People often ask me how to finish up a PhD quickly but not many people know that I did exactly that. In this episode, I consider why people worry about finishing quickly enough and share some reasons why it was possible in my case (sneaky preview - none of it was because I was cleverer or better than anyone else in my cohort...) I also discuss the downsides of speeding through and what I think people could do instead. This is my most personal episode so far so hope you enjoy!
Transcript
Hi everyone and welcome to episode 35 of the PhD Life Coach. Today I am going to be talking about how I did my PhD in just over two years. To be honest with you, I've procrastinated making this episode. I had intended to do it sooner than this, but there's loads I hate about the entire premise of trying to do your PhD fast, and so I've really put off doing this, but I also think there is loads of merit in thinking about why you even clicked on this podcast. Thinking about why you want to know how to do your PhD that quickly.
And it's something I've noticed a lot. I get people messaging me, not my usual coaching clients and not the people in my membership, but like randoms off Twitter messaging me to say, how can you help me write as quickly as possible? And there's this real sense of urgency and this real sense of “we've got to do it now. How can I do this as quickly as possible?” that really makes me a little bit uncomfortable. And I'm somebody who's usually quite whizzing around on wanting to get things done.
So why I decided I would go ahead with this podcast now is because I really want to think about why this is even a desirable thing. Now, I haven't click baited you into listening to this. Don't worry. We are also going to talk about the things that made it possible for me to get things done relatively quickly and what you can learn from that.
But there is also going to be a massive chunk of “why do you want this?” And a massive chunk of the kind of circumstances and privileges that conspired to make this possible for me, that mean that I don't feel that it's solely my achievement to brag about, as it were.
So, as always, we're going to start with compassion. It is totally understandable that you clicked on this podcast. For some of you, you'll want to get your PhD done quickly because you are not funded and it's difficult money-wise when you're not funded, where the longer this takes, the more debt you get into, for example.
Other people will just feel like their PhD's been going on forever and you just want it to be done now. I get it. It's totally understandable and I'm not going to tell you that you should feel bad for wanting to get this done as quickly as possible. It's totally, totally understandable.
What I am going to ask you though, is a series of questions that you might want to reflect on. So the first one is, how do you think you are going to feel when your PhD is handed in? One of the reasons people want things to happen faster than they're happening at the moment is because they think they're going to feel a particular way at the end.
They're going to feel proud. They're going to feel confident. They're going to feel validated. They're going to feel like people respect them. They're going to get treated differently. They're going to get treated as an academic rather than as a student. And the problem is, as much as we tell ourselves that those things will happen when we get to the end of our PhD, they don't happen automatically.
People don't just start treating you differently. You don't suddenly feel differently about yourself. I coach people who are early career academics, mid-career and senior staff, and all of them have concerns about how they're treated. They have concerns about how they feel about themselves. At the moment, it feels like the sticky badge you need is a PhD and that floppy hat, if you have that in your country like we do in the UK, but that floppy hat doesn't automatically bestow confidence and validation on you.
I also want you to think about what thoughts are you having at the moment that are making the process uncomfortable? So another reason people want the process of doing a PhD to be over faster is because they're finding the process hard. They're finding it uncomfortable. And I'd really like you to ask yourself why? Why are you finding it so hard? And why is finding it hard a problem?
Maybe it's meant to be hard. Maybe you should feel uncomfortable. Now, I don't mean - as usual caveats - I don't mean that you should have to put up with poor mental health and all those sorts of things. That's not what I mean at all. But why is it a problem if you find it difficult along the way? Why are we trying to rush past that difficult and what's going to be at the other end of it?
Are we assuming that what you do next will be easier? I see PhD students who are desperate to get through their PhD so that they can start their academic career because they're finding, doing a PhD, stressful and they want to get on with the real thing. And one of the things we often talk about is what's going to be different over there?
If you are doing research and you are doing some leadership bits and you are doing some admin, the stuff that you're planning difficult at the moment is still going to be over there. And even if you've decided that the reason you want to get your PhD done is so that you can go into a career that doesn't use your PhD, there's still going to be different difficulties over there.
There's going to be different challenges and this belief that everything will be fine once the PhD is done can sometimes just make it feel really “grass is greener”. It can make it really mean that we don't appreciate where we are at the moment, and we instead sort of fantasize about what it's going to be like when it's all done.
I also want you to think back and remind yourself what you wanted this experience to be when you took it on, because I coach a lot of PhD students who are finding it really uncomfortable, finding it really difficult, but who dreamt for years of doing a PhD. This was their dream, this was all the things that they wanted to do, and it ended up being hard, a little bit like at the moment, you are dreaming of what it's going to be like to have finished your PhD, and when you get there, you're going to find out there's going to be some hard stuff too. So really thinking about what did I want this experience to be and why am I looking to shorten it? Why am I looking to make this a two year experience instead of a 3, 4, 5, 6 year experience, depending on where you're studying in the world.
And I want you to think about how could it be different if instead of looking for ways to shorten this experience, to get it done quickly, I look for ways to make it less uncomfortable, to make it less frustrating, to make myself feel validated now, to make myself feel respected and confident now. How would it change your experience and would it allow you to experience the PhD in its full length without wishing it passed?
I also want you to think what you believe about people that finish quickly. So, in my coaching membership that I have at the University of Birmingham at the moment where students get access to two sessions a week of coaching, I have students who are writing up, they're into their fourth, fifth year. Some of them have been disrupted by covid, for example, and many of them have a narrative where that makes them a less good PhD student.
The fact is taking them longer makes them a less good PhD student. And I want you to really question that in your mind. What would you believe about yourself if you were someone who finished quickly? What do you believe about me because I finished quickly. I think I'm the fastest person I know to finish a PhD. I think. What do you make that mean about me?
Because in a minute I'm going to tell you all the things I make it mean and I am absolutely sure it's not the same things that you are thinking right now.
If you think that finishing your PhD quicker makes you a better PhD student, makes you a better academic, means you'll progress faster, really query whether those things are true, because from my perspective over here, those things aren't necessarily objective truths.
So let me give you a little backstory. I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Birmingham and in my third year I had to do a research project and I was allocated to a wonderful member of staff who absolutely ignited my interest in research. I had no intention of being an academic. I was going to be a primary school teacher, and those of you who know me can probably imagine me being a very bossy primary school teacher.
But no, I got the bug for research and I loved it and I was in a very privileged position that partway through my third year, my PhD supervisor offered me a funded PhD position, said, if you want to stay, there's a post here for you. And so I decided to stay. I graduated in July, 1999 - last century, I know I'm old. I graduated from my undergraduate degree in July, 1999. I started my PhD at the beginning of October, 1999, and I handed in in December 2001. So I handed in two years and three months after I started my PhD, and we had to seek special permission for that to happen because three years is meant to be the minimum registration.
I'm going to tell you a whole bunch of reasons why that wasn't about me, and I'm going to tell you a whole bunch of reasons why that didn't necessarily lead to everything being like amazing, high-flying career and perfectness afterwards.
But before I do that, I just want to say I am proud. I'm proud that I did my PhD. I'm proud that I achieved what I did within my PhD. I'm proud that I showed that I could finish something because that was something that I would question about myself. So none of this is about being modest. It's certainly not about being falsely modest and none of it takes away from the fact that I am proud of my PhD.
I'm not proud of the time I did it in because so much of that was outside of my control. So I accept a hundred percent that not everyone would've been able to do what I did. And do I take pride in that? Maybe a little bit. Not everyone would've been able to get it done in the time I did it, but it wasn't me and my abilities and my amazingness that made it happen.
It was a whole cluster of circumstantial things that meant that that was how it worked out. And could other people have done what I did in my situation? Yes, absolutely. I would say that the vast majority of PhD students, if they had been in my exact combination of situations, would probably have been able to do it too. Okay, so none of this is to do myself down. None of this is false modesty. This is just genuinely, I want you to understand the massive combination of things that had to happen in order for this to be possible. In conclusion on that, my abilities, my skills were necessary, yes, but they were not sufficient. They didn't do it on their own by any stretch at all.
One thing, I was already there. I'd done my undergrad degree there. I was settled in housing, so there was no changing country, there was no changing university, there was no getting to know anyone. I was working with the exact same person again, so I literally turned up at the same place and carried on. Don't underestimate how much time that saves you. Are there down sides to that? Yes, absolutely. And I'll talk about some of them later, but it absolutely meant that I started running.
It wasn't directly related to what I did in my third year project, um, but everything was so familiar that I knew how it worked, and enabled me to start quickly. Another thing you might have noticed, there was no masters in there. I did a BSc and then I went straight into my PhD. And again, unusual combination of events. My supervisor didn't think there was any benefit to me doing a Master's. The PhD I was doing was a very interdisciplinary PhD and so there wasn't like one master's that would've absolutely made sense. I worked at the intersection between, psychology, neuroendocrinology and immunology.
So I looked at how stress affect health. And you know, I could have gone and done a Master's in psychology or I could have gone and done a Master's in immunology, but we didn't really see what benefit it would bring for the project, and my supervisor was happy with that. A lot of supervisors wouldn't have been. I was at that stage in my life where I just thought this cool opportunity, I was like, yeah, let's go. Let's do it. I don't think I thought it through much beyond that, to be honest. but that's quite an unusual position to be in.
I also, by chance, as much as anything, ended up with a pretty amazing combination of supervisors. So the supervisor who'd looked after me in my third year project, he was head of our department, which meant that he was in a position to just give me a PhD studentship. He had that power over finances and decisions and those sorts of things. And that also meant he had access to money and resource. So there wasn't any waiting around for grant money to do particular things. That made things pretty straightforward.
But I was also second supervised by somebody who, at that stage was reasonably well known in his field, but reasonably early in his career.
So he was probably 10 years postdoc, something like that at this stage. Well known in a related field, but not specifically what I was working in. He was at that stage of his career where he had time and capacity to put into me. He had enough space to be in regular contact with me and those sorts of things.
I also had the bonus, they were best buddies, so my head of school and my second supervisor, the other member of staff best buddies, spent so much time together, and so I was immediately in this really friendly support network where they saw each other all the time and talked about this stuff all the time.
They had also already established a relationship with the immunology department at the university where there was an absolutely amazing clinical immunologist who was insightful, open to the fact that psychology could impact immune function, which at this stage in the nineties, most people weren't. And who had access to all the assays that we needed, the technical support that we needed.
So I was in this hugely privileged position of having like this perfect combination of seniority and access and resource and friendliness and social network and all of this that made it incredibly easier than a whole bunch of the situations that I could have ended up in.
As an example, we had lunch, so not the immunologist, the other two, and me and some of the other PhD students had lunch together every day. Five days a week, we toddled off to the staff canteen and had lunch together. 12 o'clock off for lunch. That was just our routine.
That is not typical. That is not something that you can expect to happen. Academia was a different time then. We're talking 24 years ago, which is slightly scary. It was a different time. So when people are like, oh my goodness, you finished your PhD so long quickly. I'm like, yes, I've finished it in a different world. And yes, it was unusual then. But the things that made it possible then absolutely don't happen now.
Would members of staff in similar career stages to them now go for lunch together every day with their students? No. Absolutely not. But what it meant was I had constant feedback. I had constant praise and motivation and accountability because we were chattering about ideas, not in formal meetings where we wrote stuff down, but just while we ate our pudding. Because apparently we had pudding every day as well.
So it was highly, highly productive environment. It was also at that stage, this wonderful combination of a relatively small school. There was maybe 10 of us in my PhD year, something like that, maybe 30 PhD students in total, but we were a world renowned school, so everybody knew our school. We were really well connected, but we were pretty small and therefore got lots of attention as well. Again, unusual, completely different if you are like one little fish in the middle of a massive med school or something, totally different environment.
My topic also was a whole bunch of things that kind of conspired to make it perfect at the time. It was a relatively new way of studying something that had been studied a while. It wasn't a brand new, I wasn't like, bashing through walls that were up, that this was a new idea that nobody believed in. Lots of people had been looking at stress and immune function before me. Nobody had been looking at stress and vaccination response, or a few people had done one or two studies, and so it meant that I was in a position where, people were really ready for this.
There had been one or two proofs of concept. There was a whole bunch of questions still to answer, which meant that I wasn't having to convince people of it. But equally, I wasn't having to compete massively with loads and loads and loads of other people doing this. I basically knew all the people who were doing this sort of research in the world pretty much, and so when I was ready to publish studies, there were journals ready to take it because they wanted more of this stuff. Publication, it wasn't that it was easy, but it was inordinately easier than trying to publish things that are more saturated. Things that are more early stage and more controversial, and all those sorts of things.
I was also in this wonderful balance where my supervisors were highly experienced in writing. They were highly experienced in the general field of how emotions affect health. They were highly experienced in statistics and all of these sorts of things. They highly specialists in the specific bit that I did, so they'd done some bits of stress and immune function. They certainly hadn't done stress and vaccination responses before me.
And what that meant was I had this amazing support network that would mean that anytime I had a problem, they could move me along, but they weren't micromanaging every reference I included because I knew the literature better than they did. I didn't have this sense that, “oh, they could write this better than me, or, this isn't good enough. They're going to think I'm rubbish” because I knew the area as well as anybody, and so that gives a sense of confidence. So having this sort of combination where your supervisors are enormously useful, but you're not in competition with them in knowledge wise, again, massively productive and super helpful.
It also meant I had quite a lot of freedom, so they weren't hugely invested in which direction this had to go in. They were invested in me and my success, but they weren't invested in, “we have to study it like this and we have to do this next.” So there was a whole bunch of freedom to pursue things I'm interested in, which for me is super important, but to also pursue things that came up.
And that was one of the things that really helped this project move fast was the ability to be serendipitous. So we were reminded that all medical students have hepatitis B vaccinations and have their antibody responses to that (so how well they've worked) measured as part of their program. We were able to piggyback in that and just do a whole bunch of questionnaires. Somebody else was doing all the testing already. They were already giving them the vaccine. They were already testing it afterwards, and so we were able to do a really fast study by being able to piggyback on something that was already happening.
And that was because we were open to those opportunities. We were at that kind of early stage where we could just jump into things and see what happened. And on that, the other thing that I was super lucky about was that these designs weren't necessarily that complex.
We were giving people vaccines, measuring their responses to them. We could get data collection done just over the period of a month or two. Yes, we had follow-up bloods like six months later, but it wasn't huge intervention studies. It wasn't accessing really hard-to-find archives. It, yes, we had to go through ethics, but we were doing stuff that was all like pretty mainstream. No one. We weren't sort of harming participants or doing anything complicated, and so it sort of just conspired to be pretty straightforward.
The other way I was lucky - the studies worked. We found things. So it's enormously easier to write up a paper if you confirm your hypothesis, if you find exactly what you were looking for. And I'd love to say that we found those things because we made amazing hypothesis based on the literature, and I'm sure that was part of it. But sometimes data just doesn't work out for you.
And I had that with PhD students later down the line, it becomes harder to publish when you don't find what you thought you would find. In my case, they all just kind of muddled out and it worked out fine, which made it really easy to write up and made it really easy to get accepted in places.
I also use mostly standard assays. So those of you who aren't on the biochemical end of things, assays is how you measure stuff in a bodily fluid or anything else for that matter, and I was measuring antibody responses to vaccination. These were all established tests. I didn't have to do methodological development. I didn't have to make this work in my lab. Again, I've done all that stuff with other PhD students since then, and it's much harder when you have to go through all that kind of uncertain phase as part of your data collection.
We could send them to the lab and they got measured. It was super straightforward. So again, a whole bunch of reasons that meant this went faster, but weren't anything to do with me bringing this like brilliant thing.
I also wrote with my co-supervisors. So what that means is we literally sat around a computer together writing. I was always the one on the keyboard, partly because it was my PhD, and partly because their typing was painfully slow. Couldn't deal. I was the one typing and I was the one leading where we were going and stuff, but I was like checking it with them. We were brainstorming what would be where. I would do the polishing, do the editing and all that stuff separately, but that kind of initial thing of getting down a rough draft, we did it together.
So I still take ownership over my writing. Absolutely. But how much easier and how much faster is it that if you are going, “does this sound right” to be able to turn to your supervisor and go, “does this sound right? You're happy? I'm happy. Okay, let's go and keep going”. Sounds inefficient. Sounds like there was, you know, lots of people sitting around where maybe one person could do it, but oh my goodness, so efficient. There was no waiting for emails back. No waiting for comments. We would just talk about it.
I also was studying in a department where they were quite early adopters of thesis as papers, so I didn't write a thesis that was introduction method, series of results, discussion. I wrote a thesis that was a general introduction, relatively short. I had four separate papers. Within each of which we're intro method, results, discussion, and then a general discussion on the end. So what I wrote for my thesis was also what we put out for publication.
In fact, we did that as we went along. So the other thing that sped this along was that by the time I was writing my last papers, I was already going through the review process of my first two.
And so when I went into my viva, I had like three publications. And so whilst I was nervous about my viva, we knew it would pass because it was publishable. There was sufficient work there and it was publishable. And that was possible cause of the way I was able to structure my thesis. It also meant that because I was publishing in journals with a relatively short word count, my whole thesis is really not that big.
It was highly productive, but it wasn't that long because each of my papers are only like 3000 words and I have four of them. Bits beginning and end, that was about it. That helps enormously. So remember, one PhD isn't a set length, it's not a set thing. When somebody says they finished their PhD quickly, that doesn't mean they wrote 80,000 words. I did not write 80,000 words. I didn't write 40.
Then from a personal perspective, I was funded. I wasn't funded well, but I was funded and I was funded enough that I could afford to live. I had a cheap housing because my mate's dad owned the house, so it was cheap. I didn't have to have another job, therefore, so I could work really properly full-time on my PhD.
I had a social network because several of my friends had stayed on. I was culturally similar to a lot of people in my department, which made it just super easy to fit in. It's not saying it's a problem if people are culturally different, obviously, but it can make it more challenging sometimes. So I had this enormous privilege of just being like, “yeah, you fit right in. That's fine.”
I was writing in my first language. So I often find people who compare to me and like, “oh, you did it so quickly. I'm taking ages”, are writing in a second language. I'm like, I, I can barely order lunch in a second language. I was writing in my first language. That helps enormously.
I did have one thing that could be considered a disadvantage, I guess, a lack of privilege, which is I had what I now believe to be undiagnosed ADHD, but actually in that environment, it really wasn't that much of a disadvantage. If I was doing a PhD where I was having to put my bum on a chair and do it on my own all day, every day, I would've… - I don't wanna say, I don't think I'd have got through. I liked believe I would've figured it out, but I don't genuinely don't know how that would've worked. It would've been really, really painful.
But actually, if you take somebody with undiagnosed ADHD, give them an inordinate amount of support, an inordinate amount of attention and positive feedback, we get on really fast. And so I had this situation where I was able to write really quickly because I was getting near constant feedback from my supervisors, and then it's really easy in that situation to just crack on and do it. So we kind of benefited from the hyperfocus that can come with ADHD, whilst also massively compensating for all the things that were challenging. I didn't know that was what we were doing. Nobody talked about me having ADHD at the time, but those events kind of conspired to mean that I ended up in an environment that really, really worked for me and my needs.
I also… now I'm going to say I'm not a perfectionist, and some people who know me listening to this will laugh at that. I am a perfectionist in the sense of I expect to be good at things. I am a perfectionist in the sense that I expect to be able to do everything and that be okay. So quantity wise, I'm a perfectionist.
However, I've never been a detail-oriented perfectionist. I've never been someone who you can't take the essay off because they're tinkering with it and trying to make it perfectly, perfectly perfect. I'm somebody that if it's 97% done, it's done. Happy days, let's hand it in. And that really helped. So I never had that “Oh my goodness, is it good enough? Maybe I could just tweak this bit. Maybe I could tweak this bit. It'd be like, I've gone through it, they've gone through it. I've changed it. Happy days, let's submit.” And that massively helped as well.
So I wasn't having to kind of overcome those kind of perfectionist tendencies. The other thing was there was a massive incentive. So how this all came about was I was due to spend the same amount of time as everybody else, three years, and then maybe a bit of write up, but the person who was a postdoc in my lab at the time - so that was another source of support that I had – she got another job. and so she was due to be leaving in the June of my second year.
I was just coming up to the end of two years. We were at a conference and she had handed in her resignation, and my supervisor said, “if you can be written up by Christmas, you can have the job in January.” And so I was also in a position where there was a massive incentive for me to get it done, but there was also a massive incentive for my supervisors to get it done as well, because they wanted me to have the job. They didn't want to have to recruit somebody else. And so there's an incentive for them to get me through.
And, I didn't have to do job hunting. So loads of you are trying to write up your PhDs whilst also job hunting. I didn't have to do that, I just had to write my thesis. Now, I don't want to say “just” because obviously it was work, but when, when you're not working for money, I didn't have children, I didn't have any responsibilities and I didn't have to look for a job and I had tons of support, t was alright. It was fine. You know, there was a few late nights, but it was fine.
And so again, as I said, I don't want any of this to be like, “oh, I anyone could have done it.” I don't mean that. But what I mean is any of you in my situation probably would've done the same thing. Anyone who is already a pretty good PhD student in my situation, could have finished as quickly as I did. This is nothing specific to me at all.
Now before I go onto the bit where I do actually say, what can you can learn from this, I also want point out some downsides because people think this is all shiny magic. This is like, “oh my God, they're so amazing. You’re in job already, da da da.”
You know, I started my postdoc position just after my 24th birthday. I was young. But there was a whole bunch of downsides to this. And the first one was related to that being young. I was in a department now where all of a sudden I was staff. And in my postdoc position, it was a teaching postdoc position, so I was supervising students and I was starting to supervise PhD students as well.
And so I ended up in this weird position where my kind of demographic cohort was the PhD students, but my professional cohort was the members of staff. And that was really hard. And I don't think I necessarily navigated it well. I was friends, like my social group or PhD students for way longer than probably would've been professionally advisable, who knows, and it made for some really blurry boundaries. It made for some really complicated situations. You know, I muddled through it, but I'm not sure it went well and there was definitely downsides to being so young in an academic role like that.
I also had massive imposter syndrome. I don't mean in the sense of not deserving my job. I knew I could do my job, but in terms of believing in the depth of my knowledge. I really believed my PhD was rushed. I really believed that while I was good at getting studies done and I was good at getting them written up, I didn't necessarily have the depth of understanding that I felt I should have by that stage.
And some of that is the perils of working in interdisciplinary science. No one can be quite as, um, what's the word? No one can be an expert in all areas in interdisciplinary science. So looking back, I think a lot of it was by nature of working in interdisciplinary way, but a big chunk of it was knowing that I had gone through my PhD so quickly and it really made me doubt myself. It really made me over dependent on further qualifications.
So as an example, during my postdoc, I actually went back and did part of a masters. So I have a postgraduate certificate in immunology and infection that I did as a full-time student while doing a full-time job at the university because I was so worried about my lack of in-depth immunology knowledge. Did I need to, probably not. Was it useful, maybe. Was it driven from imposter syndrome that was caused by my thoughts about having finished so quickly. Yes. Hundred percent. Okay, so there's downsides to all of this as well.
Another downside was that lack of a cohort and lack of a feeling of cohortness. I didn't really celebrate finishing my PhD because none of my friends were anywhere close to finishing. Most of my friends took at least another year, if not more, and I felt really socially awkward about that. I didn't wanna be “Hey, yay, I’ve finished. Come and have a party with me. I know you haven't, but party with me.” So I didn't really - I celebrated my family a bit because they were proud, but I didn't really celebrate with my cohort. It was really awkward and there were people that didn't like it and I found that really difficult.
Even since then I've been generally embarrassed more than anything. Because when people, when you tell people, they're like, “oh my God, you must be amazing. Are you the person that finished in two and a bit years? Oh my God.” And you don't get to tell them all the story that I've just told you. You don't get to tell them all the reasons why it wasn't because you were amazing, it's just a cluster of things and that you are just pretty middling to compare to everybody else. So I was just generally pretty embarrassed about it to be honest and tried to avoid talking about it whenever I could.
Then there are some things that aren't downsides, but they're like, not upsides.
So some people are like, “you must have progressed so fast.” And I look at people in my cohort and I would say, I'd say I progressed middlingly. So I reached full professor, which I'm super proud of. I reached that when I was 43. Other people had reached it before me who were either cohorts behind me or similar cohort. So did it help me progress faster? Probably not. Am I the most successful person in my cohort? No, not by a long stretch. There's people off all over the world doing super exciting things, creating incredible careers.
So has it meant that because I did it fast, I went further and faster? No. I'm really happy with my career. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I haven't achieved, but did I achieve because I got that done so quickly and got on first? No. That wasn't what did it. In fact, other than the niggling doubts that remained in my mind about whether I was good enough or not while I was, whether I was well trained enough, after a couple of years, it just wasn't even a thing.
It is amazing how fast something becomes unimportant. I have the same conversation with undergraduates when they're freaking out about whether they're going to get a first class degree or a 2:1 or whatever. No one knows what, what degrees did your supervisors get? No idea. I have this conversation with some of my PhD students on the membership.
I say, how long did your supervisor take to write up? No idea. How many changes did your supervisor get? No idea, because it really rapidly, doesn't matter. Once you get to the stage where you've got to your PhD, how long it took, how many changes you had, none of these things matter. They're just not markers that are important, and that's why I'd really encourage you to be really skeptical about anyone who's giving tons of advice about how to get your PhD done really quickly, because it's just not an important marker.
So what do I want you to learn instead? I want you to learn that you can be proud of things. I've got a podcast next week about being proud. You can be proud of something without taking credit for every element of it. So I am proud of my PhD. I'm proud of what I did, but there's huge amounts that were out of my control.
I'm going to encourage you to be careful what you wish for. Getting these things done faster isn't necessarily the dream you think it can be and sometimes it can create different challenges that you can't even anticipate at the moment. And I'd really encourage you to think, what do you actually want? You think at the moment you wanna finish your PhD faster. What do you actually want? Do you want a feeling of security? Do you want that feeling of validation? Do you wanna feel like you're enjoying what you're doing?
How about instead of figuring out how to finish your PhD faster, you figure out how to do that now? How can you make yourself feel validated now? How can you make yourself feel secure now? How can you make yourself enjoy what you're doing now?
Because not only will that make things feel better, it also makes it more easy for you to get on and do your PhD as well. So ironically, it might make you more efficient in the long run too. But really ask yourself, what are the feelings that I want and how can I generate them now rather than trying to generate them by whizzing through this as fast as I possibly can?
Next one, everyone's journey is different. Some people do it fast, some people take ages. It tells you nothing about where you're going to end up. Everyone's journey is different. Focus on your own, not where everybody else is. I know I caused inadvertently a whole bunch of pain for people in my year who looked at me and were like, “oh my God, if she's finished, should I be?”
I never intended to create those thoughts and I hate the fact that I did. They have to take responsibility for their thoughts. I know that now, but I beat myself up about that for a really long time. So if nothing else, reme. So if nothing else, remember everybody's journey is different.
Next one, support is everything. This was possible because of the support I had, the scaffolding I had, and the amount of fun we made it. I genuinely loved every day of my PhD because we had a laugh. We had a good time, and we worked together. If you don't have that automatically with your team like I did, I want you to think about how you can generate it, how you can generate it with the team you have in tiny steps. Listen to some of my previous podcasts about building community and things like that, if it would help. Or how can you generate this in your life aside from your normal supervisory team. So if your normal supervisory team aren't providing this sort of scaffolding and support and cheerleading that I just fell on my feet and got, how can you generate that for yourself?
So that you can support yourself, so that you can scaffold yourself and you can make sure that you enjoy this journey no matter how long it takes. Thank you so much for listening. This was a really personal one for me this time, so I hope you forgive me waffling on, and I hope you found something useful in there.
Thanks for listening and I will see you next week.