• Set out what your aims are at the start of your PhD (and let your supervisor know) for instance if you would like to spend time in a different lab or learn a specific technique.. TELL THEM. They aren’t mind readers
• Plan, write plans (revisit and revise plans) and keep showing them to your supervisor (even if your supervisor appears uninterested)
• Get to know your supervisor, learn how they work and how to get the most out of them
• Learn to communicate what you are doing to someone outside of your field (and your parents/loved ones)
• Adapt, learn that plans are not set in stone and things have to change and shift. Learn to live and love(if you can) this
• Things will take longer than you plan them to
• Read the PhD comic strips (http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php)
• Join a select number of societies related to your field (when the time comes to present work at conferences most societies insist that you have been a member of their society for 12 months in order to apply for travel funds/grants – I wish I had known this!)
• ‘The Unexpected’ WILL happen. You can’t plan for it. You don’t know when it will happen. But it WILL ARRIVE. Promise.
• There will be additional courses, learning and support you can get from the university along the way (for example presenting, writing or computer skills courses). Identify where your weaknesses are and find out what courses will be able to help you
• Learn to communicate with your supervisor and lab mates/others in your group
• Gain a set of friends who are all at different stages of their PhDs, you can draw on their experiences, pass on your experiences and go for tea breaks with them when ‘the unexpected’ happens 
• Politics will probably create more problems and stresses than your research
• Not all research is ground breaking or exciting, but it all helps
• Something you have to do will be incredibly dull
• Something you have to do will be exciting
• You will find yourself in a different world where only your PhD project exists (try not to spend too much time in this world, it helps to get out from time to time)
• At some point someone will ask you to teach someone else
• Blog it. Blogging the trials and tribulations of your PhD can help get you through it and you might make some friends along the way
• Think about (and plan for) what you want to do when it ends. Although it may not feel like it eventually you will finish it!
• You will not tick off everything on the plan you created at the start of your PhD
• Your PhD is your project you need to OWN it, manage it and be responsible for it.

I probably need to add something about ‘being organised’ and ‘writing everything down and filing it properly’ these two will probably become more of a concern as I try to put all my work together in the thesis!

“I’ve found out the hard way that a PhD does not make you more employable outside of academia, unless the job in question is explicitly related to the PhD. Most employers won’t know what a PhD entails, and you’ll be at least three years behind everyone else in the job market.”

Given that Vitae tell us over half of PhD students will leave academia (only 48% of PhD graduates working in the UK remain in the education sector), most of us need to be prepared to account for that 3 (or 4, or…) year gap in our employment history when we eventually face the interview panel.

So what does the PhD graduate have to offer to the real world?

Independence
We have got to be among the most well versed in working without a manager’s direction, or agenda, or oversight. Surely this is an attractive prospect for any potential employer? Although, entry level positions might require you to show that this quality doesn’t simply mean we’re stubborn hermits, and can submit to authority when appropriate!

Commitment
Were you listening to the bit about it taking 3 years or more? That’s a long time to be working on one project. Completing a PhD shows that you can be dedicated to a task and to getting it finished, whatever that takes.

Time management
Again, the PhD is a long project. By the end, we’ve learned to identify our tasks, accurately predict their demands, prioritise them, and get them finished, often while working on more than one thing simultaneously.

People management
It might seem lonely and isolated at times, but we do encounter a number of people, and so can give evidence of working successfully together. We manage upwards when we engage with our supervisors or other academics in our home departments or at conferences. We work with the administrative staff in our universities, and comply with the regulations of our funding bodies. We organise things together, attend things together, and advise each other.

Problem-solving
We don’t start our research knowing the answer. Doing a PhD demonstrates the ability to work on something new, cope with the uncertainty, and find a solution.

Quick to learn
By the end of the PhD, we’re the experts in our chosen field (even if it is rather niche): that’s what the assessment criterion of originality really means. By that time we’ll have taught ourselves what we need to know to get there, demonstrating independent learning.

Writing skills
90,000 words. Legible ones. Comprehensible ones. Interesting ones. Structured ones. Engaging ones. Necessary ones. This is the bit most ‘normal’ people find most incomprehensible, so celebrate your achievement.

Can you think of any other ways of articulating what skills we doctors of Philosophy can offer to potential employers?

P.S. If you’re an English Lit student, like me, you don’t have to worry. See here for a vision of your future.

1) Sit down and spend a good amount of time going through what I have done already

2) Work out what is a) Useful and finished b) Useless and rubbish c) Useful but needs finishing off d) What is missing

3) Put a plan together to finish the unfinished and tackle the missing bits

4) Put a realistic, priority focused timeline together on what I want to acheive and by when – I don’t want to try and do too much and end up not finishing any of it. What parts are essential and what is ‘nice to have’?

5) Start putting a plan of attack together for the thesis writing…

I am interested to know why people fail to write up their PhD. Please share any reasons you know of or have experienced, all the better if you can share how you overcame them!

So I have created a % of what a PhD is made up of (from my point of view, at this particular point in time)

5% Thinking

65% ‘experimenting’ doing things that didn’t work and will never make it into the thesis

15% of actual experiments that have worked and have revealed something

15% Luck

Not sure what everyone else thinks about my little percentages. I probably should have included a procrastination % too, although that could be included in the ‘doing things that will never make it into the thesis section’.

I have been learning a lesson recently, one of patience and taking time over things. PhDs do not happen overnight, they take time, an awful lot of time (and patience). My PhD is lab based. Experiments that I think are pretty simple and will not take any time to get going have been the ones that have tripped me up. I had a reminder this week that thinking time is important and can save time in the long run. I launched into doing something in the lab thinking that I could repeat what someone else had done and it would be OK – it wasn’t. Now I am having to peddle back on myself to work out how I can make it work. A learning curve – but I am getting there and I have learnt from it. Take a an hour/half a day/ a day out to think regularly to make sure that what you are doing is correct and plans for the future will work out as you wish. I think thinking can be as important as doing!

Dr. Koller gave an overview of the aims of her company and her team. The team dealt with dynamic financial analysis, financial modeling, pricing, natural catastrophe modeling, insurance aggregation analysis. She stressed the stability of the insurance industry which is needed where ever there is an insurable interest.

She outlined the mathematical aspect of her role and said that her team-mates had backgrounds from accounting, engineering, physics, computer science, geography and mathematics. There were a couple of PhDs in her team and a good percentage of Masters holders. Dr. Koller presented a few cases where she had to use general mathematical problem solving skills to model and solve problems in risk analysis especially related to catastrophes.

Dr. Koller stressed the importance of gaining the actuarial certification to do well in the Insurance industry. However, she did not plan to get an official certification as she had picked up the required skills and an official certification required a further three to four years of intense study and examinations. She was of the view, that even if an insurance employee is not taking actuarial exams, it is worth refreshing the concepts and regularly consulting the training material.

It was really helpful for her to stay after the talk and answer various questions from final year PhDs concerning the job market. Some one asked if she was using her graph theory training in her job. Although, her PhD did not directly apply to her job, she maintained that it was the skills acquired during her PhD which were valuable. She was of the view, that it is these skills which should be emphasized in non-academic job applications. It was interesting to see that where as most PhD seeking a job in the city turn to investment banking, there are other industries with interesting challenges and rewarding careers.

• Clarity, goals, and forward momentum: Nielsen mentions that being clear about one’s goal and continuing to work towards it is critical.
• Have multiple formulations: Having alternative formations of a problem provides multiple ways to attack the problem. Sometimes, a different way to describe the problem gives new insight.
• Spontaneous discovery as the outcome of self-development: Nielson writes that discovering something new while understanding and exploring some problem is a classic way to solve problems.
• Working on important problems: Nielsen writes that successful problem solvers work on important problems. He identifies various reasons why some one may be hesitant to tackle important problems. The first reason could be lack of self development and tools. The second reason could be that short term goals make him work only on doable small problems. The third reason is simply intimidation. This is especially relevant to PhD students who are reluctant to tackle problems that the best minds of the last century have not solved!
• Committing to work on an important problem: Nielson writes that commitment to work on an important problem is a long term process and requires patience.
• People who only attack difficult problems: In the end, Nielson also warns against just attacking difficult problems. He gives the analogy of pole-vaulting where one should raise the bar gradually.

He explains that the problem solver tries to solve well-posed, well-known difficult problems and formulate methods to solve them without worrying too much about the ‘big picture’. On the other hand, problem creators ask new questions, identify important problems, build links or try to provide a different perspective.

Solving well known problems has immediate incentives whereas creating problems can open up new fields. Nielson describes the characteristic skills for both roles. For problem creators he highlights the following points:

• Developing a taste for what’s important: Nielson states that getting an idea of the past achievements of the field and identifying outstanding issues and problems is critical. He specially points out that the difficulty of a problem does not necessarily relate to its importance and elegant solutions may be more important in some cases.
• Internal and external standards for what is important: Apart from identifying external factors, Nielson also emphasises that the problem should also be important and interesting to oneself.
• Exploring for problems: A thorough survey of an area can help one get the ‘big picture’ and identify issues that people in the subfields have not looked at.
• Getting ahead of the game: A skilful problem creator can identify the critical problems before others.
• Identify the messes: Nielson’s final point on this ability is to identify aspects of the field that are not well developed, clear or well understood. The mess can be an opportunity for cleaning up.

The next entry is on problem solving.

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In order to distinguish what is most simple from what is complex, and to deal with things in an orderly way, what we must do, whenever we have a series in which we have directly deduced a number of truths one from another, is to observe which one is most simple, and how far all the others are removed from this-whether more, or less, or equally. RULE VI

If in the series of subjects to be examined we come to a subject of which our intellect cannot gain a g6od enough intuition, we must stop there; and we must not examine the other matters that follow, but must refrain from futile toil. RULE VIII

We ought to turn our entire attention upon the smallest and easiest points, and dwell on them a long time, until we get accustomed to behold the truth by distinct and clear intuition. RULE IX

To gain sagacity, our mind must be trained on the very problems that other men have already solved, and it must methodically examine even the most trivial of human devices, but especially those which manifest or imply an orderly arrangement. RULE X

If, after gaining intuitive knowledge of several simple propositions, we are to draw some further inference from them, it is useful for us to run through them in a continuous and uninterrupted movement of thought, to reflect on their interrelations and to form, so far as we can, distinct conceptions of several at once. For this adds much to the certainty of our knowledge, and it greatly increases the scope of our mind. RULE XI

If we are to understand a problem perfectly, we must free it from any superfluous conceptions, reduce it to the simplest terms, and by a process of enumeration, split it up into the smallest possible parts. RULE XIII

The same rule must be applied to the real extension of bodies, and it must be set before the imagination by means of plain diagrams. For in this way it will be far more distinctly perceived by the understanding. RULE XIV

The same rule must be applied to the real extension of bodies ,and it must be set before the imagination by means of plain diagrams. For in this way it will be far more distinctly perceived by the understanding. RULE XIV

When we are dealing with a problem we must run over it in a direct course; in so doing, we must abstract from the fact that some of its terms are known, others unknown; and by valid processes, step by step, we must apprehend the interdependence of the terms. RULE XVII

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It is a pity that Descartes, who set out to write 36 rules, only finished a total of 21 rules. One thing that we can draw from the heuristics is that there is a lot in common between analytic philosophy and computer science.