Its kind of common for youtubers to start
of videos that might be a little bit spicy by saying things like, ' this video is so
hard to make' and I guess that is a little bit true here in the fact that I am a little
bit worried about making this video because I am afraid of being judged or of letting
anyone down. But I also feel pretty confident in what i'm
doing so i'd just like to explain my situation to you. Maybe sometimes people follow a path something
like this from student to professor. I've got professor up there because it is
like the pinnacle of the academic pathway. But sometimes maybe a path looks more like
this between those same destinations. I have always throughout my life been going
on this path, this straight trajectory. I've always done things that I feel were quite
obviously seen as going forwards in the right direction towards some goal. Although right now I feel i'm on here and
I think maybe i'm going off somewhere like this. So I have withdrawn from my PhD program and
I don't even know if i'm going on a path to professor which used to be the old destination
or if i'm going to end up somewhere completely different and maybe i'm ok with that. Coming to this decision to withdraw from my
PhD program was actually pretty difficult and I think the main emotional strain that
I felt was that for the first time in my life I was unsure of what I wanted to do. I mean this in terms of career because i'd
always been going to the same destination which maybe was wanting to be a professor
or teaching at a university level. However I started to not enjoy my PhD that
much and I also felt a little bit disillusioned with the academic system as a whole. I guess what I felt was for the first time
this unsure feeling of where I wanted to be and it was almost overwhelming because it
meant that I could do anything I wanted to do. If I stopped aiming for this one thing then
I could pick any other random thing to aim for and that was almost overwhelming in a
way. In a good way like that there were so many
possibilities that I could do. I only officially withdrew from the PhD program
in january even though i've known for a while that it's what I wanted to do. And I didn't want to make a video about it
before it was official incase anyone involved saw the video and got a bit surprised. In terms of where I was in the program, I
was about a year into the research component of doing a PhD. I, to finish the PhD, probably would have
had to stay doing that for another 2 plus years, maybe 2 or 3 maximum. I didn't need to do anymore coursework or
exams it was only research and writing the thesis that I needed to do to get the PhD. And so it kind of seems like oh you were so
close why didn't you just stay, but the reasons why I wanted to leave, I guess there are lots
of reasons and i'm just going to keep talking until I feel like most of them have come out,
I just felt like it was the best decision for me to leave. Even though in the grand scheme of things
i was kind of close to finishing. I kind of toyed with the idea of leaving in
my mind for a little while but I didnt think I would actually be brave enough to do that
because it seemed a bit extreme but i kind of remember one day just cycling to uni and
i don't know it would like like 20 minutes, 15 minutes and I felt like my bike would just
get heavier and heavier the closer I got. In a way that I just felt unmotivated to arrive. And it was sort of this general feeling that
I would go to uni and be there for a while but really I just wanted to go home and work
on things that I actually really enjoyed. So YouTube is one of them but I mean there
were sort of a lot of little side projects I enjoyed doing and I felt like I was torn
and I was separating my time between working on my PhD and working on the things I actually
liked. Where it got to the point where it kind of
felt unsustainable and kind of inauthentic to try to work on both at the same time. So ultimately I decided to get rid of the
thing that I didn't enjoy doing and just to do the things that I do enjoy. Sure I could have just kept going and just
stuck at it and in fact a lot of sort of more senior PhD students maybe they're in their
third or even fourth year of research, i'd spoken to them a bit and there was this general
sentiment, almost every one of them said 'oh those feelings are normal for a PhD student,
wait till you get to third or fourth year, then you will really feel like you don't want
to be here'. But i thought ok sure like a lot of people
have said that, you get to a point where you feel a bit disillusioned with everything and
almost everyone apparently wants to pull out at some point during the PhD but why should
that be normal? And I thought well if im feeling like this
already one year in well how am I going to be feeling three years in? I don't want to be three years in feeling
this because then I dont really have the option to leave and just leave it all behind but
at my current point I feel like the sooner the better in the sense that I could just
leave and I wouldnt lose too much effort and investment into this thing. I would hate to be leaving further into the
PhD so yeah if I was dragging my feet to sort of get to uni each day then I think that it
was good to just actually do something that I was excited about. I also did a bit of reflecting during this
time and I came to the conclusion that everything in my life that ive done that ive been quite
proud of came as the result of doing something brave. So really stepping out of my comfort zone
or just making a decision that wasn't the easy one. Doing things like that had got me to the point
that I was at and actually i felt like it had been a while since i'd done anything brave
or not taken the easy road. Maybe starting the PhD in the first place
was taking the easy road for me. I know it sort of sounds strange to say that
about pursuing a PhD but after i'd finished my undergrad and things it was kind of the
most readily available thing and I had a scholarship to do it, it was actually the path of least
resistance to just keep going in academia. So when i think about this decision it is
quite brave for me to leave academia and try to do some other things for a while. A totally separate reason was kind of highlighted
for me in the form of a youtube comment left on one of my videos, now im going to read
it out and this was posted on my fortnite video and I kind of owe this guy a reply so
i'm gonna do that here in this video. So Basketball guy commented on my video "This
is fairly off topic for this video, but based on your earlier videos it seems like you got
interested in physics because you got interested in as you said those big questions like 'what
is our place in the universe?' Do you feel like you are still pursuing the
answers to those questions by studying plant cell physiology? I would have thought you would end up in theoretical
physics trying to understand the standard model or trying to quantize gravity or study
GR or doing something like experimental quantum mechanics." and I replied to this guy and
I just said this comment hits too close to home and he said i'd love to here the full
story. So maybe this is a little bit of the full
story in maybe I did start to feel like maybe the topic of my PhD which was experimental
biophysics was maybe deviating a bit from where I saw my greatest passion in physics. Maybe i started to feel like it wasn't really
truly me. And I don't know how much that is true because
I did actually quite enjoy that project. I do enjoy asking those big questions like
you know what is out there in the universe and what is our place in it and physics offers
some answers to those questions but you're probably never going to answer questions like
that in the scope of a PhD. That's sort of a romantic idea of a PhD student,
what their life would be like and what they're working on. Often students are working on you know quite
obscure little elements of physics, maybe they fit into this bigger picture of what
physics is. I liked that I was using physics and applying
it to biology and looking at these tiny little structures and i guess try and find out the
secrets of how they're working. I did enjoy that but i guess that comment
is right. I guess when I think about my future in physics
and how i got into it i kind of do like the idea of working in theoretical physics or
quantum mechanics or stuff like that. So whilst maybe i agree that every PhD student
wants to leave at some point and loses motivation, maybe the ones that stay it's because they
have that really fundamental motivation in what they're doing and it really is exactly
what they picture themselves doing and theyre moving towards answering these big questions
in their own mind and that allows them to have the motivation to stay even when it's
really tough. I think my problem is also just that I am
interested in so many things. I think there is so many different projects
I could do for a PhD that picking one of them you will always be unsatisfied that you didn't
pick any number of the other ones. Because it is just really hard to decide what
you want to work on when the scope is so large. In terms of my academic future I wouldn't
rule out returning to a PhD program at some point, just not right now. I think right now for me there are other opportunities,
one of them is Youtube but it's not the only one, that have a lot more momentum for me
than the PhD. So yeah I can kind of see myself finishing
a PhD in the future but what the topic will be on really I have no idea. People who were critical of my decision said
to me that you know you should just get the PhD because that qualification will last forever
and YouTube might not be around forever and I fully agree with that I dont think YouTube
will be around forever, I actually am not that optimistic it will be around in the same
way that it is for very long at all. Like even a few years into the future I find
it very hard t predict you know how people will be learning and what people will be using. Maybe it will still be YouTube but maybe it
will be something else entirely. And that's actually kind of the point, is
that I fell like the universities and the PhD system is going to be around a lot longer
than YouTube is so I should jump on doing YouTube now while I have the opportunity and
I can go back to the PhD later because it is still going to be there. So really right now I just want to make videos
full-time for YouTube I think that I've seen so much power in education on YouTube. It's how i learnt it's how I taught myself
things and I think it's how people are learning these days. Not just learning but also gaining inspiration
and new ideas and connecting with other people and actually working on awesome projects that
excite me. When you compare that with the academic learning
system, I much prefer Youtube. I dont know I used to want to teach at the
university system and that was you know why I was going off to this destination of professor
but really I am so much more excited by the reach that you can get online. Just in a video made in your bedroom you could
reach a million people, you could never really reach that same sort of audience teaching
in a conventional environment. And maybe it's not as impactful if you're
just you know talking through a video but I actually find it more impactful because
you guys get to know me and the people that I watch on YouTube, I feel sort of connected
to them in a way that i don't feel when i'm learning in a conventional place. I'm also doing a little bit of freelance science
communication work and in general just pursuing the projects that i'm interested in. I am interested in like start-ups and that
sort of community and so maybe I would like to make my own business. Probably based around education and online
education but we will see what happens there. I haven't got any solid plans at the moment
that's just something that I know I'd really enjoy. While I have this momentum in this science
communication aspect of my life at the moment I just want to run with it and see where we
go. It was a bit of a risky decision for me to
just quit my PhD and I felt a bit like it was metaphorically jumping off a cliff because
i was sort of jumping into the unknown. I'm still floundering in the unknown a little
bit, especially because these projects that I want to work on are still in their infancy
but I do have confidence and i'm happy with what i'm doing so yea i'm just going to keep
doing it. When I did decide to do this I was really
scared of disappointing people. The number one person I was scared of disappointing
was my PhD supervisor and I guess it took me multiple meetings with her to actually
work up the courage to say that I wanted to leave. That's because she was a really good supervisor. But I think that fact was reflected in what
her response was which was that she was excited for me and um after a while like she said
that she felt like her job as a supervisor was done that she'd you know set me off on
a path to doing something i enjoyed and that was so nice and i guess so perfect to what
I wanted to hear. And i feel like that really was the goal of
a supervisor to get their students you know to a pathway to a job to do something that
they enjoy so yea i guess i didn't need to be so afraid there. There was other people that I was afraid of
disappointing too, I did have this quite fancy PhD scholarship from one of the banks in Australia,
Westpac, and I was kind of afraid of what would happen when I told them that I was leaving
the program that they'd like been giving me money to do but actually they were really
supportive as well and when i told them that i'd quit, they actually were like oh can we
write an article about you and what you're doing now because that's so exciting and so
just this week they published an article about my YouTube channel. So im like well maybe I didn't need to be
so worried. Um the only other people that i'm really worried
about disappointing is you guys because sometimes I get comments saying like that i'm someone's
inspiration in terms of pursuing physics or maths or whatever and I dont know how much
of that inspiration comes from the fact that i'm a PhD student and that you know that's
my current title. I guess this doesn't change anything of like
my knowledge or what i've done or achieved in the past but I felt sort of afraid that
people would no longer find me as inspirational. But really I want to be authentic with people
here on Youtube and I want you to know that I am also a student just like you and so I
have my own things to figure out as well. You know I get asked a lot of questions to
do with um giving advice on picking majors or picking courses or anything like this as
if I am you know up on a pedestal handing out advice because I know the perfect way
to do everything but that's so far from the truth. I only have my own experience and i'm still
figuring things out too. So I want you to know that I have flaws as
well so you can watch my journey here but you know it is a journey so i'm not at that
destination yet I feel. If I had a time machine and could go a few
years into the future and already have my PhD degree and already have the qualification
and I think well what would I do with it, what I would want to do is exactly what im
doing right here right now. So i'm really grateful to have you watching
and to have this way to provide educational content. it's something that I really appreciate and
I really enjoy. Because i'm already doing exactly what I want
to do right now, that's why I felt like I didnt need my PhD degree. But you know, i know that people's minds change,
i'll see how I feel in a few more years maybe. Thank you so much for your support, from here
if anything things will be the same but i'll be uploading more content, hopefully better
content, thank you for sticking around and thanks for watching :)
