Month: June 2019

Academia is a tough environment, partly because it entails being criticised a lot which can be very damaging for many people. You don’t only receive criticism during you PhD (mainly from your supervisor) but this continues well into your career and even seasoned academics are not immune to unnecessarily harsh comments on their written work from their peers.

Very often PhD supervisors (and peer reviewers) forget that there is a person behind the written work and that in order to create a good researcher you need to give praise as well as critique. Therefore, everyone in academia could afford to be more constructive in their criticism by pointing out the weak as well as strong aspects of a person’s work.

But in this post I’ll focus on constructive criticism, which is aimed at improving your work. Before I started my PhD I had never really failed at anything. I was always a good student and also did reasonably well at uni. Very early on I got a job as an English teacher, which I was very good at and received praise and promotion. This means that for most of my life I have not received a lot of criticism regarding my work. Therefore, when I first started to receive feedback on my written work from my supervisor, the critique came as a bit of a shock. I took it rather personally, and for a long time I felt like a failure. This led to a loss of motivation to do my work and essentially procrastination. At some point towards the end of my PhD I developed some strategies for dealing with this beast called criticism, which I will share in the rest of this post.

1) It’s an apprenticeship

People often come to the PhD thinking they should already know a lot. After all, by that point you will have usually been in education for a number of years and often will have had a successful career in a tangential field. But as my supervisor always used to say to me, the PhD is like an apprenticeship – you are learning how to be a researcher and it is natural that you work won’t be perfect to start with. The criticism of your works serves to help you develop your research and writing skills. Even if you have done academic writing before for you undergrad and master’s degrees, writing a thesis or a journal article is completely different and it takes time to develop these skills.

(At this point, I urge supervisors not to forget that pointing out the things your students is doing well is as important and useful as pointing out what needs improving!)

2) It’s not personal

The criticism is not personal, it does not reflect badly on you as a person and your self-worth. Please keep that in mind! It is a criticism of your work which you are still learning how to do properly. It is really important to separate your thesis (i.e. your work) from you as a person. This is particularly difficult to do with a PhD thesis because it feels like your baby in a way. You came up with the topic and you will be working on it intensely for at least four years. There are few other jobs that will make you this closely connected to your work.

But it’s important to remind yourself that at the end of the day it is a job, and and success or lack of thereof doesn’t reflect on you as a person.

3) Work stays in the office

Therefore, it is important to take steps to start treating your PhD as a job. If you can, try to set yourself working hours. It is also important to try to keep the weekends to yourself and to relax and/or do something pleasant. This also goes for holidays – you are entitled to holidays and make sure you book them throughout the year (and conferences are not a holiday!).

If you need to be more flexible with your time that’s fine but make sure you are still getting time off. For example, I wasn’t really able to work on a regular basis and according to working hours. So I worked when and how ever much I could, and this meant that sometimes I did work on the weekends. But to compensate for that I would have a day off during the week.

4) Reward yourself

When we submit a piece of work or meet a deadline, we don’t tend to see it as an accomplishment at all. In fact, we often feel guilty that it wasn’t better or that we didn’t do more. To counteract these feelings, make it a habit to reward yourself for every milestone in your PhD not matter how small. It might seem silly at first but you will eventually develop a very good habit. Your reward can be anything from a glass of wine, a meeting with friends or a holiday. We often forget things that makes us happy so it might be worth making a list of things that you can refer to when you want to do something nice for yourself.

Many people struggle with their mental health during their PhD, even if they have never experienced mental health difficulties before. There is something about the PhD experience that places specific demands on the students that tend to lead to the deterioration of mental health. In this post I will list some of those struggles/demands and relate them to my own experience. I will group the struggles according to what mental health issues they caused for me. 

Anxiety and feeling like a failure

Procrastination and imposter syndrome were the two struggles that most often led to me feeling anxious and like a failure. Many PhD students suffer from the imposter syndrome, and feel like they don’t really belong in academia and will be found out at any moment. This often leads to perpetual feeling of being a failure. The imposter syndrome is also partly systemic to academia, and the way PhD students are treated within the department/university.

Procrastination is a bit of a “chicken or egg” situation. It’s difficult to know whether it comes first or is a result of other feelings. For me procrastination was usually connected to feelings of guilt and anxiety. And because I did not want to deal with those uncomfortable feelings all the time, I procrastinated. But procrastinating made me feel even more guilty, so it turned into a vicious cycle.

Stress/pressure

Financial worries are a common struggle for many PhD students. There is a high proportion of students who are self-funded, and even those that do have funding sometimes struggle to make ends meet. As a result, many students have additional jobs, such as leading seminars in their department or a job external to the university. Struggling financially and having to work alongside your PhD can be very stressful and put a person under additional pressure.

I was self-funded and had to work during my PhD. My first year was the worst as I wasn’t able to get a teaching position in my department. Since I was a qualified teacher I worked as a supply teacher in secondary schools, which was exhausting and too demanding to do with a PhD. For the rest of my PhD I taught in my department, which was easier. However, I always felt like my PhD would have progressed faster if I hadn’t had to work so much.

Depressive symptoms

The PhD is highly unstructured compared to other forms of study or employment. You are mostly left to your own devices and have to manage your own time while there is very little accountability on a daily basis to anyone else but yourself. For me this was the worst, since I worked as a language teacher prior to my PhD and was very much used to structure and feeling useful and like I was contributing to other people’s lives. This also impacted my motivation as I often questioned why I was doing the PhD at all and who would really benefit from my research.

Burn out

Time management is often the cause of burn out among PhD students. You are either working too much or procrastinating and feeling guilty. Additionally, many students feel under a lot of pressure to work to make ends meet, and to also do as much as possible to gain experiences. The PhD is not only about doing your research and writing. It is also going to conferences, networking, doing research assistant work, attending workshops, etc. We are all very well aware of the competitiveness of the market and often feel huge amounts of pressure to gain as much experience as possible. All of this can lead to a burn out, when the body and mind have just had too much.

Low self-esteem

One thing that you don’t get so much in other forms of employment is constant criticism. The PhD is like an apprenticeship where you learn how to be a researcher. And the best way to learn is through someone pointing out everything you are doing wrong. However, many academics/supervisors forget to also point out the stuff you’re doing right. As a result, many PhD students are left with a low-self esteem and feel like a failure. In addition, academia in general can be brutal and academics are used to harsh criticism from the journal peer-review process, and automatically transfer this style onto their PhD supervisees without really thinking about the consequences.