15 things to remember if you’ve started to hate your PhD
Jun 1, 2021
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It’s entirely normal to hate your PhD from time to time. The further you travel on the PhD journey, the more you start to resent the thesis.
That’s natural – spend years working on something, often with little immediate reward, and it natural that you will start to crumble.
Here we’ve put together a list of 15 things to remind yourself of if you’re started to lose motivation. They’ll remind you of all that’s special about your thesis and, hopefully, inject some enthusiasm back into your relationship with it.
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1. you should work less.
I find that most people fall into one of two camps.
There are those who throw themselves into their work, always chained to their desk and never feeling like they’re on top of things.
Then there are those who get easily distracted, putting things off to the last minute and feeling guilty that they’re always a little behind.
In both cases the outcome is the same: long hours spent working, with the fatigue and the stress that comes with it.
But what about doing less work? What about being more selective with your time, and more selective with what’s on your to do list, such that you didn’t have as much to do at all?
It means accepting that your value and output is not measured on the basis of how many hours you put in, or how much work you get done. It’s measured instead on the quality of the work, and on the level of focus you can achieve.
So if you find yourself burning the candle at both ends, ask yourself whether what you really need to do is work less.
2. Don’t Push Away Negative Thoughts
3. remember that your phd is trying to drown you, 4. routines come and go.
For many, the simplest way of making the PhD journey more manageable is to develop consistent routines.
For me, that involves going on a morning walk, exercising a few times a week, getting my emails and admin done first thing in the morning, and going to bed at roughly the same time.
But it’s easy to slip out of routines. We may be away from home, or the holiday season may disrupt our daily rhythm.
Whatever it is, we can start to drop the good habits we carefully nurture and start to pick up unhealthy ones – we might start exercising less, eating more processed foods, or staying up late.
When that happens to me, I can quickly start to feel anxious about whatever it is I’m working on. That makes sense; if routines introduce stability into our lives, it’s logical that disrupting those routines can mean we feel ungrounded and out of sorts.
If you can relate this holiday season, go easy on yourself. Like everything in life, this is temporary. As long as you’re conscious of what good routines looks like, and as long as you’re conscious that you’re temporarily departing from them, it won’t be long before you get back into healthy habits once the thing disrupting your routine has passed.
5. Ask Yourself: Are You Biting Off More Than You Can Chew?
6. set your intentions, 7. embrace the crappy drafts, 8. remind yourself that phds are hard.
Finding your PhD hard is kind of the point.
Repeat after me: if you’re finding your PhD hard it doesn’t mean you’re a failure, it means you’re doing it right.
9. Keep failing
10. remember that you’re never going to please everyone, 11. you’re going to get criticised, 12. don’t focus (too much) on the problems, 13. you have to admit when you’re wrong, 14. ask yourself: am i a perfectionist.
Most of the PhD students I talk to are perfectionists. You probably are too.
With perfectionism comes a desire to have control over day-to-day life, knowledge of what’s going to happen in the short term, and the certainty that the PhD thesis will be, well, perfect.
And then along comes coronavirus.
Your day-to-day life has been disrupted as you work from home and away from you normal routines, you’ve got no way of knowing what will happen in the short or long term, and you may worry that your thesis will be sub-optimal as you step away from fieldwork, labs and supervisors.
The perfectionist in you is panicking, right?
Perfectionism is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it can fill you with drive, passion, dedication and motivation. It can inspire you to try your hardest and do your best. It’s likely what got you on to your PhD programme in the first place.
But at the same time, it has a dark side. For as much as it can inspire, it can lead to panic. Anxiety, worry and dread often follow in the footsteps of perfectionism, such that when you lose control over your reality, or when you get things wrong, make mistakes or produce something sub-optimal, you panic. What starts off as a simple mistake can quickly become the end of the world.
Part of the challenge of doing a PhD, and particularly in the current context, is learning to embrace imperfection and recognising that sub-optimal does not necessarily mean failure. Managing perfectionism involves reminding yourself that you’re only human, and that humans face stresses, make mistakes and sometimes struggle to produce their best work. Even the brightest and most competent of people have off days.
The more you can remind yourself of that, the better equipped you’ll be to deal with what life throws at you and your thesis.
15. Lastly, Remember That It’s Okay Not To Be Productive
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Thanks for the encouragement and all… but, I keep failing, and I understand it is a process. But because of my failures I’m about to be fired from my PhD. :( It is hard, yes. I keep messing up and failing, yes. I’m getting fired, yes.
Thanks for the kind words. I hope things work out for you.
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Thinking about quitting your PhD? Maybe that’s the right decision
Sometimes not completing a PhD is the rational choice, and having open conversations around it helps stop people feeling isolated and uncertain, says Katherine Firth
Katherine Firth
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We know that 30 to 50 per cent of PhD candidates don’t complete globally. Countries such as the UK and Australia, where about a quarter of students don’t finish their PhD, actually congratulate themselves on their efficient completions. While my day job involves trying to help more people finish on time, I also know that choosing to stop can sometimes be the right decision.
People quit their PhDs for a variety of reasons, including to pursue job opportunities, to focus on external life priorities or simply because they lose interest. Over the past two years, there have been even more disruptions than usual: researchers haven’t been able to travel or do fieldwork; they have had to give up in-person conferences and avoid busy labs and libraries; they got sick or the pandemic exacerbated existing health conditions; or their priorities changed.
Supervisors, candidates and universities need to be more open to having conversations about quitting PhDs. Why do candidates choose to quit, how many people do so and what happens to them afterwards? It’s almost impossible to get detailed, accurate data about completion rates. When people quit they leave the university, so we often don’t see what they do next. If we don’t talk openly about stopping, people who are considering it feel isolated and uncertain. But it isn’t rare, and supervisors are in a privileged position to recognise the signs early – and then, as appropriate, support their candidates as they successfully navigate away from the PhD.
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Academics don’t always like to acknowledge it, but your health, family, career and community are more important than any scholarly accolade. People generally think about quitting their PhDs for reasons including family responsibilities, mental health or their financial situation. Or they choose to leave because other opportunities come up. These can be rational, practical choices with sensible long-term outcomes.
After all, graduating with a doctorate is not the only pathway towards contributing to knowledge, discovering new information or being recognised as an expert. That incomplete doctorate might be suitable for a patent or to spin out into an industry application. Perhaps it makes sense to publish your findings in an academic article – or a public-facing book. Similarly, the skills that candidates have already developed in pursuing their research might be an asset in their job beyond academia.
It’s important for candidates to know that not finishing a PhD doesn’t make you a failure, and it doesn’t mean you’ll never have the opportunity to do a research degree in the future. Sometimes, now is not the right time or you’re not in the right field. You wouldn’t be the first person to return to academia after a decade in industry, or when your circumstances changed, or when your research project was safe to pursue again. The past two years have been particularly challenging for researchers who had to totally change their planned research projects. When it is just not possible to pursue the PhD you signed up for, it can be a valid decision to do something else instead.
However, I wouldn’t want to suggest that the only two options are gritting your teeth or leaving. Universities increasingly have opportunities for flexibility or support, which candidates should explore. Some adjustments are quite common if you ask around. It’s often possible to press pause on your candidature, take a leave of absence or change to part-time study. Work with the equity team or researcher development team to improve accessibility or get support. It might also be helpful to negotiate changes in the supervision team – realigning it to better support your methods, specialisation or preferences.
There are more drastic options, too. It’s possible to convert your PhD to a master’s by research. Candidates might even explore taking their project to another faculty, another university or another country where it fits better. Leaving your current situation might mean losing out on your funding or burning bridges or hurting feelings. It tends to require a lot of extra time, effort and work. It’s an extreme option, but if you’re already thinking about leaving, you are already considering radical action.
I recently wrote a book with Liam Connell and Peta Freestone, Your PhD Survival Guide , based on Thesis Boot Camp , our award-winning programme for helping get people over the thesis finish line. In our experience working with thousands of doctoral candidates around the world, non-judgemental conversations about quitting help people feel freed from having to pretend that everything is fine.
Supervisors, peers and mentors can also help identify what changes are possible to make or support candidates to weigh up their options and make a considered decision about whether to carry on or put down the doctorate, for now or for good, and pursue other priorities. PhD researchers are smart, resilient, persistent problem-solvers, and they contribute in so many ways to our world, whether or not they gain the title “doctor”.
Katherine Firth is lecturer in research education and development at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, and a founding member of the Thesis Boot Camp team. Her most recent book on doctoral success is Your PhD Survival Guide: Planning, Writing and Succeeding in your Final Year with Liam Connell and Peta Freestone.
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Should you quit your PhD?
Do you sometimes think about giving up? Should you entertain this notion seriously, or ignore it? When is it right to walk away? It’s an important issue which we haven’t really tackled much on the blog to date, which is why I was pleased when B.J. Epstein, a lecturer in literature and translation at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England offered to write a post on the topic.
BJ is a writer, editor, and Swedish-to-English translator. She absolutely loved her time doing her PhD and currently enjoys supervising doctoral students, but she is saddened by the number of PhD students who say how stressed and unhappy they are. Here she offers some advice for people questioning their commitment to their PhD.
Time to give up the PhD?
No, you think. You can’t give up on your doctoral studies. What would people say? How would you feel about yourself? Would your supervisors be disappointed? What kind of job would you be able to get if you can’t finish your PhD? Those are all natural concerns, but there are some situations where you’re actually better off letting go of the PhD and moving on with your life. If you are doing the PhD for the “wrong” reasons and you aren’t enjoying it or getting much out of it, then it’s time to let go.
There are many possible wrong reasons. I’ve talked to students who decided they wanted a PhD because they didn’t have anything else going on in their lives . Some have actually said, “I don’t have a spouse or children, and all my friends are married with kids. I needed something to do.”
If you want to have a partner and/or children, concentrate your efforts on that, and don’t use your thesis as a substitute . If you don’t want those things but you are lonely and/or you feel you need something equally important in your life, carefully consider whether a PhD is actually that meaningful to you. It might be that you’d be happier if you made some new friends or found a new hobby or changed jobs.
Other students have said that they couldn’t get a job, so they decided to continue with higher education instead. Think about whether a PhD will in fact help you get a job you want. If it isn’t leading you in the direction you want to go in and/or if it is just piling you with debt, then you might be wasting time. Similarly, if you are doing it because you think having “Dr” in front of your name will get you a job and/or other benefits, that isn’t a strong reason to continue.
If you are no longer interested in your topic and you’ve lost your passion, it might be time to give up, but you need to ask yourself a few questions first. Most researchers go through phases where they are more or less excited about their work. Indeed, all workers have tasks to do that are less enjoyable than others. Have you temporarily lost your academic mojo? If so, what can you do about it?
For some people, taking a short break (whether an actual holiday or a “staycation”) can be enough to reignite their love for their subject. Sometimes reading books on another topic altogether can help. Also, other activities – teaching, volunteering, going for a walk, spending time with friends – generally can help with research-related stress, and this in turn can help you re-focus. It may even be that moving on to a different chapter or working on a different part of your research is enough to help. Maybe approaching your topic from a new angle is all you need. Talk to your supervisors about this.
But if you’ve been feeling disengaged from your work for a long period of time and nothing you try makes you care about it again , it is probably time to consider leaving it behind. If the thought of continuing with your research strikes you as drudgery that you just can’t face, that is telling you something, and you should listen to your feelings.
An issue that can come up, however, as I mentioned above, is that some doctoral students worry that they would be ashamed if they scrap their thesis and their studies, and that others will be disappointed in them.
While it is true that people generally feel better if they accomplish what they set out to and while it is also often the case that we are very aware of others’ expectations and desires for us , none of this constitutes a reason to make yourself continue on a path that is bringing you little joy or satisfaction. Also, your supervisors won’t want to waste time chasing you up to do work you promised but never delivered, and they, your friends, and your relatives would much rather you be happy than not.
It is a hard, but brave, decision to make, and yes, it may involve disappointing yourself and/or others. There may be other implications as well (having to pay back student loans, needing to move, looking for a new job, a loss of prestige, and so on), but these all pale in comparison when you consider the fact that this is your only life , and you don’t want to waste it by pressuring yourself to do things that aren’t right for you.
People claim that “quitters never win”, but actually, for some, quitting a PhD is the best choice they can make.
Thanks for such a thoughtful and straight talking post BJ. What do you think? Is your PhD making you miserable, or does the misery have another cause? Is it time to quit or do you think you should soldier on? Have you given up on study before and then started again? Love to hear about your experiences in the comments.
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The Thesis Whisperer is written by Professor Inger Mewburn, director of researcher development at The Australian National University . New posts on the first Wednesday of the month. Subscribe by email below. Visit the About page to find out more about me, my podcasts and books. I'm on most social media platforms as @thesiswhisperer. The best places to talk to me are LinkedIn , Mastodon and Threads.
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Why I Finished My Dissertation, but Quit My Ph.D.
I’ve never been one to quit. Anything really. I mean sure, I quit pretending to be straight which caused me to quit my last marriage. I do, in fact, recognize that as a huge deal, but it took me 25 years to finally quit pretending to be straight. That’s the brut force of an ego that can’t stand to look weak if I ever saw one. I keep going and going, refusing to quit to a point that I’ve come to realize is to my own detriment and the detriment of those closest to me. But last month, after finishing my dissertation months ago, I quit my PhD program. Let me explain.
I received an email a few weeks ago reminding me that I still needed to pay tuition by the end of the month or I would be ejected from the program. “Okay, I guess it’s time to go back into scrappy hustler mode,” was my first instinct. I have always prided myself on my ability to ‘figure it out.’ Whatever ‘it’ is, I can do it and finding the money was no exception. I grew up in a extremely low-income single-parent household and if there’s one thing my mom taught me, it was the brilliance of being filthy rich in creativity and resourcefulness. It’s saved my ass so many times, not the least of which was when I had my first son at the barely employable age of 16 years old. It’s my survival strategy, my coping mechanism, my inherited genius, and I’ve always been proud of that. Hell, I’m still proud of that. After a few minutes passed though, and I allowed my body to feel her feelings, I realized that she was begging me to please stop.
You see, if I’m really honest with myself, a large part of my wanting to accomplish receiving the actual degree was to prove to myself and others that I could do it; that I was good enough, smart enough, hard-working enough, and worth being listened to. What I’m slowly beginning to realize, however, is that actually at this point I know I could get the degree. I’ve finished my dissertation. All I would have to do in order to successfully obtain the degree is pay the university $7,000 and kill myself for the next six months obsessively examining each argument I make in my writing, predict how it might be torn to shreds by fellow academics, and do everything I can to make it airtight. Making absolutely certain that I’ve successfully walked that very thin and paradoxical tightrope between making a unique contribution to the field but not saying anything that I can’t prove was said before by some old white guy who’s been deemed to have more authority on God and Theology than my small queer female teen parent voice. For a long time, I internalized that sentiment, believing that what I needed to do was prove to everyone that my story was worth hearing.
But these days, I know my story is worth hearing. And truthfully, I’m so so exhausted by the continual effort to try to prove it while putting myself under emotional stress and family under financial stress to do so. No more. It’s far more important to me to finish this project I’ve spent the last 5 years working on with my whole real and invigorated heart, instead of the heart of an exhausted student just trying to prove that what I have to say is worth listening to. Now, I want to be clear, I am not suggesting that degrees or education is useless or that the right thing to do is drop out of any academic programs you might be enrolled in. I am an educator in the depths of my being; I believe education is the key to true liberation and empowerment. I love education. What I don’t love is the academy. What I don’t love is the self-preserving models of our old institutions. What I don’t love is being told that I’m valuable because I paid someone else a lot of money so I could prove it.
The truth is, I’ve had an amazing dissertation experience. My supervisor is truly a dream and she has always encouraged the spark inside my guts to keep saying the things that need to be said, liberating my own soul and God/ess within her. The problem is not the education I’ve received. I’ve received a remarkable education. However, I also know the academy enough by now and ironically, the same critical lens I’ve developed through my educational process is the one helping me to realize that I need to quit the academy. I need to quit the sport of publicly tearing down colleagues, pretentious posturing, and criticism that goes beyond constructive critique into the realm of one-upping those around us for our own shallow reputations. Even in fields where we academics are already marginalized multi-fold. Even in fields like mine: Queer Feminist Theology. I don’t want that anymore. Participating in it only causes me to deny the divine inside myself and show up as a less fully alive human woman to bring home to my loved ones.
First and foremost, at the end of the day, what has consistently been so deeply important to me is the heart of the project I am working on and the relationships I’ve built in my program. It is no longer the degree itself, the external validation it might bring, or any potential career opportunities that it may offer. The truth is, there really aren’t many jobs in our home state that this degree would qualify me for and I’m at a point in my life that the external validation just doesn’t quite feel like a good enough reason. And so, after discussing with my family a cost/benefit breakdown of what finishing the PhD might bring… after hearing the beautiful people close to me remind me of all the hard work I’ve put into it… it has continued to become more and more clear to me from the depths of my guts that, the benefit of finishing the degree does not outweigh the costs of scraping up the money, going into more private debt, and tearing myself to shreds in my own head for the next six months. Not for me, anyway.
A tsunami wave of relief settled into my body the second after I hit “send” on the email to the university quitting my PhD. I’ve finished my dissertation, I intend to publish it, and the process of writing it has healed something deep inside of me. My work has not been in vain and it will not go to waste. I simply won’t have the respect that comes with a credential from people that wouldn’t respect me without it. And, you know what? I’m okay with that. That sacrifice is worth my renewed invitation into communion with my love for the work rather than the prize for doing it “right.”
Jeanie Whitten is the associate director of Together Lab and director of community engagement at Moreland Presbyterian Church in Portland Oregon. Prior to these roles she worked as the director of innovations in diversity for the Lutheran Institute of Theology & Culture at Concordia University.
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Why I do not give a damn about my PhD anymore
Last week I went to my doctoral office for the first time since the pandemic. It was one of those days when you get up and feel so guilty about not having done anything substantial about The Big Project, that you quickly gather your things and scurry away promising yourself that today will be the day. The day when you write your chapter, the day when you look into your notes, the day when you settle on some deadlines and be productive.
So I did something. I talked to people. I printed my notes. And I came back pissed and miserable in equal measures.
Hi, my name is Marta and I don’t give a damn about my PhD anymore.
The whole story
Let’s start from the beginning.
You see, I always imagined myself in academia. As a thirteen-year-old girl I was dreaming of going places, knowing things, being someone . But I had no idea what it takes to become a scholar and in fact, what a scholarly work is about. Nobody in my family has academic experience. I come from a small town where elites comprise of petty local politicians and medical doctors. I had this idealized image of… I don’t know honestly about what. Maybe finding myself among the knowledgeable and the experienced, of knowing the ways of the world, of having authority, of teaching others. I figured academia will give me the prestige and take the province out of me. I realize it was all very selfish. It was about me earning the prestige, climbing into the higher echelons of the society all the while losing a complex of a nerdy girl from nowhere. I wanted those who bullied me look at me and say with a hint of envy: “oh yes, I went to school with HER”.
I’d been wanting to do a PhD ever since I started university back in 2011. I found anthropology fascinating even though I didn’t understand shit until my third year. I wanted to be good , I wanted to be the best, I wanted to climb on that social ladder, have a good job, be a respected citizen, be an authority on something (take a good look at this case of a sick ambition). At that time, I believed that objectively measured success will justify my very being. To live was to work, to climb, to reach. I was also convinced, that showing up and proving I care, I will earn myself trust, position, someone will invest in me. In the end I realized, that as much as I can work my ass off, there is a special route to success, not necessarily based on your merits but rather politics of “chosen ones”. I wasn’t one of them.
I was fed up with the Polish academia and decided to do an exchange year in Switzerland. I like it here, I got to do cool things. I went to Africa for the first time, wrote my thesis and eventually got an invitation to stay as a doctoral student. Even though I felt completely drained and hesitant about starting the PhD right away, when you’re given such opportunity, you don’t toss it away. I accepted the position. Wasn’t doing a PhD all I ever wanted?
Unfortunately, I didn’t find energy to enjoy my new job. I got a scholarship and during the first year I didn’t have to work much – I was supposed to read, think, and conceptualize my research proposal. Easy-peasy. But after a year (and years before) of struggles on all possible fronts, I suddenly felt too stressed to even think about research. I got busy doing other things: I was super involved in work for a student organization, I traveled, partied, drank way too much alcohol, and tried to forget what my PhD is all about. I still read papers and produced a fairly decent research project but at the end of the year I was hitting rock bottom.
In December I found out I didn’t get a grant with a pretty much only governmental body that funds international students. Due to that I wasn’t also eligible to apply for the Swiss National Funds money and there were hardly any other projects or foundations which could support me (remember that Switzerland doesn’t belong to the UE). There was nobody I could count on except myself. But even though I continuously attended German courses I didn’t know the language well enough (it’s bloody hard and my brain was in shambles) and I could not bring myself to even think how I will manage to make money. I was starting to hate living in a student dorm, where everyone would always ask me how things are – not a bad thing in general, just when you’re struggling with finding anything positive. My supervisor and I were still finding way to send me to Ghana to start my research and everything felt so incredibly temporary that sometimes I felt it’s no use to get out of bed. Over those few months, time passed with a quality of a band aid being slowly ripped off my skin. Millimeter after millimeter.
Soon I moved out and I couch surfed at various friends for five weeks. Then I went to Ghana, then I moved into another place, meanwhile I got a teaching contract, I improved my German and started working small jobs. Did I have time to think about my data, write anything, let alone enjoy any of it? Hell, no. After five months I packed my stuff again, went to Ghana for five months, did a good job, came back, moved into my new flat, attended conferences, summer schools, taught at the university again, worked in catering. My time was full. And yet I realized with confusion, that I cannot find a single thing that makes my life worth living. I started treatment. A year after I can say there’s a lot of those things.
The Painful Epiphany
After spending years trying to make something work, it’s incredibly hard to realize that what was supposed to be a dream come true is a burden that makes you constantly miserable. I realized it this year in Ghana. I loved fieldwork and working in Ghana was always a healing time for me. I attribute it to slowing down, resting a lot, doing one thing at a time (actually – my job) and not worrying about one thousand other things. But one evening I received an email saying, that my article which I worked on for four months was eventually rejected. I cried that evening – I was furious and sad because I realized that I have no more energy to push through but more importantly, I don’t want to. I don’t want to obsess over my PhD anymore. I don’t want to feel guilty about not doing enough, not working on it enough, not writing enough, not being enough. And that evening I broke up with my PhD. It hurt but it made me feel unbelievably and joyously free.
The three goals
I had three goals when I started my PhD: first, to get better doing field research, second to become an expert in some kind of niche, and to gain experience in academic life. The first goal was achieved, no doubt about that. I cannot stress enough how much I learned during this year in Ghana. Being thrown into a completely strange culture and society, I made it. I became more generous and compassionate. I ploughed through my perceptive patterns, I disassembled residual racism, prejudices, the Western gaze. I don’t fool myself the job is done, far from it. But I started to understand another culture and be respectful in a local way.
The other goals mostly turned into a miserable disappointment. I found myself absolutely not interested in spending hours upon hours sitting at my desk reading articles. I realized I am unable to consistently go through dozens of articles and book full of theories and to compare them, to juxtapose them, to draw conclusions, to write up pages of text which has nothing to do with real life. Academic discussions are often entirely void of links to real life (although anthropology somehow still manages to stick to the ground, somehow) but clearly, my personality, my needs, my sense of fulfillment lie somewhere else. Especially when it comes to creativity – I feel there’s very little to no space for it in academia.
Over the last five years I learned that, as other fields, academia is also populated by mean, selfish, and ignorant people. I am not saying that all academics are horrible people but that even though this world should ideally be more self-reflexive, there’s still so much space for bad practices. I learned that academia is unbelievably elitist and snobbish – younger generation has to fight so hard to get space taken by old gurus, unwilling to step down and give up their thrones. That the best academics are oftentimes lost in the real world. Furthermore, I realized that this life is unbearably lonely. You read alone, you write alone, you present alone, you celebrate alone.. There are few official community links, almost no group leverage and therefore – no sense of belonging anywhere. If you add a few months a year spent abroad, you end up having no stable circles of colleagues around. I have a piercing feeling, that everyone here is solely focused on their job and saves little time to give to others. And of course, there’s a ton of competition, bullying, and behind-the-scenes collaboration.
Everyone is in this ring alone and since the resources in humanities are incredibly scarce, everyone is twice as bigoted to win their share.
No future for young academics ?
My other observation tells me, that nobody cares about passing down good academic practices. Universities don’t offer institutional support for PhD students who find themselves virtually lost. I haven’t received any major peer or institutional support. No older PhD student came to me and said “hey, you’re new to this, wanna talk?”. I recently watched a lecture by James Hayton on how to write your PhD thesis without going insane. He posed a question, how many of the present PhD students ever attended a writing course. Nobody raised a hand. Further in his lecture, he compares academics to neurosurgeons: the latter group makes sure to gather as much knowledge during their practice as possible and pass it on to the next generations. They write down mistakes, discoveries and ideas and disseminate the best practices to move the discipline forward. Therefore, new inventions, new methods are possible. It’s in everyone’s interest to bring the discipline forward, right? Well, there’s no such thing in academia! Every generation of PhD students struggle with the exact same things . Can you believe that? Nobody teaches us how to network, to write, how to publish, how to organize field research. You survive, you get the chance to make a career. I just don’t think this is how it’s supposed to be.
What is perhaps the worst, is the precarity of that work environment. Getting a well-paid position in a good institute, where you’re able to do some valuable work, is like winning a lottery ticket. You are constantly chasing new projects, new grants, new jobs, new publications. You struggle to get our work out there and guess what – nobody cares if you do. Nobody cares if you publish because nobody profits from it besides you, quite the contrary, it’s the others who lose (a space in the journal). Without rock-solid confidence and sense of purpose, you’ve lost before you even started. It is also incredibly easy to attach a lot of feelings of self-worth to your successes as an academic. It took me too long to realize, that whether I publish or not, whether I write something good or not, I am still a worthy person. Maybe even a good anthropologist. But there’s no true sense of appreciation and reward in this world.
Let’s say you finally got your PhD – what next? Doing a PhD in humanities doesn’t equip you with a set of skills improving your employability rates on the labor market. What can you say to an HR officer? I read books and thought quite a lot these past four years. And yeah, I published two articles in journals which nobody reads. No wonder UniBasel has those networking and „invent a story about your competencies” kind of workshops, which are supposed to help you find a job after your PhD. The fact is though, that most of my colleagues, who recently submitted their doctorates, live off of an unemployment benefit. Others have a working spouse. Or work – but then the time of doing your PhD stretches into eternity. Holding a PhD in humanities, to find a job you still need to monetize skills you most likely gained though other activities.
It’s not what I want and it’s ok
In the end, I think pursuing PhD in a sense of reading and analyzing, and proving, and discussing is so far removed from reality, from what life is about, from where the agency lies, that I don’t believe there’s much value in it anymore. Therefore, I tend to lean towards applied anthropology and researching for business purposes. Over the years of struggles I’ve developed a more fighting, self-assured, dynamic personality (thank you-no thank you, PhD) which I feel doesn’t belong in the academic halls anymore. I know some people might say I’m the person they need. That academia is slowly dying, swallowing itself, and it needs fresh blood, people doing things differently. But you see, I hold my mental health dearer than the future of academia. Maybe I’ll change my mind. But as for now, I’m done.
I am still going to finish that PhD. I am fully capable of writing 250 pages of text that’s good enough and defend it. I don’t like leaving things unfinished and I still want to have that title – maybe I’ll be able to use it for something good. I am also trying to develop a different career, which hopefully will provide me with a couple of years of peace of mind. And even though I just started, it has already brought me more satisfaction than any of my other scientific achievements. I think it’s a good sign to get the shit done and move on.
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What happens if I don’t do my dissertation?
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How to Finish Your Dissertation
By Kerry Ann Rockquemore
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Dear Kerry Ann,
I was hoping to finish my dissertation last year and graduate in May. But it’s August, I’m heading back for another year on campus and I’m nowhere near finishing the dissertation. The sad part is that it’s not the research that is holding up my progress (it is mostly complete) and it’s not my committee (they are supportive and want me to finish). The problem is that I’m not writing. I’m starting to think that I may never finish and will end up another A.B.D. who fades out of the program.
But I do want to finish my dissertation! And yet I’m not making any progress. I need help beyond your usual suggestion to start a daily writing habit (I tried that and it didn’t work).
Need Help Finishing
Dear Need Help,
I am so glad to hear that you are resolved to complete your dissertation, recognize that what you’re doing isn’t working and are open to new experiments for the upcoming academic year.
There’s an important reason that nearly half of graduate students who start doctoral programs don’t finish -- they never complete their dissertations. That means you’re not the only person who has struggled while A.B.D. Over the past year, I’ve worked with more than 400 dissertation writers , and I’ve seen over and over again that isolation, perfectionism and procrastination are the three biggest threats to completion.
So that leaves us with a very simple issue. If you have only one way to finish your dissertation (write it) and you know the three challenges you need to overcome to do the writing (isolation, perfectionism and procrastination), then the key question is: How can you create an environment and support systems this year that will enable you to write on a regular basis? In other words, how can you design your work time to ensure that you have everything you need to complete your dissertation this year? Only you can answer these questions, but I would like to share a few insights and gentle suggestions.
Get Real About Daily Writing
I know I sound like a broken record on this point, so I’ll be brief. You cannot binge write a dissertation over a weekend, over a weeklong writing retreat or even if you hide in a cave for a month. High-quality work takes time to produce. We know that the most productive academic writers don’t write in large uninterrupted blocks of time; they write every day (Monday through Friday) in small increments.
I also realize that it seems like everyone these days is telling dissertation writers to “ write your dissertation in 15 minutes a day ” or that “you should try 25-minute pomodoros .” And as you’ve noted, I regularly advise people to write for at least 30 minutes per day. In response, graduate students tell me “that’s pie in the sky,” “it’s impossible to write a dissertation in 15 minutes a day“ or (my personal favorite) “ Bolker really meant 15 hours a day -- the publisher made a mistake and never fixed it, sending an entire generation of graduate students into a tailspin of self-loathing and misery.”
So let me make two important distinctions. First and foremost, when I encourage you to write at least 30 minutes per day, the most important part of that phrase is “at least.” It doesn’t mean that you’re going to complete your dissertation in one semester by writing for only 30 minutes per day. It’s advice given to people like you, who are not writing at all. In fact, it literally means start with 30 minutes a day, boo. When you’ve got that locked down, work your way up to longer periods of writing.
The second distinction that’s important is about the expectation versus the reality of what constitutes writing. Many graduate students I’ve worked with imagine that writing means producing perfect prose on the first draft. I have observed students spend 30 minutes writing, revising, deleting and rewriting a single sentence. If that’s how you are spending your daily writing time, I understand why you might conclude that it doesn’t work.
Instead, consider that drafting and revising are two separate stages of the writing process. Those initial drafts are where you work out your existing ideas and generate new ones. For that reason, much of what you write is for you, for your own thought process, and may never be shared with your committee or make it to the final draft. This is why we often say “ writing is thinking !”
Win the Battle of the Moment
If you’re like the majority of dissertation writers I’ve worked with, your initial attempts at daily writing fail. Why? Because you experience a repeating and self-defeating pattern that looks like this: you set aside time in your calendar for dissertation writing and you fully intend to write during that scheduled time. Then when the time comes, you experience a subtle but powerful urge to do anything but write. It’s such a strong and seemingly harmless impulse (“Let me just answer one quick email!”) that you follow the urge where it leads you, whether it be email, Facebook, teaching prep, more reading or a snack. Pretty soon your writing time is over and you haven’t written a single word. You promise yourself that you’ll do better tomorrow, but the next day comes and goes with the same result. After a week, you decide the whole daily writing thing doesn’t really work for someone like you.
I call this daily struggle “the battle of the moment.” It’s the moment that it’s time to start writing -- the hardest moment to move through -- and if you can just get going you’ll be fine. It’s truly a battle between your future self and your resistance . One of you will win and one of you will lose. In other words, either your future will win and you’ll start writing your dissertation or your resistance will win and you’ll end up arguing with somebody on Facebook about the presidential election.
The best way to win the battle of the moment is to first understand that it’s normal for your resistance to show up every day when it’s time to write. I encourage you to become aware of it and accept it for what it is . Then set a timer for a small block of writing. ( Even 10 minutes will get you through the moment.) The goal is to win the moment each day. Once you can stack up enough daily wins, you’ll see that you’re making progress on your dissertation.
And it’s important to know that your resistance is strongest when you’re alone because it festers in isolation. But that also means that your resistance is weakest in the presence of other active daily writers. For that reason, I strongly encourage you to consider what type of writing support you can create for yourself this year. Be creative! Dissertation writers use many different types of support structures to overcome resistance: write on-sites , writing buddies, accountability groups, dissertation boot camp , Facebook groups, writing retreats and 14-day writing challenges , to name just a few.
Learn to Analyze Why You’re Not Writing and Design Work-Arounds
If you’ve tried daily writing in the past but were unable to maintain it, then ask yourself why ? What exactly kept you from the single most important activity that will allow you to complete the dissertation, finish your degree and move on with your professional life? What happened (be as specific as possible) when you sat down to write?
For most dissertation writers, the inability to develop and maintain a daily writing practice is due to one of three things: 1) technical errors, 2) psychological obstacles or 3) external realities. While I’ve written about those in detail elsewhere , let me provide a quick dissertation-specific overview so that you can diagnose why you’re not writing and then design a quick and effective work-around.
Technical Errors: Dissertation writers often struggle to establish a daily writing practice due to several technical errors. That simply means that you’re missing a skill or technique. As soon as you identify the error, the work-around is clear. Here are the most common technical errors I’ve observed in working with dissertation writers and a corresponding work-around:
- You haven’t set aside a specific time to write. (A work-around is to designate time in your calendar for dissertation writing.)
- You have been setting aside the wrong time for writing. (A work-around is experimenting with writing first thing in the morning.)
- You struggle to get started writing each day. (A work-around is to develop a writing ritual.)
- You have no idea how much time tasks take and keep grossly underestimating how long it takes to do them. (A work-around is to use a timer to collect data on how long it takes you to complete various writing tasks.)
- You don’t have any way to measure progress because you just have “write dissertation” as your daily writing goal. (A work-around is to set SMART goals .)
- You feel overwhelmed because you can’t figure out what you have to do. (A work-around is to make a dissertation plan that lays out the steps for completing each chapter.)
- You keep writing and revising the same sentence. (A work-around is to try Write or Die to permanently separate the drafting stage from the revising stage.)
Psychological Obstacles: Technical errors can be fixed with changes in your writing habits, but psychological obstacles often underlie dissertation writers’ inability to write daily. The most common I’ve observed are impostor syndrome , perfectionism , disempowerment , inner critics on steroids , fear of failure and/or success and a lack of clarity about your future goals. Regrettably, a quick tip, trick or hack will not eliminate psychological obstacles, but we can loosen their grip by increasing our awareness of their existence, reframing them and experimenting with behavioral changes.
External Realities: Lastly, I would be remiss if I did not recognize that sometimes the inability to maintain a daily writing practice results from an external reality that is beyond your control. The truth is that life events occur that directly impact the amount of energy we have to write. For example, you have a baby, someone dies, you or someone you love becomes ill and you have unexpected recovery/caregiving, you get divorced, etc. These situations can’t be “fixed,” so they require patience, compassion toward yourself, adjusted expectations and the willingness to explicitly ask for the kind of support you need.
Change Your Peer Group
In my experience, people who don’t finish their dissertations have one of two problems with the people they surround themselves with: 1) they don’t have anyone who is actively writing a dissertation in their daily life (i.e., they remove themselves entirely from contact with other dissertation writers) or 2) they surround themselves with dissertation writers who are not writing and spend their time complaining about their advisers, their campus, the oppressive nature of graduate education and/or the abysmal state of the job market.
To state the painfully obvious, neither self-isolating nor surrounding yourself with negative peers will help you develop a consistent daily writing habit. What you need most is a positive community that supports you through the ups and downs of writing a dissertation and celebrates your successes every step of the way. Every small win builds momentum, and seeing other people succeed makes it seem possible for you, too. It’s sharing the daily grind while making personal progress that reduces the isolation, perfectionism and procrastination that got you to this point.
I hope it’s clear from these suggestions that finishing your dissertation is a realistic possibility. It won’t happen if you keep on doing the things that have kept you unproductive. But if you’re willing to get serious about writing, get into a relationship with your resistance and join a positive community of writers, you will quickly start to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Peace and productivity,
Kerry Ann Rockquemore, Ph.D.
President, National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity
P.S. I love your questions, so keep posting them on my Facebook page or email me at [email protected] .
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IMAGES
COMMENTS
75 I struggled with low self confidence throughout my bachelors, masters and PhD in chemical engineering. After spending two years in Masters and six years in getting a PhD degree, I am lost at what I can do with my life. Initially, my plan was to be in academia. Though I love doing research, I don't see that as a possibility anymore.
All PhD students hate their thesis at one time or another. Here are 15 things to remind yourself of if you're starting to hate yours...
I don't know what to do. I feel like crying but I can't. I look for jobs but I don't have work experience + I want to finish my PhD. I don't know if I hate my project or I hate myself. All I know is that I am suffering.
Today I've just been told by my advisor that she thinks it would be better for me to quit after this quarter. I asked her why and she told me she thinks I don't have what it takes to complete grad ...
I hate grad school and I don't want to finish my thesis. My whole psyche is fighting tooth and nail against me doing this. I hate every second of it and it is making it hard for me to do good work and I keep making stupid mistakes. My brain is trying to give me a reason to leave. I only have a month and a half left.
Katherine Firth. We know that 30 to 50 per cent of PhD candidates don't complete globally. Countries such as the UK and Australia, where about a quarter of students don't finish their PhD, actually congratulate themselves on their efficient completions. While my day job involves trying to help more people finish on time, I also know that ...
I needed something to do." If you want to have a partner and/or children, concentrate your efforts on that, and don't use your thesis as a substitute. If you don't want those things but you are lonely and/or you feel you need something equally important in your life, carefully consider whether a PhD is actually that meaningful to you.
Why I Finished My Dissertation, but Quit My Ph.D. Jeanie Whitten cmaadmin (EDU) Aug 1, 2021. I've never been one to quit. Anything really. I mean sure, I quit pretending to be straight which caused me to quit my last marriage. I do, in fact, recognize that as a huge deal, but it took me 25 years to finally quit pretending to be straight.
The counterargument to this advice is that although a Ph.D. degree is generally designed to prepare you for a career as a professor, the skills you obtain are invaluable to other domains. It would be foolish to argue against this assertion, particularly if you already have a Ph.D. But it also ignores a more relevant point: your time is finite ...
This is the last thing I need to complete before finishing my MA and starting my PhD in the fall...and I just don't care about it anymore. I'm done with this shitty year, of ZOOM learning, of writing a paper on my couch and not the library, of shitty departmental issues, and missing out on all the social aspects of Grad school.
I don't want to obsess over my PhD anymore. I don't want to feel guilty about not doing enough, not working on it enough, not writing enough, not being enough.
I'm going to second what @999tigger said. Regardless if you're studying art, science or history - you are required to submit a dissertation. If you don't submit this you'll get 0%, which may impede whether or not you graduate. Your university has resources available to help with your writing, and there are employed members of staff who ...
In my experience, people who don't finish their dissertations have one of two problems with the people they surround themselves with: 1) they don't have anyone who is actively writing a dissertation in their daily life (i.e., they remove themselves entirely from contact with other dissertation writers) or 2) they surround themselves with ...
Don't want to publish dissertation. I graduated from my PhD program in August after an early July defense. My advisor and I updated my dissertation to make it "publication ready" and submitted for publication to a journal way out of our reach. Not surprisingly, it was rejected. Surprisingly, 5 reviewers provided detailed suggestions totaling ...
I've procrastinated working on my thesis for more than a year (thoughtsbyaashiq.bearblog.dev) If you're not just making slow progress but literally unable to make a single bit of progress, my goto strategy is similar to what writers call a vomit draft. For writing it conventionally means means writing words without stopping to plan or edit, no ...
If you don't want to do that, you probably don't need a PhD, so why go to the trouble of getting one? That said, I personally don't agree that you should never get a PhD unless you want a career as a researcher.
Whether you're studying sociology, criminology, social policy, politics or another social science subject, you'll likely have to do a dissertation as part of your university or college degree. However, choosing what to do your dissertation on can be tough!
Since I decided I don't like what I've studied for my Masters anymore, the dissertation is in something I don't want, and I can't change the topic. The only option I have is to go through with it and finish my degree, knowing I will continue working in a different domain after I graduate (which is relevant, so the degree will help ...
If they don't there is always student service or somebody in administration who can tell you how to do it. For example, in PhD program on my faculty, it is explicitly stated that you can change both PhD thesis and mentor once, no questions asked. It is wise to assume yours has similar rules, even in masters program.
Now, two years later, I'm almost done and feel like (not just my topic) but the field in general is rather boring. I almost don't even feel like being a scientist anymore. Some people have told me I should try looking for a job to see if I like it or not and if not maybe go to law school (as was my backup plan) but I'm just not sure.
28 I just finished my dissertation at a German university that requires that I include personal data (place of birth, date of birth) on the title page of the dissertation. While I have no problem giving this to the University, it has been published on the library webpage and is easily discoverable on Google. I don't want this to be publicly available.