Top Ten Tips for doing your PhD.
Ok, so you have been accepted to do a PhD and your funding is in place but now you actually have to do the qualification! These tips should help you make the best of your next three years and come out with a top class qualification at the end of it. (Advice on how to cope with your PhD viva will appear in another set of top ten tips).
1. Talk to your supervisor
2. Stay focussed
3. Start with a plan
4. Be flexible
5. Stay sane while researching
6. Set yourself achievable deadlines
7. Stick to your achievable deadlines!
8. Know when to stop
9. Choose tough but friendly examiners
10. Think about the next step
1. Talk to your supervisor
You have chosen a topic that presumably interests you and your supervisor. Hopefully you will have met or at least corresponded with him or her before your arrival but now get into a routine of meeting up regularly. Supervisors vary, but try to agree to meet at least once a month. He or she will be able to help you get started on your research.
2. Stay focussed
In the early stages when there is no immediate deadline looming it is easy to allow ‘life' to take over and for your PhD project to be forgotten. Do not let this happen, make sure you set aside regular slots to work on it, some time every day if that is feasible, or a certain number of hours a week.
3. Start with a plan
Although you won't be able to predict the findings of your research in its early stages you will have some idea of how you want the finished thesis to look. Put together a chapter-by-chapter outline and check this with your supervisor. Bear in mind that if you pursue an academic career, you may want to publish your thesis as a monograph, so think about whether it would make a good book and if not how you might improve it.
4. Be flexible
Once you have made your plan, be prepared to remould it and in some cases discard it altogether! Sometimes your findings will take you in a completely different direction to the one you anticipated. If your supervisor agrees, then allow this new approach to come to fruition, no need to stick rigidly to a plan you wrote on ‘day one' of your PhD.
5. Stay sane while researching
Whether you are stuck in a lab for ten hours a day, or away from home researching in a dusty old library somewhere, research can be at different times both tedious and thrilling. You will be doing a lot of it to carry out this research project, so if you cannot bear researching your topic then it is time for a change. Staying focused is difficult at times, but keep on assessing your research questions, checking you are collecting information useful to you. Also make sure you have an efficient way of recording and measuring this information; when it comes to writing up you will need to use this data every day.
6. Set yourself achievable deadlines
Early on in your PhD plan how you will spend your three years (many universities allow a little over three years, but funding bodies are stricter and will often not finance you for longer than that). Do you, for example, need to go abroad to do some research? If so, then figure that into your plan. An obvious division of labour is: year one, finding your feet and doing preliminary secondary research; year two doing your own research; year three writing up. However, this rigid programme will not work for everyone, so plan your time carefully.
7. Stick to your achievable deadlines!
Do not allow yourself to get behind in your research and writing up schedule. Self-defined deadlines are the hardest to keep because we think that we can change them as easily as we set them. However, if you start falling behind, you will find that your university enforces on you a final submission deadline that is hard to meet, and your PhD may have to be submitted far from its ideal state.
8. Know when to stop
When you get near the end of writing up, you will start revising your work for final submission. This can be exciting as you will see how far your thinking has progressed in the course of your PhD. However, it can also be very daunting and candidates can find it hard to know when to stop revising and simply submit their work. Take advice from your supervisor, of course, but if you find yourself agonising all day over ‘ands', ‘ors' and punctuation, then it is probably time to stop.
9. Choose tough but friendly examiners
Your supervisor will help you pick suitable examiners and will contact them to invite them to examine your thesis. However you usually get the final say in this choice. Do not necessarily pick people you know will be ‘soft' on your work, sometimes it is more rewarding to be challenged by someone who has issues with it. But equally, do not choose an academic who is openly hostile to your ideas (or those of your supervisor) as you don't want that viva experience to turn into a nightmare.
10. Think about the next step
During the course of your PhD your department will probably offer you some undergraduate teaching and some career development advice if you want to work in academia. You need to decide at this stage if you would like to pursue an academic career, and if so whether research- or teaching-based or both. If not, then start exploring your other options, both with your supervisor and the careers service at your institution.
To read tips on doing your PhD viva, please click here.
