Pros and cons of doing a PhD (personal experience)

this video is sponsored by brilliant over the past four years I've been making video blogs about my experiences doing a PhD at the University of Exeter and now that I'm finished I thought that it might be fun to do an overall review and talk about five things I liked and five things I didn't like about doing my PhD obviously this is gonna be specific to my personal case and no two PhDs are alike but I think the points are generic to most PhDs and so they should still be a help if you are considering doing one or not however if you are a PhD student watching this and you think I've missed a particularly egregious pro or con then please put that down in the comments below like brexit I'm gonna kick everything off with a big con and that's not having any money if you're doing a PhD in the UK then your typical stipend is around fifteen thousand pounds depending on whether you live in London or not and so whilst I was doing my PhD I was earning less than some of my friends were paying in tax especially seeing as I went to a well ranked University and did a science degree a lot of the people that I went to undergraduate with were earning a lot of money whilst I was earning not very much money at all I've said in previous videos that you shouldn't be doing a PhD for financial reasons anyway but this is a serious concern during your PhD you you're not gonna have very much money you're going to be living basically like you did at undergraduate in similar accommodation shopping at similar places generally trying to avoid spending money wherever possible this does pressurize people to do work alongside their PhDs for example marking or teaching or tutoring or in my case youtubing most people do this fine especially for the first year or two but it is worth pointing out that between the rigors of doing the PhD and having to work on the side you're not going to have very much spare time and you're in a financial situation where one catastrophic event can tip you over the edge into some real difficulties during my PhD I had a drone related accident I went so any more than that and I had to pay five hundred pounds in damages which was a very big ask and basically wiped out my reserves had anything else happened after that I would have been in serious trouble so yes you don't do a PhD expecting to earn very much money but you are going to be operating on a very tight budget and you're gonna perceive yourself to be falling behind the friends that you went school with me went to university with in terms of finances okay to make things more positive the first pro flexibility this may be the case more for me than some other PhDs because I was doing basically a lot of coding I could work anywhere with a laptop which meant I could work at any time I didn't have to go into the office I could work in libraries or coffee shops and I could come and go as I pleased other PhDs notably those with lab components will require you to come in on a regular basis sometime in the middle of the night but generally I think PhDs offer more flexibility than a lot of other jobs flexibility in terms of where and when you work I could come in on the weekends I could come in a middle of a night if I wanted generally I kept office hours because it was more sociable that way but also flexibility in what you did on a day-by-day basis I was my own boss and I could determine which tasks I thought always pressing and do them in whatever way I saw fit but more than that the self-directed nature of the PhD meant that I could pursue whatever I thought was interesting if I came across an interesting result that was a little bit out of the ordinary and wasn't expected I could just run down that rabbit hole and pursue it and drop everything else and I don't think there are many jobs that allow you that kind of flexibility comm number two being tied to your supervisor I accept that this can be very much a pro or a con depending on how you work with your supervisor and I can't stress enough just how important the student supervisor relationship is if you are thinking of doing a PhD it is imperative that you meet and have a chat with your potential supervisor before applying because whether or not you finish the PhD and how much work you get done along the way and how easy you find it along the way is almost uniquely determined by how good your supervisor is at their job I know PhDs across the spectrum going from people who had really experienced supervisors he knew exactly what they were doing from day one set out a plan and then in three years the student just did what they were told coasted through really easy experience but then on the other hand I've known people who whose supervisors had never supervised anyone before they were unfamiliar with the systems and didn't set a plan and so they were just left to flounder around for three or four or even more years not really know what they were doing and even worse you get people who just actively dislike their supervisors and try not to meet with them wherever possible and in some cases you get supervisors who you just never see because there's such high profile academics they don't have time for their students they're always away on conferences and interesting places I was somewhere in the middle on the spectrum my supervisor was a very respected scientist but he had never supervised anyone before because he'd been in private research rather than university it meant that he had fantastic scientific insights and a great knows for what direction to go in but I don't think I was given enough direction from the get-go I think I was allowed to fumble my way around and decide what I thought was interesting but that meant that it took longer for me to complete my PhD then it would have done competitive my friends for example he was set that this is what you are doing and I'm gonna sell tell you week by week this is where I expect you to be so this was only a con in my personal case but I think it is a general con that you are uniquely ties to somebody else's abilities if things go really wrong you can switch supervisors though it is rare but by and large whether or not you get your PhD is determined by someone that you don't have a huge amount of control over and I view that as a con Pro number two something which I've already alluded to the ability to travel over the course of my PhD I have been lucky enough to go to Vienna to San Francisco so all over the UK to talk about science talk about what I've been doing my research and to learn what other people have been doing and it's been amazing academic conferences are their own beasts and I may end up doing a whole video about them anyway but once you've been doing your research for a while you build up a network of people that you know from other universities who you talk to on Twitter and these conferences are a great way to network and meet these people in real life and these conferences tend to be in really nice places like San Francisco Vienna New Orleans Hawaii if you're an astronomer and the best part of traveling during the PhD is that as long as you can justify going there for your research the University will most likely at least subsidize your travel if not pay for it completely I've known PhD students who were basically told look just keep spending money on our travel budget until the university tells us to stop and so they basically had a free ticket to travel wherever they wanted as they could justify it in some way perhaps this was a benefit of going to Exeter compared to somewhere else but I think generally doing a PhD is a great way to travel see the world and meet interesting people Khan number three possibly the most obvious thing I'm ever gonna say in a video PhDs are hard work I went dwell on this too much because it kind of speaks for itself but doing the PhD is a lot of hours although I'd like to draw a distinction between hard and difficult when I started my PhD I went to a training session and the lecturer basically said look guys you're on the course now it's actually quite difficult to fail if you just do what you're told and put the powers in what you're doing doesn't necessarily have to be technically difficult although generally it will be what you're doing just takes a lot of time for example a very good friend of mine he in his PhD measured glacial features Romaric Marines in front of places doing that isn't necessarily terribly difficult but he had to do a lot off them and then he had to do all the statistics all the analysis write the software that did analysis that nobody had done before all this stuff which just takes time and particularly in the run-up to submitting your thesis you will almost certainly be doing 12-hour days plus seven days a week for possibly months on end after people submit their theses they generally take quite a bit of time off like weeks or months of not doing very much so they can physically recover from what they've put their body through it is hard to do a PhD particularly at the end so don't do one if you think it's just gonna be an easy ride and better than getting a real job okay Pro number three improving your skills in the same way that you don't just do an undergraduate for the knowledge that you get in your degree you do it for the way it teaches you to think and the skills it teaches you a PhD is a fantastic way of expanding what you're capable of doing in my personal case that meant getting so much better at programming I was given a lot of support by the other guys in my office and by training courses in how to code in Python yes I could have done this on my own in my own time if I was doing some other job but in this case I was trained how to do it and I learned on the job by being given lots of research problems to do I don't even know how many programs I wrote in the end and so doing the PhD gave me a technical transferable skill and I feel like that's common to pretty much all phd's it might not be coding but it could be analysis problem-solving statistics all these skills which are immensely transferable if you wish to work on something else after you graduates but more than that and more than these soft skills that you get like interpersonal skills and presentation skills because you will have to present your research at some point more than that you are given the ability to manage an immensely complicated project on your own with support from your supervisor yes but on your own and bring it to completion normally vaguely on schedule a phrase which I really like is that we're all prisoners of our previous reference points and once you've submitted a thesis and you've seen the complexity of the whole project on your own you kind of have the confidence you see that it is possible to do something like that again of your own volition it gives you a huge amount of confidence and skill in bringing a very big project they do it bigger than you previously conceived was even possible to fruition that might be doing stuff outside of work like writing a novel in your spare time or it could be work project if you leave academia but it's a very very valuable skill alongside all the other technical and soft skills which you were given during the PhD and I view that as a huge huge benefit however call number four you might well be pigeonholed there seems to be some kind of assumption that people who graduate with PhDs are incredibly skilled at that one thing and nothing else this as I just said is completely untrue PhD graduates have a huge number of transferable skills they're capable of doing things in a wide variety of fields I've known people who have graduated from their PhDs and then stayed in academia but moved to a completely different field like from physics to biology I've known people who have graduated left academia behind completely and then gone on to do something wildly different but uses the same skills like data analysis or machine learning so while you're not actually over specialized people will perceive you as being over specialized and they will pigeonhole you in one particular field and that's something which some people some recruiters will do and others won't but it is worth bearing in mind if you're doing a PhD that you might be limiting your options in some way unless you can demonstrate to them that you are capable of doing things outside of your field in my particular case yes I have my PhD in atmospheric physics and my physics degree but I also have a wide portfolio of video editing and have a wide portfolio of talks which I've given I've basically demonstrated that yes I do that but also other things so a con yes but not as big of a problem as I think a lot of people perceive it to be Pro number four contributing to human knowledge one of the key requirements of doing a PhD is that you have done some original research you have pushed the boundaries of human knowledge and that is the coolest thing I've done things I've learned things which nobody has done before I uncovered a phenomenon in my thesis that was completely unknown before the examiners were like ah that's that's really cool and if that idea doesn't excite you then maybe you shouldn't be doing a PhD at all because to me that is incredible depending on your philosophy doing a PhD in and expanding the frontier of human knowledge is kind of the most important thing you can do with your life you're leaving the state of how we understand the world better than it was before you were born so philosophy depend on the work you do in the PhD if you then don't go into academia afterwards could well be your biggest contribution to the world and I feel like that's a pretty big Pro however con number-5 it can be incredibly isolating going from the ecstasy of talking about how awesome doing the PhD is the end of the day it is very hard as I've already said not just physically but mentally rates of mental health problems in PhD students is definitely higher than the national average and that's because you're doing a very hard piece of work you're doing something that is intensely stressful and you're doing it mostly alone you argument support by your supervisors and your research group if you're working in a research group but at the end of the day you are the captain of the ship with basically no crew you will have to do everything yourself nobody else on the planet apart from maybe a couple of people really understands the details of what you're doing and so you can feel very isolated during my PhD I was so stressed that I actually developed a psychosomatic breathing problems meaning that I felt like I couldn't breathe even though there was nothing physically wrong with me but my brain was basically shutting my lungs down that may be more of an extreme case than most PhDs but I will guarantee you if you talk to pretty much any PhD student they will have a vaguely similar story about their near breaking point of stress of the times when they thought they were just completely overwhelmed and pretty much everybody at some point just goes home and cries their eyes out your research is Australian not just on you but also on your friends and on your relationships and you have to be really committed to it I think to make it through there's really no way of sugarcoating it doing a PhD is hard mentally and physically and there are a whole worlds of hurts that you can expose yourself to if you overdo it and if you don't identify useful good support structures but Pro number five you spend another three or four years at the University and with that comes a huge number of support structures yes you've got the university mental health services and the the doctors on campus but you also have a readily available friendship group in my case I really didn't have a good time as an undergraduate I worked way too hard I got myself incredibly stressed I had mental health problems which prevented me from doing as well as I could have done and so when I started my PhD I very much perceived it as a chance to have a second bite at the Apple a second crack doing University and this time round I definitely did it much better because I ended up with a fantastic group of friends in my case it was from the chapel choir that I sang in from all the music side of campus I had a great support network friends that was ready-made by the university system having now left University it's only now that I realize how special it is to be at uni because if you say graduate and move to a new town how do you make new friends yes there are societies and things like that but that's very much a lot of effort on your part you will go out and seek out those societies and those people whereas at university every year there's a freshers fair saying hey if you're interested in this thing come and have a chat to us if you like singing come and have a chat to us if you like playing rugby go and have a go over there to the sports stores the university system allows you to meet people and do things which you can do outside yes life much much easier and in exodus case there was a campus cinema there were opportunities to make music and play sport and all these things which were special to being University and the fact is by doing a PhD you have another few years of making the most of those advantages for me the benefits were mostly social but whatever it is that you want to get out of life I think being a university just makes it that little bit easier and it certainly made me much much happier so for those of you who wish to weigh up the pros and cons of doing a PhD this is my personal take however if you're not yet in a position to consider doing a PhD or if you're just curious about expanding your horizons and learning new skills then I definitely recommend checking out brilliant dog who were kind enough to sponsor this video if you've seen a science YouTube video before then you've probably seen an advert spot like this where you get someone like me telling you about a product or a service or a website but to me brilliant dog is different because it's based on an educational philosophy that I firmly believe it but the best way to learn something is to get stuck in and try your hand at it and make mistakes and learn from those mistakes brilliant has courses on everything from foundational maths and science right the way up to complicated topics like machine learning I've taken these courses myself I can tell you they're really good as well as the courses you also have problems of the week set by they're incredibly engaged community and generally the website is a fantastic educational resource that I wish I had access to when I was applying to university because it would have made me a stronger student you can use parts of the website for free but if you'd like to get access to the premium courses then you need a premium subscription and if you'd like one of those and go to the link in the description brilliant org forward slash Simon Clark and you can get 20% off your premium and your subscription and support this channel thank you for watching the video and for making it all the way to the end if you're interested in the vlogs I made whilst I was doing my PhD then they'll be a link up here from the very beginning to the very ends and like 70 blocks and yeah I had some good times and some bad ones I'll leave you to watch them thanks for watching I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Simon Clark

Views: 400,849

Rating: 4.9287705 out of 5

Keywords: phd, grad school, dphil, doctorate, dr, doctor, physics, exeter, university, uni, college, education, degree, science, research, thesis, student, study, what to study, school, careers, career, should i do a phd, getting a phd, simon clark phd, phd pros and cons, simonoxfphys, is a phd worth it, pros and cons of doing a phd, phd experience, is phd worth it

Id: GKUu--wnWtE

Length: 17min 28sec (1048 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 24 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/anotherbozo]

I really like this guy. Have watched a few other of his videos... not annoying and gets straight to the point.

Glad to know he's finished now and is still sane!