James Hayton: How to get through your PhD without going insane (complete lecture), Edinburgh 2013

okay so first of all it's an absolute pleasure to be here Edinburgh is one of my favourite cities and especially one day like this when it's actually sunny it's a real real privilege to be here on such a nice day so my name is james titan i run a website called the three-month thesis and basically what I do is I try and make the process easier for PhD students so I know what it's like when you're in a talk like this and you're a nice comfortable lecture theatre and maybe your coughing is worn off from this morning and what you start feeling like a little bit sleepy your head starts going and so what I'm going to do is something a little bit unusual I'm going to give my conclusion first and that way if we lose some of you on the way it's not a few so in conclusion just because a PhD is difficult and it takes hard work that doesn't mean that it has to be stressful or painful okay and this is what I'm going to try and convince you of in this talk so this is not only my conclusion but it's also the starting point so how to get through your PhD without going insane five things every PhD student please know so I'm going to cook talk quite generally about five different themes and then it's going with plenty of time for for Q&A at the end it'll take you about an hour to get through all of these things and then as I said we'll have plenty of time for Q&A now there's already a huge amount of advice out there about how to do a PhD how to manage your time how to reduce your stress that kind of thing there's countless books and websites and all that and the standard advice basically covers these kind of things so make to-do lists take stock of what you need to do set targets and deadlines take good notes write as you go so you don't have to do it all at the end don't be too perfectionist and then various things for managing your time so this is what a lot of people focus on when they trying to make the process easier in a PSD just before we get into it if anybody who doesn't know this stuff okay next question if everybody knows this stuff is there anybody in the room who has managed to take any of this advice and apply it consistently to their work and then suddenly everything becomes easy not one person okay so if this is the case there's something missing it's not necessarily bad advice to make it to do list you know it can be very helpful it's not bad advice to set targets and deadlines because that gives you direction but that is not all that's done not what's going to help you to get through if you only focus on this stuff so all of this it's kind of like rearranging the deck to deck chairs on the Titanic so you're doing a lot of stuff on the surface but there's a more fundamental problem underneath if you don't care take care of the fundamental problem then you're going to sick so we want to go right back to basics and figure out what we're trying to do so first question what is a PhD anyway what is it we're trying to achieve so does anybody have a definition of PhD this is excellent I was probably the best answer a pencil yeah okay Club membership okay that's another good one you also get dr. on your credit card which is quite a nice feeling I'm very sad reasons no people do POS things for loads of different reasons loads of different valid reasons but you've got to know how the system works and it's a little bit worrying that so many PhD students in the room and nobody has a clear definition of what it is that you're trying to achieve okay how many people are actually doing PhDs at the moment okay so pretty much everybody and so this is been the same in every University I've spoken to recently very few people have a clear statement of what it is the Trinity that's the problem so we're going to break it down and then kind of rebuild it so at a simple level a PhD is the highest academic qualification you can get there may be some exceptions but generally speaking this true so the people who do PhDs generally speaking have done extremely well at every previous level of the education system so pretty much everybody goes to school if the people who do well at school some gone to college the people who don't do so well or maybe they want to do something else they leave and get a job equally do well in college so I'm going to university so I'm going to do a master's degree so at every level some people leave some people move up so when you get to a PhD you're left with a small number of people we've done really very well at Afric previous level there's a problem with viewing a PhD that way and that is that when you go from school to college the University and even to a master's degree there's a certain consistency in the system so generally speaking there's a set timetable there's a set syllabus so the teacher delivers the same material to everybody and then there's a set exam at the end of it so everybody goes through the same process and generally speaking if you're intelligent are working in you show up on time and you do what you're told to do you'll be okay the problem is that when you get a PhD level oh so this time that um the problem is that when you get to PhD level the rules change and if you work on this assumption that just because you did well at school and and your undergraduate degree that you'll do well at a PhD then you can run into problems my own experience of this was on a very first day of my PhD and various people came to talk to us about administration and safety regulations and all this kind of thing but then somebody came in to basically give us her motivational speech and he said you are the best of the best you people we've chosen you because you're the brightest you're the smartest you're the most hard-working and this is why you've been selected to do a PhD or one of the best universities in the country so the idea of it was try and give us confidence in our own ability but it actually had the reverse effect for me because when he said you're the best of the best I thought not and I looked around and I saw all these really really smart people and I kind of assumed that they were the best the best and I was the one who you sort of snuck in and what it left me with was this feeling that I didn't deserve to be there and I wasn't as smart as anybody else and sooner or later somebody would find out that I wasn't as good as I supposed to be so this kind of thinking if you start your PhD thinking that way it can be a burden because you have this very very high expectation and it can it can lead to real problems later on so a PhD is a fundamentally different thing it is not the same as an undergraduate degree or a master's degree it's not the same thing but just a little bit harder there is no set timetable there is no set syllabus and you have to decide what to do so there's nobody telling you do ABCD then you get your degree at the end of it and simply doesn't happen and so the skills you need in order to succeed PhD are not the same skills which you needed to succeed at every previous level of the education system okay so a more accurate way of defining a PhD would be a PhD is the entrance qualification to the world of professional academia and it doesn't matter whether you intend to stay on in academia or not this is the way the system works and it's designed to test whether you're capable of conducting academic research at a professional level that's it and if you work with this definition it tells you a lot about what's required and what you need to achieve now if your instead of thinking of it as the top of the education system you think of it as the bottom of the professional academic system so overall a PhD students some want to do postdoc someone's been lecturers senior lecturers or professors and heads of department or heads of however it worked if you think of yourself as being a beginner in that system rather than trying to be the best of the best from the previous system then there's a lot less pressure on you because you know you have to learn skills for a different completely different environment there's a much healthier way of living in it so what do you need to succeed in professional academia so you probably heard the phrase publish or perish so basic aim is to produce promise will work and some academic systems in some countries all you have to do is produce three published papers in peer-reviewed journals staple them together Hanneman and you're done you've cleared agree in other places you don't necessarily need to have any publications but it's still the basic standard which you need to aim for and for this reason this is why the thesis defense is usually in front of an examiner from somewhere else so you don't hand it to your supervisor then they give you a mark and some it's an expert from your field from outside your University and the reason is that it's loosely modeled on the process for peer review so you have to be able to convince somebody from outside your university of the value of your work what makes work publishable so what any ideas okay so most people will say an original contribution to the body of knowledge but this is not enough so I studied physics but I could go into another field say English literature and argue that Shakespeare's plays were actually written by an alien from Mars right so an original idea nobody's published that but nobody's going to take it seriously probably because it's a stupid idea but hunter you know the originality is not enough you need to have a basis in the existing knowledge in the field so in order to be able to convince others in the field of the value of your work well they will judge it by the standards set by the field so it's no longer a case of compete get people in your class it's competing against all of the researchers all the way around well so it depends on your field what the standard is going to be if you're in a brand new field where everything's new then any new contribution is going to be valuable because not that much has been done yet but if you're in a very well established field then the standard you have to reach might be slightly higher because a lot of it has already been done so the standard is set by the field it's not set by the university it's not set by your supervisor and field is a reference point the purpose of your work is to publish something which other people can use so what you need to be able to do is convince people of the value of it if you take the existing body of knowledge so all of the published work which is already out there then you can take that and you can use it to help you in your own research and this is a point we'll come back to later the existing body of knowledge has to inform your own work and you might disagree with it and you might be able to disprove an established idea but you still have to reference that initial idea in order to do so otherwise nobody will take you seriously then of course you try and produce some kind of publish of a result you can't just contribute that back to the body of knowledge there's a quality control system of peer review so you have to get through that in order to succeed so you need to know the field partly to know that your work is original and as I said that's not enough partly to aid your own research and also to give your work context and justification ok so you need to know the field before you can make many 4.com - it is a really keep like so this means we need to work with literature and it might work with individual students this is probably the number one thing that people struggle with the most what is literature for and how do you work with it the first thing to say is that the literature is a resource to help you in your research it is not burden but a lot of people see it as a burden because this kind of thing happens so you do a quick search and you get 1.7 million results in this example I deliberately picked at search done which I knew would produce a lot of a lot of results but you know you'll be familiar with this kind of thing and even if you get hundreds or thousands of papers rather than millions it's still far too much to work with how can you possibly filter that much information and stick it all into your into your literature review and if you think of it this way then it definitely will be a burden so how can we make it useful you've got to think about what is the literature actually for why are you looking at that published literature is it to try and learn the subject well if that's the case then looking at recently published to academic journal articles may not be the best way to do it the reason being that that's not what they're written for they're written for people who already know the subject so they don't go into a huge amount of detail about the basics so that information is not there so you can't possibly learn a new subject just by meeting a big stack of research papers you've been better off looking well why not Wikipedia as a starting point or a textbook or finding an expert I'm just asking something far more efficient way to learn a subject are you looking at the literature to show that you know a subject or to impress your supervisor if that's the case again just reading a stack of papers and going for sheer numbers that's not going to do the job or is it to help you to do good research and if you think of it this way then that's a game that you can win so you have to filter the literature in order to make it useful so if you've got say 500 search results okay reading through every single one or 500 papers that's going to take you a long time you're not going to get a lot of benefit from that so you need to reduce that number focus on a small number which are actually going to be useful to you and then you can build upon that so the most effective way to filter is to focus on the best papers and the most relevant so if you're looking at a broad subject where there's thousands and thousands of papers the way I would approach it is to look for the very very very best acres in that field the tends to be a small number of groundbreaking papers in any research field or a small number of authors who are really really influential and if you focus on those first because you're a very strong grounding if you understand the key principles in those papers then it's much easier to one understand all of the other papers so if you're going to start anywhere why would you start with anything apart from the best so an easy way to filter this is to look at the number of citations so any paper which is which is more than a few years old it's already been through the process of being read by other academics in your field and if they think it's important they would cite it so if something has been cited 500 times you should probably read it if on the other hand it's paper which is 20 years old and it's been cited five times and four of those times were by the author of that same paper then it's probably not that important it might be and you can always skim through it but as an initial filter you might as well start with a little bit the other way to filter is by relevance so the more specialized you get the closer and closer you get to your own very small niche the fewer papers that are so when you really really narrow it down there might be only three or four top research groups directly within your field you know who are directly competing with you when you narrow it down to three or four and then you focus on the best authors real leaders in the field then it becomes possible to read everything those people have done and if there are only three or four people doing pretty much exactly what you do quite quickly you can read a small number of papers and you can become you know the number five expert in the world very very quickly but only by specializing and you can't do that for an entire field but you can do it when you narrow it down so it depends how competitive you will feel is so a PhD is all about research so how does research work what are the skills that you need so the aim of research is to go beyond what's already known and this is why it's attractive you know there's kind of a romantic image about to do with working on the frontier of human knowledge and being able to contribute something back to the world in the form of in the form of your research the problem is that because you're going beyond what's already known you cannot know the outcome if you know the outcome in advance then it's not research or it's at least not very interesting research and it's often in the surprises the things which go wrong the things you didn't expect that the best results emerge as anybody know me this guy's know you're the second person to say that maybe I've got the wrong picture but you're on the right lines it's Alexander Fleming so very famous Scottish scientist discoverer of penicillin is anyone know the story of an assailant how it was discovered by accident yeah okay it was just growing in this level okay any many more detail to Oxford ah okay seriously did yeah there's this theory he he made this up there okay okay uh yeah I haven't heard that particular version but yeah um okay so basically what most people know but most people know is that it was an accidental discovery so something to do with mold growing so sorts of mold penicillin but there's obviously a lot missing from that story because mold grows in lots of places and people don't discover anything out of it so the important point is not the accident the important point is what he did afterwards so what happened was he was growing petri dishes bacterial cultures and he went away for the weekend he left his samples on a shelf and he was notoriously messy in his lab and one of the one of the dishes were sealed properly and it became contaminated so he came back from his weekend away and he noticed that there were spots of mold in this in this dish now what most people would have done because it was only one of his samples which was contaminated well most people would have done so oh that's contaminated throw it away that's probably what I would then it wasn't that good research it so what he did instead was rather than throwing it away he had a closer look and he noticed that around the spot of mold there was a region where the bacteria wasn't growing and that got him curious and so what he did what he then did was he used his exceptional skill as a researcher to figure out what was going on and then try and reproduce it and they no ultimately this led to antibiotics and the story about the other scientists from Oxford apparently the story I've heard is that he actually abandoned research into antibiotics because he didn't think it could be scaled up it was very difficult to to cultivate the mold and it was very difficult to isolate the chemical product which which came out of it and it was the guys in Oxford who developed the kind of industrial process which allowed the mass production of it and so they shared the Nobel Prize with him as far as him kind of making it up I don't have I haven't had that version but anyway so the important thing is not the accident it's what he did afterwards and it's how he responded the unexpected so if he had been focused on his to-do list or his target in his deadline if that had been his sole tunnel-vision focus he would have missed it he would have thrown it away because it wasn't what he was aiming for so you need flexibility of whatever approach you take partly in order to deal with the unexpected but also it's the only way you can do great research because great research comes from the unexpected so when you have a target and a deadline it's a good place to start because it gives you direction and you know kind of gets you going but there are two possible outcomes you can either succeed or you can fail so what do you do when this happens and it's inevitable that it will happen because there's always unexpected things which happen do you just set a new deadline and try and work harder in order to in order to get it done or do you stop and think and fire up your curiosity if you just set a new deadline then you're too focused on doing the same thing again again again until it works but if you get curious then you can engage your problem-solving and creativity skills and this is vitally important for doing good research so when you have a target and you have a starting point you might kind of have a rough idea of how to get there but if you don't have a fixed process an ABC kind of recipe to follow then there's a big unknown between your starting points and your target so what almost always happens if you haven't done something bought is that there will be a block something will go wrong and it will stop you in your tracks now what you do now is really important if you focus solely on the outcome so in order to succeed in my PhD I need to get this thing done if I don't get this thing done that I'm going to fail if your focus is over there then there's nothing you can do now which has a big positive or negative effect on the ultimate outcome because a PhD SEC types along with so many different things involved that you can't directly influence that result which is one or two or three years in the future so the only place you can have an effect the only thing that you can do is to focus your attention on the point of failure focus on the actual problem which is directly in front of you and that is where you can have some kind of influence you have to stop and you have to think and you have to get curious what's going on why is this not working and then you can maybe find another way and the path to your final target only becomes clear afterwards so you cannot rigidly stick to a plan because the universe is under no obligation to follow your timetable there is always things which happen which are going to disrupt you so you have to investigate a little bit you run into a problem you change direction in constantly adapt to things which happen because the unexpected is the only thing which you can actually expect the defining factor for success is not how well you plan it's what you do when things aren't going to plan and that's the vital skill so number four PhD is not intrinsically stressful by nature and I know I'm gonna have to do some work to convince you of this um so I'll give an example so I mentioned you're rock climbing so your several meters off the ground you're clinging to a cliff face if you are not a skillful rock climber you'll find this interesting definitely you'll find this stressful so you'll be scared of falling your heart will be racing your muscles will tense up can be shaking and it'll be very very difficult to move it will be extremely stressful but if you are an experienced climber then you'll respond differently so you might still feel fear but you can control it and you can use your skill in order to get out of that situation so what this means is it's not the situation which is stressful by nature it's a personal reaction to it which depends on all kinds of other factors so if you see a PhD is just being intrinsically stressful by nature so a PhD it just is stress and everybody has to go through this suffering in order to succeed if that's just the way it is then you'll ignore the stress and just try to work through it because there's nothing you can do about it that's just the way the system is you know pH D equals stress I think this is an extremely damaging but very common kind of way of thinking and in some cases people actually see the stresses like a badge of honor so you think you have it hard my supervisor never responds to emails my equipment doesn't work I have to work 18 hours a day and it's going to delay the stress one upmanship but it's not a particularly useful way of operating so you know maybe there's some things Kandra vote so if you see it not as the PhD is stressful but I am feeling stressed into reaction within me and it's not coming from the situation but it's coming from inside then maybe you can change that reaction okay but you can't do anything if a PhD is just stressful on it so you don't have to just accept stress as part of your normal everyday existence you should see it as a signal as a warning sign as an alarm that something isn't right and just carrying on and trying to work harder isn't the way to go are there any psychologists in the room one okay - was that half a hand up okay okay so I might just about get away with it okay um we have to look in a little bit about how the brain works and you know very very kind of simplified version so when you have a level of it kind of ingrained skill so something that you can do without having to think about it it leaves a lot of a lot of spare capacity for doing other things so for example if I am walking it's an extremely complicated process all the different muscles firing all the nerves going but I don't need to concentrate on every single step and every little adjustment of balance so I can walk about and I can keep talking and you know it's not going to affect anything but if you increase the difficulty then you reach a point where you have to start using conscious effort and concentration so for example if we set up a wooden beam maybe a meter off the ground and I was trying to walk along it then I have to concentrate okay and so I'm really really thinking about everything every little movement and when you reach that point if one of you tries to have a conversation with me I'm not going to be able to respond because I'm using up part of my which is effort and concentration and the key point is that your capacity for concentration for conscious effort is unlimited and so if I try and have a conversation at the same time as I'm walking on this beam I can't really do either one properly okay because of one thing safety and part of the reserve of conscious effort and the other thing is taking up another part so I can't apply myself fully to either one okay so what happens when you increase the difficulty even further is you end up in overload so you've used up all your conscious effort and concentration there's nothing left in reserve and you can't apply yourself to the task at hand and you just end up unable to operate unable to do anything and this is what a lot of people end up visit the situation that a lot of students end up totally overloaded totally overwhelmed and so we want to try and twist that situation so when you need to work it close to your full mental capacity the slightest distraction can drastically reduce your ability so this is what would happen you know if I'm really concentrating on walking on the beam somebody talks to me that's a distraction and then I'm much more likely to fall off okay same thing in your research when you really have to concentrate on a particular idea if somebody interrupts that that thought process is very difficult to get back so your ability becomes reduced because you're using up part of that mental reserve that you need to apply to the problem but what about external motivation so what people often do when you're having difficulty concentrating on something would be to add some kind of external motivation on top in order to make you concentrate so again I'm working on the Bing finally kind of difficult and then somebody says okay I'll give you a million pounds if you make it to the other end of the beep so in principle you would think that I'm going to be really motivated to succeed the problem is that now I'm not just thinking about walking on the beach I'm also thinking about the significance of it of the outcome so okay I really want a million dollars but I also really don't want to fall off so it has a negative consequence as well so I'm thinking about the positive on think about the negative it's using a part of my mental reserve and so now I'm going to be hesitant I don't want to make a mistake so actually it makes it much less likely that I'm going to succeed so sometimes what you think of as a positive motivating factor can have the exact opposite effect and it's the same with deadlines it's the same with any kind of trick that you try and use sometimes it can have the opposite effect when you have a fear of an outcome so in that simple example I'm afraid of falling off the beam not because of the height but because I'll miss out on on some positive it takes up some of your mental reserves and that reduces the amounts that you can spend on the problem so if you're worried about the outcome of your PhD that's going to occupy part of your conscious thought and it leaves you with less to apply to the actual work so the exact same task can become much more difficult when friend in a different way or it can become much easier so if you change the way you view the work then you can adjust the difficulty now a PhD is not just one single difficult task it's multiple tasks added together and so if you're in a situation where you have 20 different things to do and they're all difficult and if you're struggling to do it then you start thinking that I'm going to fail my PhD and if I fail my PhD my family's going to take this on me I'm not gonna be able to get a job and I'm going to have this big gap on my CV and I'm not gonna be able to expand to explain to employers that I failed I'm going to lose my home I'm going to lose my relationship and I'm going to living on the streets and eating been at the back of McDonald's that's going to take up a lot of your mental reserve add in a lack of time so you have to do everything Brighton you have to do everything right now this will leave you with divided attention and reduced ability and you end up in the situation where even easy things become difficult and then you start thinking why can't I do this this should be easy I should be good enough why am I not good enough I'm going to fail my PhD and the whole cycle continues and it just gets worse and worse I was the worst thing to do in this situation is to just try and work harder but it's what most people will try to do so I'm not succeeding I have to put in more hours but once you reach say 18 hours a day only leaving six hours for things like sleeping and eating you can't go any further so you have to think of it in a different way and if your mental capacity is already overstretched and then you start cutting down on the amount of sleep you have as well your ability is only going to go one way and it's not going to work but it's what a lot of people try and do because they want to appear that they're putting in like the most they can but there's a difference between working as many hours as you physically can until you're exhausted and fully engaging with the work with everything that you have there's a massive difference between just putting hours in and investing in it with your entire being and that's only possible it's only possible to fully engage with it when you start to let go of the fear of the outcome so what you have to do if you're overloaded stressed is slow down and it's the most difficult thing to do when you're in that situation but it's also the most effective so your instinct will you will be telling you I have to work harder I have to work harder I have to work harder but you need to do the opposite you need to slow down you take to take time to think if you think about it as an academic your ability to think is the most important thing you have so if you don't give yourself time to think then you're never going to be able to work to the best of your ability so you think about the different ingredients of stress so you have high difficulty or PhD is difficult there's no argument about a divided attention so you have several difficult tests at the same time and then the consequences so nobody wants to fail if you look at each of these things in turn then there are things you can do so if something is very difficult how can you reduce the scale of the task can you break it down into intermediate steps so you might not know the entire solution but you can see that if you just solve one smaller problem then that will move you a little bit closer if you have divided attention maybe you just need to put a lot of those things to one side and then just focus on one thing so you can invest all of that limited reserve mental effort into the one thing and if you're worried about the consequences if you're worried about failure now maybe you can you know actually address that and try and think actually if I fail perhaps it's not the worst thing that can happen and then you can relax and then you can apply itself fully to the work now obviously some stress can be useful so you need to push beyond what you could do at the beginning of the PhD there needs to be some development but the only way to improve your ability is to push slightly beyond your limit there's no point going you know trying to do something really really really really difficult and it's so far beyond your ability that you fail because that's something going to increase increase your stress level but if you push slightly beyond what you can already do then you have potential to improve if you do this consistently then your skill level goes up or actually gradually gradually and then things that want people to start to become easy so you have to manage the difficulty of what you're doing if it's so difficult you have no idea what to what to do then simplify it if it's so easy that it's boring then you can add in some challenge so you can balance it to be pushing slightly past your limit a final point and then we'll have time for Q&A so how to write to the magnetic so we don't have time to go really into depth in how to write how to how to structure things but there's a king points which I think a lot of PhD students are missing which I'll go into so writing a basic level consists of three elements so you have the content which is your original research data your contribution and all of the arguments and all of the references that you put in all of that kinda thing then you have the structure so from all of that information how do you divide that up what order do you present it and then finally have the words so have you actually express it now a lot of people focus on the words so how many words they have to be and one of the common questions I get is how many words my thesis be and then trying to write you know a thousand words a day or 500 words a day or whatever it happens to be but if you focus on the words then the danger is that you can neglect the content the content is the most important thing if your research is good then you can edit the words it's relatively easy but if there is a fundamental flaw in your research then no matter how good a writer you are you can't account for it you can't make up for it just by having better words or writing more words so the content is the foundation of everything you have to focus on that before the writing it's absolutely vital but there's a more fundamental thing and that is your voice so in some extent the thesis is an expression of the way you think about your researching and where you think about yourself in relation to your research and there's a very personal presentation which which then gets examined to explain what I mean by this think of the difference between the writing you did before you came to a PhD so the writing school in college and university any essays you've written any assignments what happened before was that the purpose of your writing was to impress the teacher to do enough to get a good mark to graduate from that course whatever it happens to be and so it's very much a sense that you are the student down here teachers up here and you're submitting something and hoping for some approval to the Goldstar or good mark for the A+ if you think of yourself as a professional academic which is the aim of a PhD a professional academic isn't offering something up to a peer reviewer they're saying here's my research it's awesome publish it you know let me know what you think and so it's a much more equal relationship it's peer review and that basically means it's someone who's an equal so it's academic to academic and so if you want to succeed in your thesis you have to think almost along these lines you have to think of yourself as an academic and that changes the whole sense of it what a lot of people do when they're writing the thesis they're writing for the approval of the supervisor that changes the sense of the writing so if I have to impress you then I've got to throw in as much information as possible I have to show how much I've read you know and I'm hoping that it's going to be enough rather than focusing on the quality of the work in X confidence in your work so you have to write as an academic to other academics you have to think of yourself as a professional academic rather than being the student offering something up and hoping for approval to come from on high so you have to think of an academic and so you have to think of yourself as an academic you are the teacher you are the authority in your own work nobody knows your work better than you and after if you write from that perspective it makes the whole process much easier another thing to do is to invite your defense into your thesis so ultimately somebody's going to read it they can ask you questions about it they'll be looking for weaknesses and this is a little bit daunting but you can there's a lot you can do to prepare yourself for it and your defense starts with your writing and the way you think about your own research so if you think of your research and you think there's some possible weakness in there if you avoid it if you don't mention it then the examiner will probably pick up on it and that would be a point of attack because you haven't addressed it if instead you take a critical view of your own work you can pre-emptive attack you can defend against those weaknesses so what you can do is if for example there are multiple possible explanations for a result of multiple interpretations or maybe there were different ways you could applied methodology if you acknowledge them and say it may be argued that these results can be interpreted in this way however because of X Y & Z this is why I'm going with my explanation you're addressing it you're building the defense into your own thesis and you're showing that you've had that critical level of thoughts you're showing that you think as an academic and that is a way of making sure that when an examiner reads it and they have a question then the next paragraph is a oh right they've addressed that's good no have confidence in you as an academic and when you think it looks all process much easier so it's quite easy to stand up here and say all these things and and so I hope you just did this than the whole thing gets easy but the course of my own PhD was not straightforward it was a very difficult project I had to change projects actually at the end of my first year and I was doing experiments which basically involved a failure rate of probably about 95% that might actually be a little bit optimistic and so there's a constant sense of frustration then nothing I did seemed to affect the outcome trying really really hard but then you know constantly running into running into these barriers and at the same time having that background feeling that I'm not good enough I don't deserve to be here and so every time an experiment went wrong it was reinforcing that feeling in the back of my mind and so I got well into my third year and I didn't have enough results I didn't have any publications and I could see all the other students around me you know they had publications they'd go to conferences and I thought young they're going to succeed you know I'm the one who's not the best of the best I'm gonna fail and so I was working in the lab and I've dropped a sample and I'm broken and taking two or three days to prepare it and was going to take another two or three days to get back to work what this wasn't the first time it happened but for some reason this time when I'm broke that sample something inside me snapped as well and I just had enough I swore loudly I'm not gonna say what I said but I stormed out the door started walking across campus and I didn't really know where I was going I just had to get away I didn't even know if I was going to come back so I started thinking you know this is it's just not worth it it's so stressful I'm putting everything I have into it I'm not getting anywhere and what is the point you're putting myself through this I might as well quit because I'm going to fail and the one I thought about it the better I felt I've been avoiding this feeling for so long but then when I actually addressed it some to feel not too bad started rehearsing what I would say to my supervisor my family my friends and thinking well okay if I quit how am I going to find a job but then I thought what I'll probably be alright I'll find something it may not be my dream job but I'll find a way you know I trust in my own ability that I'll be okay but then I thought well actually there's still a few things I'm trying my research maybe if I tried this thing on this thing that could that could work and I thought well I'm probably going to quit but I'll just try these things and if they don't work on I'm out anyway but I thought if I'm going to go back if there's any point in me going back to try these things I wouldn't know that I've given it my best shot because then I can quit and know that I've at least giving it giving it something and so I went back to the lab and I was no longer worried about failing because I was going to quit anyway and so we removed some of that fear and all I did was think I'm just going to do this to the best of my ability I'm going to do it as carefully as possible I take my time and see what happens and things started to work and what happened previously was because I never believed anything would work I was kind of undermining myself I was rushing in preparation you know I was constantly on this pressure that I had to be working harder and so I couldn't possibly do my best work under those conditions but when I removed the fear of failure when I removed that that kind of significance to successful failure that freed me up to just throw myself into doing the work for the hell of it and only then could I actually do the best work I was capable I didn't care anymore whether I succeed or fail that was the basis for being able to write my thesis very quickly I still had loads of work to do and the last few months were a really intense effort to get the results that I needed but even though I was working harder it was less stressful because I was fully engaged in what I was doing rather than just being I have to work harder have to work out after work out so when it came to writing my thesis I took the same attitude and I basically said to myself well I may not be the best physicist in the world there's big gaps in my knowledge but I know that I know my equipment because it's broken down so often and I've taken it apart and rebuilt it I literally know it inside out and so if I stick to what I know in my thesis then I know that I can at least defend that and no examiner is going to be able to find a gap in that bit of knowledge if that's me to derive the Schrodinger equation I'm screwed but if they if I didn't take the terms of the conversation by deciding what content to put into my thesis then I can defend that if I fail I fail I've at least given it a good shot and I know that I'll be okay of the unfunded job and I trust my own ability I'll be able to do that so in conclusion just because a PhD is hard and it takes hard work that doesn't mean it has to be stressful painful and you should see stress as a signal that something is not right and you should do something about it one final thing success or failure and a PhD is not a measure of who you are it's not a measure of your value in life success or failure in PhD is not successful failure in life if you fail your PhD it's not the worst thing that could happen but when you start to get that fear and thinking I'm going to fail just tell yourself whatever happened success or failure I'll deal with it I trust in my own ability that I will be okay right now I'm just going to focus on doing this one thing I'm going to do it to the best of my ability thank you very much and we've got a mic here anybody has any questions for James running up to the mic has anybody got any questions Oh it's not working no okay hi I'm Fredrik I'm a third year student I figured in sociology I'm writing up right now okay um it's a bit tedious but exactly yeah so sort of of a daily schedule that you followed in a write up season from here about it time yeah yeah I think I think having a consistent schedule is quite is quite important there are a few specific things that I did so first of all I got rid of my internet connection at home because I knew that I had a tendency to procrastinate online so as you just remove the option and then you don't have to worry about it in terms of routing I didn't have a strict kind of timetable and I think what a lot of people do is try and plan out minute by minute I have to get this done by this by this this time worst case I've seen as a guy who is fitting honest on his daily timetable I get up at 5:00 a.m. and I have three hours work done under 14 9:00 a.m. and the problem was that he never managed to get up at 5:00 a.m. obviously because the only time you can do that is you've got a plane to catch yeah you can do it once we can do it consistently it's very difficult to be consistently and so by the time he woke up at 9:30 it was already three hours behind he's already failed and so he starts the day feeling feeling like crap so don't try and don't try and kind of set everything in stone but have a kind of general general consistent routine I think the important things are the start of the day and the end of the day and what happens in between if you get those two end points right then what happens in between contexts go in itself start the day with something simple that you can succeed up so what I had was kind of a list of fairly menial things so correct the formatting on caption for this figure for example and then you know that's easy it's not going to take that much effort so I can get that done and I start the day with a success and then you can dive into the kind of walking part more complicated things so it's an easy routine at the end of the day I think it's important to have kind of a a closed-down sort of ritual so you want to create a little bit of space between yourself and work because it is so deeply immersed in it then if you just stop and then try and go to sleep then you're not giving yourself time and space to kind of calm down yeah so what I did was basically tidy up my desk write down kind of what my or my thoughts were at that time the kind of things that I needed to do the next day so I've got kind of a rough to-do list for the next day and a couple of easy things maybe maybe to start off with and basically kind of put everything away so that I kind of felt like it was it was in order it was under control so if my desk was tidy when I left then you know it's all right I'm under the control of it if I just left it a mess then it's kind of a mess in my head as well so I think that that was a very important thing so focus on the start of day everyday the other thing that's a short question long answer but I aimed for 500 words every day the reason being that I know that when I'm writing well I can do now 300 words an hour is a reasonable pace so I'm taking time to think but it's still you know producing quite a bit so in a whole day I should be able to do 5 min the words and even on a difficult day you know I'd like to struggle and sweat and toil for 12 hours to write 500 words I know I'll get it so even on a bad day I've got a target which I can reach it sounds kind of guaranteed guaranteed success at the end of the day I've got a measure of voice what is a successful day but most days I would smash that target and I feel you know if you're wicked so I think that was that was quite important um yep that's that was my routine okay thank you sure question is it normal for first-year students to take 3-4 days just to write two pages is it normal for physicians they - every day's worth we wait yeah and this comes back to what I said about the three ingredients of writing so the content the structure of the words okay so if you focus on a workout but you don't know what you want to say then you have to figure out what you want to say before the words can come so having some people will say that writing is a way of developing your ideas but in academic research there are some things which you can't just think up you have to go and do some research to kind of to figure it out and so in order to be able to write two or three pages you need two or three pages worth of valuable content and that is possibly where the block is and if you're a first-year student you don't necessarily know what the important stuff is and that Commons kind of with with experience so what I would suggest is rather than focusing on the two or three pages focus on what is the idea that I want to communicate and then you can look at that idea and say okay what do I need to know what do i what do I understand what's the key point and then you can check up some references and then you can you know then you can find the words okay and then you can move on to that next thing so focus on the ideas first what is the fundamental thing which may be missing then worry about words effort okay hi I'm Suzanne I'm the sector sings and so this is helpful advice well you can see that you can be successful if you have kind of positive that look at least that's what I'm taking from is there anything I as I said on secondaries or anything there that I can do to kind of prepare for the writing stage because I'm in the middle of my - collection I will be sending most of this year doing that so other things steps that I can take to make that third year that kind of the data analysis and writing I'll going to be analyzing as I go along them the writing part a lot easier yeah um I would always say take care of your data first because you know the writing Union has to build upon the building on that foundation and if you start writing too early before you know what your conclusions are going to be then what can often happen is people sort of assume they know what's going to come out of it but then the data may not support it so you can end up with thousands and thousands of words based on a particular assumption but then if that assumption turns out to be false then the thousands of words are worse than useless they're actually damaging because you look at it and think this is terrible I'm not good enough you end up in that in that kind of spiral so I would say any writing which you do should be something which you at least have a chance of finishing or something where you have kind of some some basis some solid basis to build upon so if you're doing data collection the things that you can write about would not be the analysis or the conclusions but maybe you can write a bit about your methodology for the data collection because that it's already kind of already set if you write for example a literature review you don't necessarily know until you've done the data analysis exactly what literature is going to be relevant so what I would focus on is if you're reading you know other things which can help you in the research so it you know similar studies people using simple methodologies and then look at how if they analyzed it how have they taken that simulator how have they analyzed it and how can you apply that that will give you give you a back basis but I would say you have focus on the foundation stuff and sort of writing out later I mean I roll every every single word of my thesis I wrote in just three months because I had that foundation already in place so you've got the content the writing can follow but it's very difficult to write before you've finished it hi my name is Paulo I haven't done once left okay and started writing again okay I'd like to know your thoughts about rewriting stuff Russ I published a handful of papers got an incredible amount of work all right all I need to do is to rewrite into a thesis and you are talking about a word limit for example yeah do you have any thoughts and suggestions about how to turn what I already have which is solid work into something that will get a PhD out of okay well the first thing would be if you've got published papers then it makes the defense much easier because an examiner well it's very difficult for an examiner to then say oh this has been already been through peer review but I disagree with it it's already been approved so in terms of your basic basic work you've got a really solid foundation so that's good you should take confidence from that and in terms of rewriting I kind of depends on the format of the papers and the format's that your thesis needs to be so quite often you know a thesis chapter will be longer published paper because of you know if there are space restrictions and few journals and so basically if you if you sit there with your with your paper in front of you and you try and kind of take one one paragraph and then and then paraphrase it it's going to be difficult because you'll be kind of locked into that that structure which you've already got very difficult to change it so what I would do is break it down into key points and you have the data that you want to show any figures or whatever whatever it happens to be put the paper away put it to one side and only use it for fact-checking okay so don't use it as a basis for the structure of the writing and then just write everything from from scratch okay in a new form and you know you can put more detail into anything you left out of the paper you can even you can add that into kind of things about it but yeah sitting there with a paper in front of you and trauma paraphrases it's always been difficult you can take bits of it you know if you've expressed something in a really nice way in the paper and you want to use it you can reuse bits you can't kind of copy big chunks over you know words which would work that would be that would be my possible hi I'm a third-year I'm just being write about it you seem to have you seem to have had an epiphany moment but sometimes you just don't have a different moment because this is an observation yeah um yeah of course and you know for some people now the stress is kind of manageable and you know you it's really hard and maybe not particularly enjoy the work but you kind of become and get through from me and just reached a point where it was was it's like everything was building up you know I was I kind of had all of this stuff in the back of my head and then it just reached a point where you know something something broken then it all came flowing flowing out and then I could actually address the way I felt about the work and then that changed that changed everything so for example that worried that I wasn't good enough every the point where I didn't care anymore what anybody else thought I just did the work and then you know I made everything so so much easier the stuff about you know looking for approval in your writing you know if you if you just look at a different way and have confidence in your work then you know again it makes everything so much easier so I was lucky that I got so stressed that I had to address my habits but if you know you just just kind of like just kind of getting through then it doesn't force you to address what you're doing and then you you might pick up like bits of time management any time management technique will work for you for three days and you'll think wow this is amazing but then after the three days your original habits come back in because you haven't addressed that thing underneath the surface and so what then happens is you think oh there's this amazing technique that author of that book manage to make it work what's wrong with me that I can't do it and it has a that kind of negative effect so I think you don't need to wait for kind of a breakdown moment to look at the way that you feel about your research and about your writing one of the things which simply didn't have time to go into today if you've gone through the entire education system from the age of five years old or even earlier and every stage the teacher has told you that you're good because you get good marks that will give you a deeply ingrained sense that that is part of your identity that's part of your self worth and so when you come into a PhD and the rules change you no longer have that that way of validation and this causes like deep anxiety but most people aren't aware of it you never think about it you know you just kind of gone through and you know you follow the system and then you know you end up in a PhD so you don't need to wait for as I said a breakdown in order to think about the way you feel about the work and when you feel stressed when you feel anxiety when you fear kind of when you fear failure and that will happen at some point you know maybe just take a moment and stop and think and then you know is this stopping me from doing my best work anymore oh no that's great Tiki think I'll get a lot that you I'm not seeing you prove anymore I've gotten that confidence you said a few times I think what does not mean doing tips to how you actually do have confidence in never work no I think I've had similar experience and I've switched quite radically in the beginning my second year I'm feeling up it's a bit of tap track for me but I don't certainly don't feel as if I'm like I don't make up as appear to my supervisors yeah any it's just a trick or is it well I mean there's a couple of things going on there in terms of being appear with your supervisors that takes time so when you come out of masters degree for example and you go and have a meeting with your supervisor but my own experience was I mean not to say my supervisor was amazing I'm really really supportive but because he was so smart and so knowledgeable and so quick that I'd go in with a question and before I've even finished stating the question he's answered with his barrage of information he's also answered ten other questions he's given me a to-do list with 20 things on and then we kind of leave in a daze and thinking what what just happened and I never actually got to got to ask the questions I what is it and so it's very much kind of like I was the student he was their master kind of thing but what started to happen with time and experience because I was the one in the lab doing the work I got to know the equipment better than he did and so coming in the third here in the second year started with third year the conversation started to change and he had said it had to come from me so when I went in and I had a question and he started dancing a different question I had to say actually that's not not what I wanted to ask it's days and I could also bring a lot more to the conversation so it's no longer what I have a problem what should I do it was a case of I have a problem I think it might be this or my this if it's this that I'm into this particular thing against this then maybe I'll maybe I can try this what do you think so I'm bringing possible solutions to the conversation and then it becomes more equal obviously you know I still have way more experience than me much broader knowledge but it was more like I was a junior colleague rather than you know the lovely student and that had to come from me seeing the conversations in a different way and having the having the guts to come kind of say something I also realized that when my supervisor gave me to-do list it wasn't necessarily you have to do all these things it was basically ideas these are things which which you can try and what are the important things is that not everything you try has to go into your thesis and you need their confidence I mean any kind of research to try things out not knowing how they're going to work out and so I think that's really important because it means that you're kind of sense of sense of well-being doesn't depend on those immediate results I think if you can kind of get that then the rest of it sort of sort of follows from that so does that answer the question how about it let me see if I can get a logical question yet very interesting I really really enjoyed you talk I am now in my fourth year so obviously I experienced everything you've actually talked about yeah I found quite interesting because another similar reflection er is it possible to actually I mean you're doing these talks to help people circumvent that process and to help them get through their PhD do you think it's possible to do that without actually going through the organic process of hitting rock bottom and going oh my god what am i hearing what not umm I think you know I there will be moments when you think what on earth am i doing why am I here you know you know just you know if it takes you four years your life has up and downs anyway so there's gonna be moments when when you kind of have those doubts and when you maybe feel a bit boat you can't really avoid those things and you know it's a part of the natural sort of rhythm of life that you'll have you know some days you'll feel amazing and yeah I'm going to do some amazing research other days you'll say I'm so tired and you know I've got these problems at home and you know maybe you're worried about money and you've got you got this other stuff going on you feel kind of you feel kind of down that just happened what I want people to avoid though is having that consistent feeling day after day I don't want to get up I don't want to go into work I don't want to go into the lab or the library and you know that sort of deep building stress and depression and it's so common it is so so so common and so totally unnecessary you know I work with you know people who are so much smarter than me in terms of their in terms of their knowledge of their of their subject and then you know people are harder working than I but then they end up I'm just kind of battering against a brick wall and they just try and work harder and harder and harder you know I'm spoken to people you they literally work 18 hours a day and they don't give themselves they feel like if they slow down then failing I'm not doing enough my supervisors going to throw me off the course and you know it's it's such a waste and such a waste of you know the most talented people and I think it's totally unnecessary and these things they're not complicated but nobody talks about it nobody wants to admit how stressed they are because of you I don't I don't want to tell my supervisor I'm struggling because then you'll think I'm not good enough in other kind it's kind of like a sign of weakness but you have to acknowledge it it's the only way that you can possibly start to address it that's by actually you know diving in there and thinking what if I do fail what would I do and then you can you know if you ignore it then it's kind of this big thing it's like the worst thing that can possibly happen but if you acknowledge it then you can start to actually address it and take control of it and it's you know and manage it so yeah ups and downs are natural but we're honor what we want to avoid is that kind of that deep deep stress and it is avoidable but you know need to talk about it i'm james demonaco if you just say you were just saying that just acknowledge you know bell do you need a cell and episode you know what good to do after what you know because I feel it's very amazing that you know when at the last minute you changing your attitude you know well he's going to anyway yeah you always that and how's that going motivated Sammy that's very difficult mmm I think it was a case of not so not so much adding in motivation it didn't motivate me anymore I didn't want my PhD anymore the motivation is still there but it's removing the blocks which are stopping which is stopping me so as I said because I kind of never expected anything to work I was undermining myself by not doing the work as carefully as I as I possibly could you know I'm not taking the time and kind of you know rushing things sometimes and so the fact that I was kind of afraid of failure actually made it more likely and when I when I just took that away that's like I know suddenly I can I can go so if you're kind of beaten against a brick wall and then till the you moves a brick wall or some poor no you can just you know go and yet it's not about it's not about adding anything it's just about freeing up your mind to be able to apply yourself fully to what you do and in conversation yesterday with somebody talking about effort you know the amount of effort you put in and you want to you want to know that you've really worked hard but then when we talked a little bit more we got into the difference between working hard and putting in strenuous effort and fully engaging with your entire being with the work that you do you know finding that sense that you know you just do to work and kind of time time seems to disappear you have no like have no idea how long you spent doing it you're just kind of intrinsically totally immersed in what in what you do and that's only possible when you remove all these kind of all these kind of psychological barriers there's not adding anything which you don't already have it's just removing the limitations to your own ability

Channel: James Hayton PhD

Views: 209,625

Rating: 4.9267697 out of 5

Keywords: PhD, Stress, Thesis, James Hayton, Academic Research, Literature Review

Id: 4MkRMp3roKQ

Length: 75min 31sec (4531 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 07 2013