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.