the same time can be a terrible choice. You should remember at every step that you are the one with the most knowledge in your niche field. Listen to all advice you get, but filter it through your own knowledge and do not resist following your intuition.

Writing

The general opinion about writing is that it is hard. I could not agree more. Whatever you decide to write about, the actual writing is very demanding. Rumour has it that your examiners should preferably not be bored while reading your manuscript. Obviously there is a bit of a challenge to write something extremely thorough that is at the same time entertaining. In addition to that, the writing part cannot really be rushed. There are thousands of methods out there for being more productive or more disciplined. None of them works for writing or anything borderline related to creative tasks. No matter how much discipline you put into this task, it won’t really help. My suggestion is to always try to manage your mood. Being genuinely excited about your topic, and feeling like you have a story to share with the world will give you the needed energy. Do not fall into the trap of trying to write faster in order to get done with it. As soon as you start to compromise it will be a downhill journey from there: quality, motivation, chances of graduating on time, etc. Also, while all the previous steps required exposure to many other areas, writing needs a lot of focus, so ideally you would want to spend all your energy on it. You need some hobbies to fill the rest of the time, as it is counterproductive to try to write more than 4–5 hours in a day. For my thesis I spent approximately 6 months writing, switching locations from the middle of a forest in Sweden to idyllic scenery in Bali. This was mostly to reduce my costs when writing, but I found the change of environment to help with motivation (we all need a muse, don’t we?). Finally, while some people recommend writing from the very beginning of your PhD, I personally find it impossible to do that. However, you can start practicing writing early on, as putting things down on paper is a great way of understanding how solid your argument is. Things that sound thorough in a conversation can suddenly feel much weaker when you put them on paper.

Viva

I guess everyone is a bit anxious about the viva. It somehow makes sense since the hard work done in four years or so can be easily rejected in a matter of hours. It is important to remember that one of the most important decision is how you pick your examiners. There is no right or wrong choice here, but make sure you pick someone that is well fitted for your work and personality. In principle a more experienced examiner is usually a better choice. Also, while you might think that the viva is all about your research, you’ll be surprised that most of the questions won’t actually be about your work, but will test your understanding of the area. Since you hopefully did not start your research with a literature review and made yourself captive in a very narrow field with no vision and full of anxiety to have opinions about anything outside your immediate comfort zone, you’ll be OK. Also, be prepared to explain your choices in terms of methodology, as that is the aspect easiest to argue for examiners. Again, this is not about the absolute rights and wrongs, just about your ability to argue your choices while at the same time understanding their limitations.

Life After the PhD

There are still many people that think that a PhD will help you become an expert in some niche area. While this is true to some degree, it is only a side-effect. The PhD will instead equip you with the skills needed to find, evaluate, and process knowledge about any given subject in a short amount of time. Theoretically, you can become an expert in any given subject much faster than someone without a PhD. Going back to the interdisciplinary thoughts mentioned before, there should be a zillion applications for this skill. Academia is just one of them, so do not ignore the others!