When was the last time you learned something outside of your academic work that you then used within your academic work? I think it's time for another one of those tenuous links between two things that are seemingly unrelated, but actually are connected much more than you think. So in this episode, I'm going to be talking about nine things I learned planning my wedding that might be useful in your PhD too.
Hello and welcome to episode four of the second series of the PhD Life Coach. You wouldn't necessarily think that planning a wedding and completing your PhD are very similar to each other, but actually there's a whole bunch they have in common. You're on a fixed time schedule. You've got an outcome in your head, roughly, of what you want this thing to look like, but with no particular direction to get there. You need some complex project planning. You definitely need some emotional regulation along the way and there are about a billion decisions to be made.
I did my PhD very young. I did it straight out of my undergrad. I didn't do a master's. So, I started my PhD when I was 21, finished when I had just turned 24. Wedding wise, I've gone to the other extreme, getting married at 45. So, you know, there's time for everything.
Even with that time difference, one of the things they had in common was that neither of them had I spent my life dreaming about. So I was first generation in my family to go to university. All my sisters went, but not my parents generation. And so PhDs weren't really on my agenda. I didn't know what they were and I didn't really know what working in academia would mean or what it would be like. And if you want to hear more about that story, I have an episode, all about how I did my PhD in less than two and a half years and why, you know, more about my story, really.
So do check that one out if you want to.
Wedding was almost the other way around. While I'd always kind of wanted to get married, I never dreamt of my wedding day. You know, I didn't have a Pinterest board all set up ready with everything I dreamed of. I really didn't, I hadn't thought about that day particularly at all.
So very much the same as when I started my PhD. I didn't really have massive amounts of thoughts about it. The only difference was that I had been to a ton of weddings, whereas I didn't really know anyone who had done a PhD.
However, when I was just reflecting on the process of organizing the wedding, I realized that there was a whole load of things that the two had in common. And so I decided to do my top nine tips for you today.
The first one, any of you who have planned weddings before will have heard, but it's the same is true for your PhD as well, and that is everybody will have an opinion on what you should do, and there is no right way. There is no right way to do a wedding. There is no right way to do a PhD.
I hear a lot of my clients talk about how different people in their department tell them that a PhD has to be like this or it has to be like that and then they talk to somebody from somewhere else and they give them different advice and everyone's got an opinion on how much data you need. How many chapters you need, what format it should be in, how long it should take, whether you should teach at the same time or not, whether you should just focus on your research.
Everybody has an opinion. And it's the same with weddings. I was super lucky. My friends and family have been an absolute dream through the process of me organizing my wedding. Everyone's been super supportive and nobody has like, tried to push me into things that we didn't want to do. Andy and I were able to make all of our own decisions and we've been really, really lucky like that.
But I did get massively sucked into all the podcasts about wedding planning and all the sort of horror stories on Buzzfeed of unreasonable relatives and indeed unreasonable brides and I know how lucky we were not to have that from our families. So if you're finding that you're getting lots of opinions about how you should do your PhD, what you should include or not include, remember there is no fixed right way. And you get to decide. So you will simply need to justify to your examiners why you did it this way, why it meets the basic requirements for a PhD there's a whole bunch of different ways you can do that. Same as with a wedding. Usually there'll be components that need to be there in order for it to hit the actual criteria required, but beyond that, you get to pick what it looks like.
My second tip is kind of connected to that, to be honest. Which is, have a think about whether there are any assumptions that you're making in your PhD at the moment, that if you got rid of them, would make everything so much easier. So are you assuming... how many chapters you need to have without actually checking? Are you assuming that you have to have an intervention study in your PhD?
Are you assuming how much literature you're meant to read, how big the scope of your PhD needs to be? Is there anything where you've just taken for granted that it has to be like that, where you could sit back and go, hang on? Does it actually? Let me give you an example. So we were planning the timeline of our wedding.
And on the day we wanted to get married, the only ceremony availability was at 4pm. Now, neither of us are late night people anymore. We didn't want a massive late party or anything like that. And we wanted to spend as much of the day together as possible.
And the more we talked, the more we were like, if we don't get married till four, we're not going to see each other for most of the day and with the guests, by the time you've done the ceremony and then gone and had photos taken and then you have dinner, you've really not got that long with your guests.
And it's not often that all of our friends and family are going to be together like that. And it just wasn't sitting right, but we couldn't think of a way around it. We talked about first looks where you see each other before the ceremony, and we'd already decided we wanted to do that, but that would still mean seeing each other at like three. And it still didn't really fix the seeing our guests issue. And we thought about it and we're both scientists. So we were both like, right. What is the thing that's preventing us fixing this problem?
And we realized that the thing that was preventing us fixing this problem was the idea that people shouldn't see me before the ceremony. So everyone thinks of that big moment where the door's open and the bride appears and everyone goes, oh, isn't she beautiful? And I just didn't care about that. And suddenly... Realizing that, realizing we didn't have to do that, it wasn't a law, opened up so many different opportunities. And so what we did in the end was we did do a first look, but we did a first look at 12. Then we had our family come for a light lunch, then all our guests arrived. And then our ceremony was at four. So we got to greet people one by one as they arrived at the venue and actually spend time with them before the ceremony had even happened. And it was amazing because it meant we got so much more time with our guests. So much more time together. And it also made the ceremony so much less nerve wracking because we didn't have that.
"Oh my goodness. Everyone's looking at me" moment at the end of the aisle. Now I did only have my veil and my bouquet for that. So there was still a little bit of a, "Oh, you haven't seen this before" moment, but everything else people had seen, and it just changed the whole day. And I highly recommend it. If you're planning weddings as well, I highly, highly recommend. So have a think in your PhD. Is there an assumption that you're making that if you go, you know what, I actually don't have to do that. What could change for you? Try and question all of those assumptions.
Tip three, when you're planning your PhD or your wedding, make sure you have a plan B and that you like your plan B. We got married in a watermill and the idea was to have the ceremony outside. There's like a beautiful pergola thing by the lake, get married outside. The drinks reception would be outside. We'd eat indoors. And then the rest of the reception would be outside as well. So we weren't having a disco or anything like that. And this is July, in the UK, and as we know, that doesn't necessarily guarantee you sunshine. And our plan B was that if we can't do that, then we'll have the ceremony indoors, and we'll have the reception indoors too.
But the closer we got to the day, and the worse the weather forecast was looking, the more we realised we didn't like our plan B. The ceremony indoors would be fine, but the space available to do the things we wanted to do indoors was really not what we wanted. It would have been fine if we were having a disco like normal people do at weddings.
But we had garden games, we had a circus workshop, all this sort of stuff. And it really didn't... work very well indoors. Now, as luck would have it, it rained on the morning of the wedding. It stopped about 15 minutes before our first look and was dry and lovely for the rest of the day. So we were super lucky and we were able to have the wedding of our dreams.
But we had taken a massive risk without realizing, and that is we didn't really like our plan B. There was one. We had some umbrellas that our next door neighbor kindly lent us. But other than that, we didn't really like our plan B. Now when it comes to research, you never know when something might go wrong.
You don't get access to the archive that you wanted to get access to. You can't make the assay work that you wanted to do. You can't get access to the participants that you wanted to interview. There's a whole load of ways where your research can go wrong. I really, really encourage you to talk early about what Plan B would be, and make sure that Plan B is interesting.
Make sure it's a project that if you end up doing it, it's not the end of the world. Really avoid, as we did, putting all your eggs in one basket, and just keeping your fingers crossed that it works. It came off for us. We were super lucky. it might not come off for a research project. So make a plan B and make sure that you like it as well.
Tip four is make sure that you know who will support you with which bits. Now with a wedding there's a whole bunch of things that need doing, you know, you're picking what you're going to wear, you're picking your flowers, you're picking activities, um, You're organizing invitations, you're organizing who's coming, guest list, table plans, all this jazz.
Loads and loads of stuff. And you will have some people who are your ride or die there all the time. Love it. My little sis, absolute ledge, spent hours and hours on pretty much every element of the wedding, but other people dipped in and out. of the elements that they enjoyed and felt they could contribute to. Everyone was super supportive, but in very different ways.
One of the things that we learned rapidly was to know who to talk to about which things. Everybody was super excited about the wedding, but there were only certain people who cared what color our invitations were, who cared exactly which vases we were going to buy for the flowers.
Now, we could have spent time really wishing that everybody cared what font we were going to use on the save the date emails, but they didn't. And they didn't need to because we just needed appropriate bits of support are the bits where we needed people. And the same is true with your PhD. There's a whole variety of people that can support you with your PhD.
Your supervisors are the obvious ones, but don't underestimate how many other people there are. Obviously there are coaches like me. I have a free group coaching program that you can sign up for on my website. I'll put the link in the show notes for you. There's a monthly free group coaching. You get emails and all that jazz.
You'll have technicians, you'll have librarians, you'll have people in your graduate schools, at your universities, you'll have your friends, your colleagues in the department, other members of staff in the department. There's a whole variety of different people who are there to support you and they will support you in different ways and for different things and that's okay.
A lot of my clients want their supervisor to be a one stop shop for everything. And whilst that would be nice in some ways, it's often just not possible. Either personality wise, that's not their vibe, it's not how they are, or they don't have the skills to cover everything. Especially those of you doing more interdisciplinary research.
Your supervisor won't be able to give you advice on every element of it. And even if you stay within a single discipline, you will soon become more of an expert in that specific area than your supervisor is. So really think, who are your people that will give you the kind of positive motivation, cheer you on, tell you you're amazing stuff?
Who are the people that will give you the technical advice about why that machine is broken and how you can fix it? Who are the people that will help you proofread your manuscript at the last minute? Different people contribute different things and figuring out how to build that team around you so that every element is supported, but in kind of like a network of people, then so much the better.
Tip five, prioritize what is important to you. You might say with a PhD, well, priority is finishing a PhD. But depending on what you want to do after your PhD, or what you might want to do, will really influence what you're going to prioritise during your PhD. Or it should. So this relates a little bit back to that idea of everyone having different opinions.
Some people will tell you, you must get teaching experience while you're doing your PhD. And if you want to go into an academic job, that's probably really good advice. If you don't want to go into an academic job, though, and you dream of going off and working for a pharmaceutical company or you know, another job where you won't be doing teaching or training at all, you don't have to. You can curate your PhD experience, to prioritize the things that are important to you. And I've talked about this in a couple of podcasts before. The one that I did with Jamie Pei we talked about it a little bit, so check that one out. And I think I also talked about it a little bit in the one that I did with Holly Prescott too. Double check and have a look at those. So really spend a little bit of time thinking, what are my priorities to get out of this? Do I want to learn lots of different techniques? Do I want to travel?
Do I want to learn to teach? Do I need to make money alongside this? Do I want to really hone my writing skills? Is a publication record going to be really important? Is public communication really important? And hone your PhD to fix that. So for me, we decided that we didn't want to disco. We were still trying to be COVID cautious, we weren't that fussed. We didn't want a late night. And what we wanted more than anything was everybody at our wedding to sort of interact and enjoy themselves. And one of the things I've seen at weddings with dance floors before is there's a certain contingent that are on the dance floor. And there's a certain contingent that that's not their vibe.
And they don't want to, they don't want to be dancing and they get a bit separated. And if it's what you want Happy days, as I say. Each to their own, but we didn't want that. We wanted more everyone doing stuff together. So we had more games and puzzles and things to do and that sort of thing. And that's because music wasn't a priority.
Similarly, we wanted our ceremony to look nice, but, we weren't going to go and spend three grand on some, like, huge flower installation. The grounds of the place we were in were beautiful, and we didn't see the need to have lots of expensive flowers, so we had bouquets and little table thingies. but beyond that, we didn't spend lots of money on flowers. We did spend a reasonable amount of money on the venue and food. It was a venue that had family significance for us and we like food and wanted everybody to feel really well catered for. So that was where we put our money. And you get to prioritize what are the key parts of doing a PhD for you and make sure that you put those in first.
Because just like with a wedding, there isn't time to do all of them. There isn't enough of you to go around to everything. So prioritize what is important for you. As part of that, this is a little extra tip, as part of that, figure out what your pass fail issues are. So one of PhD students as they come through to submission is, are the corrections you're doing a pass fail issue or not? Often students in that last month, two weeks, week, day before submitting get really caught up in some real tiny things because they're just feeling very anxious about saying that their PhD is finished. And so I would regularly say to people, is this a pass fail issue?
Is tidying up that sentence, changing that, adding that reference going to be the difference between passing that PhD or not? Because if not... Let's just hand it in. It's done now. It's good enough. And the same was true with our wedding. We needed to decide what were our pass fail issues. And our pass fail issue was maximum time together. Maximum time as a couple, maximum time with our guests. So everything else was designed around that. If I'd had no flowers, it would have been absolutely fine. Find your pass fail issues and make sure you are really honing in on making sure they're done and that you're not stressing about the color of a ribbon that you don't even care about or whatever the PhD equivalent to that is.
Tip six is social media is both a help and a hindrance, whether you're doing a PhD or whether you're planning a wedding. So with a wedding, there's so much all over. My Instagram is still showing me all this wedding stuff all the time. And it's so easy to be like, Oh, I need to have one of those. And I need to have those flowers.
And I need to have that dress. And I'm gonna go. And it just gets overwhelming. At the same time, there were several things that were super useful about being on social media. You know, being able to show pictures to my hairdresser going just something like that. It's fine. That's all good. Um, being taught how to do the kissing dip.
You know, where he like leans over and kisses you and you flop back in a graceful, elegant style. Those of you who know me in real life, I'm not so good at the graceful and elegant. And Andy is quite clumsy. And we found an amazing wedding planner called Georgie. Again, if you're getting married, I'll link her in the show notes. That's not very connected. , She does videos on how to do that dip. And we practiced in our lounge. Dog thought we were mad. And then we did it the halfway back up the aisle on the way out and it was lovely. So good. So there are things that it's super useful for and the same is true for you.
So you will probably be following Twitter accounts, Instagram accounts that are about the PhD experience and seeing that other people are experiencing the same sorts of things as you. Super important. If you're not following me everywhere, please get on it. I'm still Dr Vikki Burns on Twitter, but if you search Dr Vikki Wright, you'll find that too, and I'm the PhD life coach on Instagram and on LinkedIn. I might appear on all these new Twitter replacements at some point, but I haven't yet. But find the ones that share the funny memes, find the ones that share different PhD students experience or that answer your questions and those sorts of things.
Find the ones that make you feel like your experience is normal and that it's okay to find it hard, and find the ones that encourage you to celebrate your successes. Be careful, though, of extrapolating other people's experiences into yours. One of the things that we got feedback on a few years ago with post grad training was that we were almost over emphasizing how hard the PhD was going to be.
We were so keen to tell everybody about all the support services that there are available at the university. And at my old university, Birmingham, there are some amazing support services, now including my yearly coaching program.. But the students were a bit like, Oh my goodness, how bad is it going to be at induction?
Because they got a bit caught up in all of these stories. And the same can happen on social media. You see other people talking about how stressful it is, how pressured it is, how important it is to publish and all of these things. And it can make you go, I wasn't stressed, but I am now. So just... Be mindful what you're using your social media for and really stop and reflect on the emotional effect that it's having on you.
Does it make you feel heard and reassured and newly motivated? Or is it adding to your stress? And then you can start to curate. So I started to delete out the accounts that were going on like really big, glamorous flowers and, all about the bands and the discos, cause we weren't doing any of that stuff.
I deleted all of those out. And I just found maybe four or five accounts where I actually really liked the style of the weddings that they were doing, and you can do the same with your PhD, find the four, five, six accounts that actually make you feel good when they pop up on your feed and follow them.
And you may find they change as your PhD goes through. Filter your feeds, block people that make you unhappy, follow people that make you feel better and that make you want to get on with the things you've got to do.
Tip seven, things will go wrong on the day and that's okay. People said this to me about the wedding and me being the kind of, slightly perfectionist high achiever person. I was like, nothing's gonna go wrong. I've got a manual. In fact, in my official wedding photos, I have a photo of my mum showing the photographer this huge pile of paperwork that was the manual I'd made to take the piss out of me.
So thanks for that one, mum. But I was like, no, you won't. I'm gonna plan and plan and plan and plan and plan. And nothing is gonna go wrong unless it rains. Nothing is going to go wrong. But then as time got closer towards the wedding, I started having stress dreams about all the things that were going to go wrong, that we went to the wrong place, and that nobody turned up, and yeah, all, it was the whole thing.
And you will find the same with your viva. As you're getting closer and closer, people will say no, things will go wrong, and you'll be okay. There will be questions you won't know the answer to, and you'll be going, no, no, if I just work a bit harder and I prep a bit more, nothing will go wrong. Nothing will go wrong. It will. There will be questions that you don't answer as well as you could.
And that's okay. It's not a pass fail issue. Your examiners are looking for the edges of your knowledge. If they find them, that's okay. You've just got to demonstrate that you did the work and justify the work and be able to explain it to them. You haven't got to be able to answer every single thing perfectly.
Now, the more you plan, the less chance there is that these things will go, but you can't exhaust yourself to try and cover every possible eventuality and make yourself panic in the run up to it. In reality for us, the rain held off, no one got COVID, so that was good. And the one thing that did go wrong...
It's frankly hilarious. So we had planned that we were going to come into dinner, and we haven't actually picked music to come into dinner because we didn't want to do one of those big prances in that you see on the internet, so they were going to announce Mr. and Mrs. Wright, we were going to come in to dinner, to general applause and merriment sit down.
And then before we had our dinner, we wanted to do this thing that I, again, picked up on social media, where the bride and groom run around to each table and have a photo taken with each table so that you know you've got every single guest in your photos at some point. If anyone's getting married, really, so good. Anyway, I had chosen. A fun song. I'll tell you what it was in a second. I had chosen a fun song to do for that. And so the idea was, we come in, everyone cheers, we announce what we're going to do, music starts, we've got the length of that song to get round all the tables and have the photos taken.
Yeah, we had to give our phone to the venue, who were amazing, by the way, and they were in charge of doing the right songs at the right time. And they'd done a wonderful job all the way through the ceremony and the drinks reception and all of that. They slightly misunderstood, which means they started playing our music for our entrance, rather than after we'd explained the running around the tables for the photos.
Which means that my new husband and I entered our dining room to all our friends and family to let's get ready to rumble by PJ and Duncan. Which was not exactly what it was meant to be like, but it was hilarious.
So things will go wrong, you will laugh about them, or there will be moments of embarrassment. But it'll all be okay, because it doesn't have to be perfect to be wonderful, and to be the start of a whole new phase.
Tip eight is enjoy the process. I had friends in the past who told me that they couldn't wait for their wedding to be over so that they didn't have to do the planning anymore. Whilst I understand that it can be stressful, particularly if you're on a tight budget, and there's a lot of decisions to be made, which can be a bit overwhelming, one of the things we decided really early on was that we were going to enjoy the process of everything we did to prepare for our wedding. And apart from the odd time where I had a wobble about what we're going to do if it rains, I think we actually managed that. You know, I made the invitations with my stepmum and my sister. I took other sisters when I did my dress, we took my mum for my fitting. My husband helped make decisions about most of the different things, helped with timelines, sent half the invitations, and we saw it as an entire process that we wanted to do together and enjoy together. And it was wonderful.
And I see so many people who are doing PhDs who just want to get it over and I ask them why they want to get it over and they say because they want an academic career and they want, and it's like, but this is what your academic career is going to be like.
There's going to be bumps, there's going to be research that's annoying, there's going to be forcing yourself to write stuff when you don't feel like it, there's going to be too much to do. This is what it's like. This was your dream not that long ago when you were doing your undergrad and you were doing your master's and you were thinking about doing a PhD, you were dying to be where you are now, and so often people want to rush that past.
So I'd really encourage you to learn from The experience of planning a wedding and that idea of enjoying all of the process and try and enjoy the entire process of your PhD because every stage that you're at is special in its own way and is all part of this amazing experience of getting your doctorate.
My final tip is that your PhD is only the beginning, just as your wedding is only the beginning of your marriage. There's so much pressure on both of them to be the perfect day, the perfect ceremony, through to having the perfect viva where examiners think you're amazing and it all goes wonderfully.
And... It's an enormous amount of pressure on a single day, a single event. And with a PhD, you've got this additional thing that people tell you, you've got to be making a unique contribution. And so people get caught up in, this has to be like my career's contribution. Your PhD is not your career's contribution.
Your PhD is somewhere between a job and a training program. You are learning, you're producing stuff that's useful, but it's not going to be the best thing you ever do necessarily, whether or not you stay in academia.
Getting your PhD is the beginning of whatever you choose to do next. Now that's not to say, I know a lot of you do them at different times in your life. Some people do it straight out of their undergrad, masters. Other people come back to PhDs later on. So when I say it's only the beginning, it's... Not the be all and end all. It's not the one thing that makes you valid as a researcher. It's not the one thing that will dictate everything you do in your life next.
So, enjoy this process through to getting a PhD, but also remember that there is a huge life post PhD where you can expand research findings if you want to do that. You can apply it into different sectors if you want to do that. Where you can just remember it as something fun that you did and you enjoyed it while it lasted, and now you're doing something completely different.
Whatever it is, your PhD or your wedding is only the beginning of the next phase of your life. I really hope you guys enjoyed that. I loved telling you about my wedding. It's kind of a cheap excuse just to tell you about that. And I didn't even tell you about the very best part of my wedding, so I'm going to throw in a bonus tip. Tenth tip, who knew? Bonus tip, don't be afraid to think outside the box.
Don't be afraid to do something that sounds slightly bonkers. As long as you think it will fit for what you're trying to achieve. Our version of that is the best thing we did on the entire day, other than getting married, which was the best bit. So we wanted, we love doing escape rooms. We do escape rooms with my stepdaughters quite a lot.
And so we wanted some sort of escape room type component at the wedding. And, so we were thinking about how it would work, what puzzles would involve and all of those things. I was like, but there needs to be a story. There's always a theme. What's the story? And then we came up with it. We put our cake in a cage.
Padlocked it shut and then gave the guests clues to how to unlock the padlock. They had to go off and find things around the venue and collaborate between tables and find little tokens. Anyway, it was a whole thing. Everybody loved it. No one could believe that we did it. You have no idea how excited everybody got from the littlest children through to the most grown up people at the wedding.
It was absolutely amazing. And if we'd been too, oh no, we need to do it the proper way, then we wouldn't have done it and we wouldn't have had this amazing experience.
Have you got any out of the box ideas that you could do that would make your PhD just that little bit more special? It could be things you do as part of your research, it could be things you do alongside your research. So this for me was a little after my PhD, but when I was a postdoc, I did a media fellowship scheme where I went and worked at the Irish Times to learn how to be a science journalist, and it helped my scientific public communication writing unbelievably. If I'd got too caught up in, oh no, I probably don't have time for that. I didn't have time for it. It was a month away. Who has time for that? I didn't have time for it. Am I glad I did it? Yes. Did anything fall apart? No, absolutely not. So if there is anything like locking your cake in a cage, going and doing a work experience fellowship, time in industry. I think there's a scheme where scientists can go into parliament. Not so familiar with the stuff on the arts and social sciences, but there'll definitely be things where there are partnerships with museums and local organizations and things.
Put in something special, because those are the bits that you're going to remember. No one is going to remember what color my bouquet was, or whether the menu cards stuck together properly. We got there in the end, but that was a whole thing.
What they're going to remember is that we locked our cake in a cage and they had to get it out. I've never seen people more desperate to get cake in all my life.
The same is true for you putting these additional little cool things into your PhD experience. No one's going to remember whether you had the perfect Zotero all planned out and organized and ready to go, but you are going to remember that amazing time you spent traveling or working in industry or whatever it is.
Make time, make space for the fun and cool bits that are the ones that you all really remember. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for indulging me talking about my wedding. Have an amazing week.
Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach.com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.g and have a wonderful week.