It's good to talk

So I may be borrowing a known slogan, but today, I want to discuss how good talking can be for you as a PhD student.

Much of this post is based on my experiences over the last few months.  As you'll know, it's not been the best time PhD wise.  We all go through these stages.  I can promise you, that when you start a PhD, at least  one person will tell you "Oh you're going to hate second year" or some other portion of time of your PhD that you can in no way avoid.  I'm not going to reiterate that message, I just want to throw out some ideas of what you might be able to do if you do find yourself hating your PhD.

And, if the title wasn't enough of a clue, most of my suggestions revolve around talking.

Don't be scared.

The first group I'd suggest you chat with are your peers.  There can be a lot of healthy competition (sometimes a little contention) between your peer group during a PhD.  One person gets a publication or a conference talk, another finished collecting their data while you're still finishing your first experiment.  That's always going to be going on.  But hopefully, there's at least one other PhD student within your department who you can talk to about how you're feeling.

Because guess what?  It's okay to hate your PhD sometimes.  (Not all the time.  If it's all the time, I would really suggest looking into other options...)

Your peers are some of the best people to talk to because they will have experienced what you're feeling too.  The apathy, the general frustration.  Even if they haven't got there yet, they can understand the basis of your complaints as someone with a similar experience frame.  If you don't have anyone in your department, try reaching out to friends doing PhDs in different universities or departments.  Have a chat over a coffee, a pint or an ice cream (or all three, why not?) and just get it out.  Then, when they're feeling frustrated, you can return the favour.

I wouldn't recommend just talking to your peers though.  I would suggest you speak to your supervisor too.  Now, before you get all "Oh hell no!" on me, hear me out.

Obviously, it depends on your relationship with your supervisor, but my recent experience taught me this is something you should really do.  How did I learn this?  Because I didn't do it and now realise that was really dumb.

Instead of taking my frustrations to my supervisor, my loss of confidence, my lack of a sense of direction or conviction, my general hatred of all things research, I took a holiday and disappeared for a while.  Now, while that was okay, it left some really big gaps.

My supervisor was concerned about me, having noticed these things (because guess what, your supervisor is quite clever), but didn't want to push me if I wasn't ready to talk about it.  I knew that he knew, because I'm not an idiot either.  

What stopped me then?  Fear, mostly.  Fear it would be a girly thing to do, to go whine about a PhD.  Fear of showing weakness.  Fear it would make me look incompetent, unintelligent or unable to cope with the pressures of a PhD studentship.  Fear it would result in my supervisor losing respect for me.

When I met with my supervisor yesterday and we actually started having a discussion about all this, it all came out anyway.  And we were able to sort some things out and just have a really good communication.  And I wished I had done it sooner.

It can be difficult to talk to people, for all these reasons.  But if you're stressed out, I'd really advise it.  How else are you going to tackle it?  From a brief stint working in psychological therapies, I can promise you bottling it up is the wrong way to go.  And don't worry about those people who seem to have it all together without a care in the world.  They're stressing out too.  We all do.  

It's okay to worry, and it's good to talk about it.  

That's my two cents ;)

Computer says "Not Significant"

As someone who hasn't done a Masters between my undergraduate degree and my PhD, the last time I was remotely responsible for conceiving an experiment was during my fourth year dissertation project.  Even then, it was guided by supervisor's interests and expertise.  Given the technological dramas I've had until this point in my PhD, the experiment I've been working on this semester is really my first 'baby'.

This was a project based entirely on my own interests.  I'd constructed the design from the questions I wanted to ask and the literature in the area.  I painstakingly created the materials.  (Twice).  I collected the data (twice).  The whole process took nearly two semesters.  A learning process, granted, so I'll be faster next time, but either way - a long part of this year has been spent on this one study.

So when we ran our first analysis and the computer was throwing out non-significant after non-significant result, I was gutted.  Truly, awfully gutted.  I'd invested so much time and effort and stress and work into this experiment.  How could it not have worked?

Before that experience, I'd never truly appreciated how devastating it can be when a study you've worked so hard on doesn't really come to fruition.  I thought it made a good topic for a post though, because if you've been through it too I thought you might like to commiserate.  Everyone deals with this sort of thing differently, and remember that this is just a reflection on how I felt about these things.  My perspective is quite probably different from yours.  That's okay too.  But if you've felt this way at all, sometimes it's nice to know you're not the only one ;)

So here's how it was for me.....

First of all, no one outside your academic circle will really understand.

This statement comes with a caveat, but it's an important one to remember.  Your family, partner, friends, dog, hamster will all understand that you are upset or stressed but they won't really get why.  Those lucky people who aren't doing (or haven't done) a PhD, don't really understand how pervasive the PhD becomes in your life.  The frustration and disappointment can become all-consuming.  You'll think about it lying awake at night.  In your office.  In your car.  At the cinema.  It'll keep popping into your head.  I mean, I'm doing a PhD and I don't understand how it happens.  I have a life outside my PhD, but there it is, all the time, in the back of my head.

And for that reason, however hard it is, try to be patient.

When you've explained for the fiftieth time how things went wrong, that you do/don't know what caused it, and the implications for your work, you will probably be ready to punch someone in the face.  (Though that might just be me...)  Try to remember these people are asking because they care, not because they're trying to remind you of your perceived failure.  (And that perceived is the key word there, more on that in a minute).

If it's getting really tough, stick to a strong, unequivocal statement: "I really don't want to talk about my research just now.  We need to talk about something else.  How is you [work/love life/dog/sibling/mother....]?"

You will (if you're like me) feel a crushing sense of self-doubt.

A PhD is a high-stress, high-pressure route to take.  When things go wrong, even if they're not your fault, the sense of guilt or failure can be strong.  If you've identified the problem and you really did make a mistake, do your best to address it.  If it can be fixed with some more testing, a rejigging of the analysis, do it.  Working on fixing the problem will make help you keep going.

But whether the mistake lies at your feet or if it has some unidentified source, you need to remember:

This is not the end of the world.

It might feel like it.  Thoughts have the tendency to run away with themselves.  An example from my own head: "If these results aren't significant that means I can't present them at the conference or submit a paper.  That blows a chance of a publication.  If I don't have enough publications I'm not going to be able to compete on the job market.  If I can't compete, I can't get a job.  That would mean this has all been a waste of time!!"

See what I mean?  I feel stressed just reading that.

But it took a gentle reminder from one of the lecturers here that, in science, 98% of experiments won't get significant results and that is okay. You've got to remember that a PhD is an apprenticeship - a chance to learn how to research.  

A good friend and fellow PhD student also reminded me that a PhD is often a series of firsts.  Your first time running a particular paradigm, analysis, using an experiment builder, eye tracker, whatever.  You don't always know what went wrong because you're still just a little science grasshopper.  It's not really until you defend that you have sufficient knowledge and understanding in your area that would allow you to go back and modify the experiment to (hopefully) get the results you'd wanted.

Ultimately, when things like this happen, the hard truth is that you've just got to keep going.  I'm not denying there were a couple of days I called up my aforementioned good friend asking her to talk me off the quitting ledge.  But you keep going.  You keep trying to figure things out.

Eventually, with enough poking and prodding we identified the problem.  The program I used to run the experiment had been showing different stimuli than I though, so once I recoded for that we were able to rerun the analysis and hey presto, we found something.  But that's not really the moral of this story.  The moral is to keep going.  You are always learning something, whether your results are significant or not. 

Keep going, you can do it!


EDIT: So I maybe didn't make this clear enough, but this post was meant to be reflective of my experiences when I didn't get the expected results for my study.  I thought it might be useful if anyone else had felt this way too.  If you haven't, that's great and don't worry about it!  And, to reiterate, I don't think that if your results are non-significant (i.e. not below the arbitrary alpha of .05) your work is meaningless.  I was only saying I felt that way at the time.  With a little perspective and some friendly reminders from friends and colleagues, I realised this was just another way to learn something new about the area I'm interested in.  Hope that clears things up!

Katy

Since Not Just Another PhD is nearly at 10,000 hits - a big milestone - I'm hosting a giveaway over on our Facebook page.  For your chance to win a SIGNED copy of Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD) comics book, head over to the Facebook page for details on how to enter!

PhD: Now vs. Then

Today's post was written by Professor Trevor Harley, Dean of the School of Psychology at the University of Dundee, Scotland.  Professor Harley specialises in the psychology of language, particularly speech production and high-level cognition.  He also has his own blog - The Science of Self-Improvement.

I did my PhD in experimental psychology in the early eighties at Cambridge. It was a good place and a good time to do it; in many respects those were the best years of my life. Things were very different then: we had much more freedom and fewer obligations. It was more like the USA now; although we only had funding for three years, no one was that bothered if we took longer. Neither did we have to take any courses. Essentially on 1 October I moved into my office and was left alone to think and do what I wanted, if indeed I wanted to do anything at all.

Needless to say therefore I spent most of my time doing nothing. Wine, women, and song are my predominant memories of most of my postgraduate years. Then somehow I caught glandular fever in my second year and was laid low for several months. At the end of all that I realised I had to pull my act together and get on with things, and somehow managed to collect a lot of data and write up the first complete draft of my thesis by the end of the third year. I also realised the importance of publishing, and got a good paper out in Cognitive Science that I am proud to say has stood the test of time and is still regularly cited today. I can only put this extraordinary foresight down to luck.

So in many respects I think things are much better now, and I envy the PhD students of today for several reasons.

1. In general there are more PhD students and many more MSc students around than in my day. I did feel fairly isolated at times. I think there are now more new PhD students at Dundee each year than there were even in Cambridge over three years in my time.

2. In retrospect I would have liked a few courses, particularly on advanced statistics, to give me training and provide structure to my time. But not too many.

3. I think half yearly thesis monitoring committees and minuted meetings with your supervisor are, in spite of seemingly being a bit bureaucratic, very useful. I wouldn't have drifted anywhere near as much if I had had regular deadlines.

4. I wish we had had regular postgraduate seminars. I think these are an invaluable resource and the more you put into them the more you get out. A few of us set up an informal reading party, but it was really too small. The first talk I gave in my life was my first job interview.

5. The pressure to finish in three years is good because it means you get it out of the way early, and are forced to work hard on it from the beginning. I know it's more stressful, and I suspect the pressure has driven down the size and scope of PhD theses. Finishing within three years means really only two months of effective testing.

6. There is pressure to publish as you go along with your PhD research because it's difficult to get jobs otherwise. While undoubtedly very stressful, it does mean your name can be out there from an early stage.

So many of the things that people now get down about - deadline, pressure, seminars, meetings, courses - are in fact I think advantageous, and when you've finished (as you will) you'll come back to look upon them fondly and appreciate the good they've done.

On the other hand I do miss the freedom, the space to do what I want to do, the fun of going to a bar at 5pm and talking new ideas with friends, making acquaintances of all sorts, and the feeling that everything is new and exciting. I had plenty of ups and downs when doing my PhD, but I found the feeling of finding out new things about human behaviour that NO ONE has ever discovered before to be unbeatable. It's a wonderful opportunity to think about what you want to do with your life and come to appreciate the beauty of science. 

And science, like all good drugs, is addictive. You will have bad days, or weeks, or possibly months, but they are more than compensated for by the highs. My tip for dealing with the ups and downs to make a very explicit plan for yourself. You have long-term goals (get the PhD in three years, get a paper), medium-term goals (write that thesis monitoring committee report, write a method section), and short-term goals (run ten participants, make up a list of new materials). Correlate those goals with a plan; keep a to do list and track your progress using a calendar. If you have a bad day or week you can see that in the bigger context of things it doesn't make much difference.

Of course, you might be very unlucky and that bad month turns into months. In that case you need to talk to someone urgently. Treat your supervisor as your friend. Talk to your peers; never isolate yourself.

And finally nothing beats the thrill of getting to be called "Doctor" (until you get to be called Professor)!