How to complete your PhD in 3 years | the ULTIMATE ROADMAP!

i completed my phd in three years and you can too so why three years why not two years why not one year and i think it really comes down to the fact that a phd is a journey and it takes about three years because firstly you need to get used to your research you need to get used to your field you need to get used to your supervisor you need to get used to all of these things you need to build the skills then you need to fail a lot and that is one thing i think that we are all not very good at is failing so that we can kind of find the things that work and we're going to talk about some very important principles throughout this video for making sure that you are able to finish within three years and that you use your time effectively um and then also the last year allows you to sort of like rapidly build on what you've learned do those experiments that no one else has done and then write up as you go along you know there are kind of gradients it's not like throughout a phd you stop doing one thing and you go on to the next there's kind of overlap and those overlaps are really about managing your time effectively so that you can balance you know going from very hardcore experimental if you're in the sciences or very hardcore like research if you're doing any other sort of phd and then fading that across into doing the writing up which ultimately is the thing that will get you your phd still theses are the way people are finishing up a phd you can do a phd by publication but i've not known too many people to do that even today so a thesis is going to be the thing that decides whether or not you get your phd it has to be full of new information it has to be rigorous and it has to be novel and so that's what you're aiming for and you've got to start your phd with that goal in mind you are creating novel research you have to do something that no one else has done before you're contributing to a field in a unique way that no one else has done before and that can be challenging but there are tiny steps to get there and we'll talk about those in this video so why three is just because you need to fail a load of times and you need a buffer so that uh you can pick up on the things that are working and run with it all right so here are the sort of absolute steps that i would take if i was trying to complete a phd in three years like i did and it isn't necessarily the things i did because i think i wasted a lot of time not knowing some of the principles in this video okay let's get on with it okay before you even start anything there are two things that are really really important for making sure you finish on your third or at the end of your third year now first one your supervisor i have said it time and time again on this channel but your supervisor will ultimately dictate how successful your phd is so you need to be absolutely upfront with them early on and you need to say i want to finish my phd on this date and you have to get them to at least verbally agree to the point um that you're you know that that you want to complete within that time and do not allow them to go well maybe we could go a bit after you know they need to be as rock solid on that decision as you are and you need to explain to them absolutely clearly why that is important for you and the second thing is that the reason i think i got done so quickly is because i had a 20 000 uh payment to make at the end of my third year i was an international student in an australian university i'm originally from the uk plymouth plymouth massive the thing is is that i had a fee waiver for only three years and as an international student i had to pay 20 000 if i was to go over even by one day therefore i recommend you have a hard limit you know like you have an immovable time and this comes down to something called parking parkinson's law and parkinson's law essentially just means that any task will fill up the time you give it if you want to finish your phd in four years you'll be able to fill it if you want to finish it in three years you can do that same amount of time and research and experiment in three years that you would have expanded to four years because that's just our nature as humans is to just look and go okay we'll space out all these things i won't do this today i'll do it later like that is the task so if you give yourself you know eight hours to do a task but then you have it like i always do this to myself i'm like let's have it i go to four hours and i can normally do that task in half the amount of time if i at least give myself a hard deadline so those are the two important things you need to get set before you start anything supervisor and a hard deadline whether it's monetary whether or not you're getting a job whether or not you know you you need to lead the country that is the hard deadline you need at the end okay year one here is the most important part of your phd it's the first few months now in your first two months what i recommend you do is you set your habits you uh you know build up the habits that actually will help you coming in at the same time every day leaving at a reasonable time having a good amount of sleep at night now go check out my other video where i talk about the perfect phd daily schedule but um that will essentially show you what a daily phd should look like and it's about sort of chunking up your time into focused work where you set your attention on one thing for an hour and a half and you know you may not be able to do that initially like you may only i'm able to manage like half an hour of attention and that's absolutely fine but in these first two months we're building up that ability to focus and concentrate on one activity and really early on that one activity is reading literature it's about trying new experimental techniques looking deeper into the literature and research areas and but really just spending a completely focused and uh you turn your attention onto that thing for an hour and a half and you do two of those a day anyway also if you sign up to my newsletter you'll get a template a daily template with task lists and to-do lists and goals and all that sort of stuff so it's a simple printout and go check that out so yes newsletter all right in the first two months not only are you setting your habits you're setting good habits because those habits are the foundation to your phd but the second thing is you are also building relationships you're building relationships with the key people in your lab and you'll notice at the moment the first two months i have not done anything about literature i've not done anything about um about research like getting into the lab like this is the first two months of laying the foundations now you can read the literature you can do those things all of these things that i'm laying out in the roadmap is completely flexible depending on your phd but you'll notice that the focus is not on cramming or getting into the lab or doing stuff it's about habits and relationships for two months build those relationships with the key people your supervisor your lab mates start asking people about their research the people in the lab that's uh you know a bit further along the post docs what are they doing what's good what's not good can they find any overlap with your research all of that sort of stuff is important now for me i had to learn a lot of experimental techniques i had to learn scanning electron microscope the transmission electron microscope i had to do atomic force microscopy optical measurements uh uv vis like i had to go find the managers of those instruments build relationships so when i was ready to go i want to use this they kind of trusted me they knew me they understood that i was motivated you know those relationships are a big big sort of help uh when you just need something done and people just know you and they like you you know you don't have to be friends but you can be friendly with all of these important people but the biggest relationship in the first two months is your supervisor regular meetings at least once a week early on show them what you found show them some literature ask them questions you know in the first few months you're not really expected to know too much other than um you know who to speak to to solve problems and start reading that literature and so the first two months are very important and you need to set your habits build relationships and then you can move on to the next stage and the next stage in the next four months that will take up to the first six months but the next four months really is about literature and skill building you need to make sure that you are completely all over the literature so go through and start deep diving you know i used to have two piles of papers which was like must read right away and would be nice to read the the um must read right away were really important papers that were directly related to my phd and then as i'm reading those i go oh that would be interesting to read if they quote something and i just sort of like print that out and today you can use you know an online manager or just some folders on your on your computer but um then i would i would prioritize the must reads which were directly related to my research and then i'd have this kind of like fuzzy boundary of my knowledge where um there would be the like nice to read and i would make sure that i would read one or two of these every day and in the first six months you just want to go through and just get a sense of what the literature is doing what it's like how uh it relates to your phd your question you know your research question that you you you have to get so well defined early on and you can sort of mold it as you go because you know that is the that's the reality of a phd is that you think you're starting off in one direction but in fact another direction is far more fruitful and interesting and we'll talk about that in a minute but the second thing you should do in the first six months of your phd is skill building so what skills do you need to go ahead now don't think don't be like oh maybe i would need this you just want the immediate skills so for me it was atomic force microscopy and i just had to kind of get used to using this machine and it takes a long time to learn to use these machines properly i needed to become an expert in all of these different type of machines and instruments and microscopes and techniques you know i used ultrasonic ones to completely create a mini emulsion of my conductive polymers in water and yes i needed to be an expert on all of these things very quickly and this is where your undergraduate skills come in which is getting information into your head and then using that information to do something physical you know getting over that that learning action gap is really what this first six months is about is understanding the literature understanding the techniques in that literature at least at a uh you know in an academic way and then starting to apply that going to get training on those things you read about in the literature that's the first six months now the back six months of your first year this is where it kind of gets fun and interesting this is where you start trying out those preliminary experiments or you start reading those things that other people have mentioned but as a scientist i would go and i would try to reproduce other people's work you'll notice at the moment i'm not focused on trying to do my own work or my own stuff or whatever it is i really want to do research that other people has done so that i can lay the foundations that i can kind of jump away from eventually in the second year in the third year but initially all i want to do is reproduce what people have done in the literature this does a number of things right this makes sure that you know the techniques that they are not lying in the literature which is a massive issue science has the reproducibility of these experiments is incredibly low so you need to make sure that what you want to do actually works and you do that by reproducing people's stuff in the lab for me i was using katrina lancer the mini emulsion process and i was able to qualify the fact that uh these things were were at least achievable you know so that's what i did and then i after i've kind of done a bit of reproducing even in the first year you can start to let your mind go i wonder if i wonder if i could try this and i ended up with a few preliminary experiments in my first year that ended up in my thesis at the end and those were very simple like first year chemistry experiments like what would happen if i vary the um ph of this as i do it what would happen if i vary the um you know concentration of this key ingredient as i go but those are very basic experiments and they're not in the literature but you're taking you know a literature experiment and you're just varying some of the um sort of variables and it means that you're just starting to get a sense of how this thing works where should you be focusing you know what's working and the thing is is that early on in the back half of your first year as you're starting to put those feelers out you're gonna get things wrong a lot and that is what i encourage you to do is try experiments because they're interesting and not because you think they'll work the first and the sort of like first half of the second year so the back end of the first year in the first half of the second yes that's right um that is where you want to uh just fail fail as much as possible follow your interests you know lay the foundations by reproducing and then go i wonder what would happen if and you start going off in these directions and you know you use your lab book to record what you're doing you follow experiments through to their completion but having two you know experiments a day that you run or prepare in the morning do it in the afternoon you'll slowly build up a sense of what works what doesn't work what's interesting and you know importantly and so that is probably the first year now that's a lot a year's a long time but that's how you quickly scale up from first day all the way through to your second year now let's have a look at the second year because that is also a really fun time this video is brought to you by my newsletter now go check it out at andrew stapleton dot com dot a u forward slash newsletter now i have got an exciting project coming up because uh i want to produce stuff that benefits you the phd students the academics and i've got a little project that i'm working on at the moment i can't say too much but it's very exciting for me and i um i'm gonna release it first on that newsletter and also when you sign up the first thing you'll get within like a couple of minutes of signing up is a link to the daily schedule uh template and i think that's going to be super important so go check that out now let's look at year two okay year two is split up into sort of uh six months blocks the first six months is all about learning from your first year your preliminary experiments and you start pushing the boundaries even more start trying new experiments start looking at new frontiers start sort of just pushing out the bubble and the way i kind of think about this is when you're doing an experiment you know each option in front of you each way you could take the experiments like a series of doors and i just opened the doors that are the most interesting so i open it up and there may just be nothing in there or i may open up and someone may smack me in the face and i go nope that's not a good way to go and so essentially you're just opening up as many of these doors as possible throughout your your early stage of your phd you've laid the foundations in your first year the second year you're going through you're opening these doors and some of them are kind of interesting some of you you look in you're like oh wow that's a beautiful color in that room i'll go in there or you open up a door and there's someone there i don't know vomiting on themselves you go no thank you very much um so that is what i think a second year of a phd should start as is still just opening those doors trying those different things follow where you're going and from that i expect a few papers a few a few kind of results that are publishable to kind of tumble out these aren't world-changing uh papers by any means but they're useful and interesting because you start to explore the boundaries of what is known and so by doing that you can speak to your supervisor regularly you're still having those fortnightly meetings at least and you are just testing out and you're just trying and you say well i've come across this interesting thing that i haven't seen in the literature i'd like to publish it you package it up in a little story and i'll be doing a video on how to write a paper soon and yes that's what you do so you still fail as much as possible and by failing and learning and watching and listening and you know these kind of things will tumble out as long as you keep your eye out on the for the interesting uh sort of results that you get that is going to be very important so that's the first six months of the second year of your phd now here is a very very important principle in the middle of your second year or close to the middle maybe a little bit before you need to do a 80 20 check and this is called the pareto or pareto principle now the pareto principle is that about 20 of your efforts actually result in 80 percent of the results now this when it like even now what what i'm doing now growing youtube channels growing businesses my startup this principle holds true for so many things so there's 20 of your efforts at this point in your phd that will result in about 80 percent of the results and what you've got to do is you've got to identify that 20 percent now on the flip side there's 80 percent therefore of your effort that results in only 20 percent of the outcome therefore it is this point where you need to flip that switch on efficiency and start to go okay what 20 of my efforts is resulting in the majority of the results and that's where you should focus for the back half of your phd no doubt that principle will save you time it will save you effort energy and if you do a little bit of digging i guarantee you that it will be obvious that you should be focusing on this part of your project because the other 80 is resulting in good things but it's only accounting for about 20 of your results and results is up to you know your phd question which one which 20 of your effort is getting you closer to answering your phd question and that is so important there we are that is the number if you take one thing away from this video let it be that the 80 20 rule or the pareto pareto parato pro that one principle um that will be the thing that dictates um your success going on and it means then that you can focus and double down on the things that are working for the back half of your second year and that will launch you into your third year first year of your third year you are doubling down on what's working from the pareto principle and so i would recommend just doubling down on those experiments and what you'll find is that as you are doubling down on the things that are working more and more things are going right you're building up momentum and that first half of the year really is just the science that you kind of there to do you know you've you've spent this much time training yourself to be to do these experiments now you're forcing forward you're forging a new path you're pushing out on the on the boundaries of knowledge and this is where a phd really comes in to its own and a phd student starts to become the expert and it's through experimentation it's through research it's through exploring the literature all of those things that have built up to this point and now you're growing that knowledge bubble and so that's the first half of year three it should be obvious at this point what's working what's not and you're just pushing forward pushing forward and the second half of the third year is where you start to flip the switch from experiments to writing up now you can start earlier if you want um but having a good phd story i like to kind of zoom out a little bit and you only get that opportunity to zoom out and really understand what your phd story is once you've got that expert level of knowledge and you've got that kind of body of work that's so very important so zoom out get an idea right this is the overall what have i achieved and then you start sort of like doing those finishing experiments you start tying up loose ends and you start flipping in that sort of middle of the third year you start flipping from experiments to writing and it's like a gradient at least it was for me i was still writing you know a couple of days a week and then three days a week i was in the labs going i'm writing at this point at the moment i don't really feel this is a complete story i'll just do this little experiment to tidy it up and that's the gradient you're trying to achieve on the back end of your phd and yes writing up go check out my other video on how to write your thesis but i've got everything you need in there and yeah just go check out that video because it's full of really important information about writing your phd and finishing up faster once again it's about small little improvements every single day that make you closer to your goal and one percent every day over three years is gonna add up to something incredible and you'll get there i promise so there we have it that is what i would do if i had to complete a phd in three years let me know in the comments below what you would add to that if you've had a certain experience that you want to share i would love to hear it and good luck until next time i hope you have a fantastic day and i shall see you in the next video

Channel: Andy Stapleton

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Id: tPHufaC7M7Q

Length: 23min 56sec (1436 seconds)

Published: Mon May 31 2021