7 mistakes PhD students make | You've definitely made one of these!

hello my beautiful friends so today we're going to talk about the seven mistakes that PhD students make mostly without even knowing it hello so if you're new to this channel please remember to subscribe and hit that Bell notification because I talk about PhD in science careers content marketing startups because I got my own startup verbalized science and content marketing did I say that as well as some tech stuff that I do along the way so I love sharing this information so please if you're new to this channel please take a moment to subscribe alright then here are the 7 things now there's no particular order to these things other than I know I've made a few of them and this is what I've witnessed from other PhD students that have been in my office or that I've been around as part of my PhD and postdoc career so the first one is they completely don't understand that this is not like anything they've done before and that kind of seems a little bit counterintuitive because to get to a PhD you need to have done undergraduate you've probably done an honours or a master's year but now this is where things sort of step up a gear and depending on your supervisor you may just be chucked into something that you're where you're just on your own you're chucked in the deep end it's like right there's your project go good luck so this is a time for learning this isn't a time where you can rely on everything you've done before to get through the next three years if you approach this with the mindset that you're constantly going to need to learn you're constantly going to need to be able to keep yourself motivated then I think you're already well ahead of where a lot of PhD students start ok so the second thing is that a lot of PhD students take the first year very slowly now I get it you've just come off the back of 4 or 5 years of undergraduate and then maybe another year or two of masters or honours work but this isn't the time to relax your first year is what really lays the foundations for the rest of your PhD and your academic career if you choose to go into it it can be really easy to take the foot off the gas like really you've got three years and you can go into it thinking whatever I've got three years to produce all this content I'll just take six months to relax a little bit after all I burnt it right yeah look you have your position but what unfortunately you haven't earned is the ability just to slack off especially in the first year this is where you'll be gaining new technical skills you'll be learning more about academia producing papers getting grants and also you'll be learning new skills techniques analyses that you'll need for the rest of the the three or four years that you're doing a PhD so this isn't a time to be relaxing and unfortunately I've seen far too many people take the foot off the gas only in the final year to be completely overwhelmed with the amount of work they need to do and they panic and I don't want that view so the third thing that I see PhD students doing is not seeking help now you've got to this stage in a PhD where you've done a lot of research and science beforehand but remember in your first kind of year and a half to two years even though you will eventually become the expert in your field you are not there yet and it's absolutely okay to ask for help to ask your supervisor or other sort of more senior PhD students or postdoc in your lab if you just don't understand I always used to say to masters honours and PhD students that would come in underneath me that there's no such thing as a silly question and I'd much rather they ask anything they're concerned about so to put it into perspective I left academia and then I reinterred academia after about 13 months in industry and I had to relearn skills that I'd completely forgot about during my time in industry and so I felt a little bit stupid saying how does this thing work again because I was brought on as the postdoc I was expected to you know know this stuff but um I'd much rather ask a silly question then put myself behind by weeks or months or even be a danger to myself all my colleagues in the lab or during my research so look don't be afraid of asking for help we're all human and we all need help so the fourth thing that I see PhD students do that I think is a huge mistake is not look after themselves now dren during a PhD it's kind of a stressful situation there's lots of anxiety there's lots of uncertainty it can be really tough time but at the same time it's a really awesome stage of your career to grow to learn new things to be part of a group and to really sort of lay the foundations of your academic career but unfortunately a lot of people put on the back seat looking after themselves this is the first step to hopefully a longer career whether that's inside or outside of academia but to get through the three years you're gonna need to look after yourself you're going to need to be eating properly to be sleeping properly to be exercising don't give up those hobbies don't give up those hobbies that you love outside of your work in your career because those are the things and those connections and networks are going to be there when you just want to relax when you just want to do something new something else and I think it's an incredibly important part and something that PhD students aren't trained in at least in my day as much as they should be make sure you look after yourself because the more you look after yourself the better you'll be able to apply yourself to your research when you're researching do that do it regularly take up the hobby get outside enjoy your weekends that is where it's at now the unfortunate thing is a lot of PhD supervisors don't necessarily agree that you shouldn't be suffering through this but take a moment beforehand to talk to your supervisor about care and set expectations of what they do want you to do what they don't want you to do and then use that to guide you know taking some time off leaving early some days to go do something you want one of my supervisors used to leave every Wednesday early to go and play golf so if you can't go and do something you enjoy every Wednesday then that's bad right so even they know that it was good to do something else something you enjoy so look after yourself okay the one two three four five the fifth thing that I want to talk about is a lot of PhD students do not get career mentoring now I don't mind if that career mentoring is inside academia or outside of academia in industry government or otherwise but you have to make sure that you're building connections and networks in a certain area to further your career throughout your PhD go to networking events connect with people on LinkedIn go check out my other video which is all about career changes I'll put the link somewhere up there I can't even remember where it goes I think it's here but yeah all of those things really you have to you have to get mentorship find someone that you connect with find someone that you like find someone that you can meet up with at least once a month throughout your entire PhD to ask for help I personally have benefited through mentorship in my academic career in my industry roles and also as a postdoc and now even as an entrepreneur and startup and whatever I'm doing now I have found a huge amount of benefit and and sort of wealth from having a mentor so PhD students go find yourself a great mentor okay then so another thing that I see this is number six the sixth thing that I see PhD students doing wrong is that they do not write their thesis early enough now I'm talking about in sort of stage year three of the of your PhD a lot of people haven't even thought about what their PhD thesis structure will look like and I know that's changing now with the publication sort of route that you can go where if you get three to five I think PhD publications you can get thesis by publication and that's absolutely fine as well but if you are going the traditional thesis remember that this is a weighty hefty document now I don't know about you but I've only got about 600 good words in me a day so starting early getting in the routine about dating graphs creating tables like even just doing the bare basics of stitching your thesis together will really start to help that means when you come to actually put down the words which is absolutely annoying it's so so draining to sit there and write and type and produce a thesis but start early do little bits and ramped up slowly to that kind of final finish that you need I ought to or to kind of regularly I see people have this digital kind of expectation of their writing where they do nothing for ages and then BOOM it's all on and it just doesn't result in a great thesis it doesn't result in your best work I'm sure of it so start writing your thesis early and you'll thank yourself yeah it's not pretty but you'll thank yourself future you or thank yourself all right then so the seventh thing there we are that I see PhD students doing that I think is a mistake is they do not set a hard finish deadline for themselves now in academia especially in my time probably about 10 years ago and even more now there's a tendency to have this gray finish zone where you kind of finish but you could always do a little bit more now your supervisor depending on their personality type may be encouraging you to do that extra experiment or do extra thing or whatever it is whereas if you have a hard deadline where you just have to stop there's no excuse for sort of spreading it out a little bit more you can kind of produce that that hard stop yourself either just by making up a date that's harder to stick to in my experience I really need an external influence for sticking to a hard date but another really great way of sticking to a hard date is to get a job like I I found a job in industry and I had to be done by a certain date because I was starting a new job so I had to be done there is no other way that I was moving on another thing as well as I'm English and I did my PhD in Australia and I was classed as an international student and if I handed in my thesis a day later than I did it was going to cost me $20,000 in scholarship for the next year which clearly is an outrageous amount of money that I would never have wanted to spend to extend by even just a couple of weeks or months let alone a year so those really hard deadlines I find it useful to have external factors but you may be really good with yourself but yeah letting your supervisor and everyone know that that is a hard stop for you and no excuses and look even if that excuses I'm going on this bloody awesome holiday because I've worked so hard for the last three or four years that's also fine maybe you've got to kind of like sexy it up a little bit for your thesis for your PhD supervisor to take you seriously but that is also absolutely ok you've got to have a hard finish otherwise it could just drip into an unknown amount of time and then and that's it then it just goes on forever all right so those are the seven mistakes that I think PhD students make let me know in the comments what ones you agree with or which ones you've kind of fallen fallen prey to I'd love to know that but yeah please remember to subscribe to this channel if you haven't already I'll be producing weekly videos I do a LinkedIn daily vlog that I cross posted to YouTube as well so I'd love to consume all of that content because I try my absolute best to be as valuable as possible with each video all right you have a brilliant day and I'll see you in the next video great

Channel: Andy Stapleton

Views: 21,219

Rating: 4.9590907 out of 5

Keywords: mistakes PhD students make, mistakes phd students amke, mistakes phd sudents amke, mistakes phd sudents make, 5 mistakes phd candidates make, phd mistakes, phd student advice, postgrad, post grad, postgraduate, post grad life

Id: dXC3HScRZIE

Length: 13min 39sec (819 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020