How to fail a PhD | 5 key things to avoid!

hello my beautiful friends so today we're going to talk about the five ways that you could fail a phd if you're new to this channel please remember to subscribe and hit that bell notification because i'm going to talk about everything phd careers and the mistakes that i've made during my phd in postdoc so you don't do the same remember to subscribe okay let's talk about the first thing the thing that you've got to remember is that to get a phd not only do you need to do the work not only do you need to go in the lab write it up produce papers go to conferences you also need to convince three or four strangers that you are an expert in your field and you do that by producing a big old thick boring book you know maybe it's not boring to people in the field but no one else is going to read this other than people that are interested in this specific field of research and that includes the examiners so how do you end up from like beginning with nothing to this and not only this but this has to convince some strangers that you are an expert so let's talk about that and the mistakes that you can make the first one is like the smallest but the biggest the smallest because it requires you to think about what you're doing every single day every single experiment every single thing that you do has to be done with academic rigor so the first thing is no cutting corners if you cut corners on every decision you will get found out now the thing about this is it can start very small it can be like oh i just won't wash the glassware as well in the case of you know a science phd or you know maybe i won't read as much as i need to if you're doing something you know literature based but it compounds and each sort of corner that you cut early on results in a less rigorous phd and remember this is about convincing some strangers that you are an expert they are also experts in a field or field very closely related to yours and they will know they will know if your results are just a little bit dodgy or you haven't really thought about something because remember they haven't seen the process they're just seeing this big boring thesis and so you have to be sort of so precise so rigorous in your investigation that they have no option but to say you know what this person feels me fills me with confidence and makes me feel like they are an expert and that is the most important thing it's about what they feel when they're looking at your thesis and if you cut corners every day those corners those things that you've cut off the things that you've skipped if you haven't been rigorous even if it's just tiny add up so yes don't cut corners throughout my time as a phd student and post-doc i only saw one failure and that one failure was down to very simply not turning up like it's amazing to me and not amazing at the same time i guess i it's amazing to me that people don't turn up when their only thing they have to do you know in terms of get a phd is turn up to the lab turn up do the work like showing up is probably like 80 of the work and then once you're there you can you can write you know you can collaborate you can go to the lab you can research you can do whatever you need to do and this person failed because they did not turn up for like three months at the beginning of their phd and i think this is kind of like a big issue with that kind of egocentric phd student where they feel like they've earned their place there and so they can ease off you know three years or four years seems like a very long time until it isn't a long time anymore so you can be like ah ah three years yeah you know what i'll take six months not turning up i'll take whatever actually there was another phd student who signed up and ne i never saw him again he was there for six months he did the reverse he was there for the first six months then obviously decided it wasn't for him and just didn't show up anymore and that's why he didn't get a phd um so yeah you've got to show up like you've got to shot and it may be that you are doing it remotely and by showing up i mean you've got to sit down with a routine you know whether it's nine to five but you know the flexibility of a phd means you can make the routine work for you but there's no excuse for just not putting in the hours not showing up not sitting down at your computer and doing work not doing all of the stuff that will actually get you there and it's a slippery slope if you feel like i'll take wednesdays off you know it can slowly erode the amount of time that you've got and then you get to the last year or six months and you go oh i gotta pull my finger out so just turn up that was the one reason this person did not get a phd is because they literally didn't put enough time and effort into their thesis the third reason is picking the wrong examiners now towards the end of your phd you will hopefully have an idea of who's an expert in your field you'll speak to your supervisor or supervisors and you'll talk about where your thesis should go and you know there's some rules around that you can make recommendations about where you'd like your thesis to go and the thing is these supervisors are choosing other experts in the field and they sometimes make a choice that's crowded by their own perception of certain people now my thesis went out to katrina lancaster um and uh and two unknowns and so uh i you know got the feedback and they they have mentioned in this thesis like there is this was like a colloid and surface science um sort of part and then i had a another examiner who was based in the kind of solar cell field and so my examiners spanned those worlds so katrina lanfester couldn't necessarily tell me everything there is about solar cells but she could very rigorously rigorously go through the colloid and surface science part and if you pick the wrong examiners you may just annoy them um by sending them a phd that isn't in their field or if there's a lot of beef right if there's a lot of arguments between your supervisor and them then potentially they're not going to look on you favorably and i know that shouldn't be the case but academia is so full of egos and self-righteousness and competitiveness that politics really do play a role so before you submit speak to your supervisor make sure they haven't got any issues with certain people if they have disagreements it shouldn't matter in the long run but remember these people don't know you as a person all they care about is what you are presenting to them in your thesis and uh if that is sort of muddied by professional relationships which it shouldn't but i'm sure it does then um yeah that could be an issue so make sure you pick your examiners wisely okay number four is poor time management and poor project management so poor management in general now the issue is is that you know three years can seem like a long time and it goes by so incredibly quickly if you don't set out for yourself a sort of milestone report of where am i going to be at this point where should i be at this point what would i like to know you know some extra decision points so you kind of set out a preliminary path but you know it's research you don't know what you're going to find but then at sort of like end of the first year and end of the second year you should have these kind of big milestones or decision points and say you know what this isn't working let's try this or this is going really well we'll go we'll double down on that experiment and so yeah you know it is a whole thing around project management and time management because i've seen it i've seen phd students just take their foot off the gas in the first couple of years only then to be completely freaked out and spend another year or you know or 18 months trying to get back the time they wasted at the beginning and if you enter a phd with the idea that you know i'm going to work consistently but um but not like not in short bursts i'm just going to do something every single day to get you me closer to having a phd and becoming an expert yeah that's what you need to do so project management if you're unsure about how to do that for research reach out to your supervisor reach out to someone who's done it before and they'll be able to help you understand how hard and how consistent you need to work throughout the whole three to four years to get to the end ultimately you need to show these examiners that you have done a load of work and not a single bit of your your three or four years was wasted and you do that by giving them something big thick and meaty you know it doesn't have to be physically thick but it may have to be sort of dense because i know there's some physics phds that you know their thesis was about 60 pages but those 60 pages were dense and full of thoughts and experiments and equations and you know that's what you need to do so always think about the examiners what they want to see and if you present them with something thick and hefty then immediately you're on their right side because they're like this person did a lot of work and the fifth thing i want to talk about of how to fail a phd is as your examiners are reading the phd they need to feel like you have become an expert in your field that you are at the very top of this very slim part of the research field and you do that by actually synthesizing your results putting out your ideas into the world based on the evidence and the research and the experiments that you've done and i reckon i've seen it a couple of times is where people have written a thesis but they've only reported on what they've done they've only reported on i did this this is what i found and they've really sort of very superficially gone over the results and put it together into kind of some sort of argument but you know a phd in becoming an expert means that you have to take the results drill down into what it really means and then express that in your own words and so yeah your thesis has to fill the examiners with confidence and if they don't get that confidence if they don't feel like you're now an authority or that you're you're a kind of a thought leader in this area then they are just not going to feel comfortable awarding you a phd you know that's not to say that you should make outlandish statements you know this is all about basing on the evidence but really going deep into the synthesis really making sure that you understand the significance of your results the the kind of limitations of your arguments that will really help you convince the examiners and and make them uh so sort of comfortable with the fact that they're awarding a phd to someone who knows exactly what they're talking about in the slim field that they're researching and yeah that's what it comes down to make the examiners confident that they're making the right choice of awarding you a phd so there are my five things on how to fail a phd and not fail a phd but let me know in the comments what you would add to that there's plenty more like choosing the right supervisor all of that stuff but go check out my other videos because i've got so much about how to choose the right topic how to choose the right supervisor and you know all of this comes together and really makes you a great phd candidate with great foundations and someone that people want to give a phd to because it's just an obvious thing for them to do after the end of your research all right then let me know in the comments what you would add to that list and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Andy Stapleton

Views: 15,376

Rating: 4.9401994 out of 5

Keywords: How to fail a PhD, how to fail your PhD, failing a PhD, how not to fail a PhD, help I'm failing a PhD, PhD how to, PhD advice, Dr Andrew Stapleton how to fail a PhD

Id: Uclo52y8Uyo

Length: 13min 32sec (812 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020