 Right so let's talk PhDs. I've had this talk with about a dozen students in the last couple weeks so I thought I'd video some of the key points so that there's a record that people can refer to if I'm not available or if you want some more info or revision. This is going to be a longish lecture explaining the idea behind a PhD, what it involves and a little bit about my journey through one for context. I'll cover the ups, the downs, all the things you might experience and this should help you decide if it's right for you. Now the important thing is that this is mostly from my experience and my perspective and that perspective is one that applies mostly within STEM subjects and even then mostly within chemistry. It does vary from place to place, from discipline to discipline and there are alternatives, there are exceptions. I'll try to stick to describing the most common setup that applies to us. Don't just rely on me for advice, speak to other graduate students, speak to admissions officers, read websites, all of that, there is no downside to you being over informed. So with that in mind let's go. So to break down the jargon and structure everything a PhD is a type of postgraduate degree. A postgraduate degree is a qualification that you start after you graduate with a conventional university degree like a B, S, E, O, N, M, Chem. But to clarify not all postgraduate degrees are PhDs. So we normally break down postgraduate degrees into PGT and PGR, that's postgraduate taught and postgraduate research. So if you're applying you may want to check on these letters just in case. Some university application forms mix in both types of programme together some separate amount. So check and don't accidentally apply for the wrong thing. So PGT include taught programmes that work like a standard university degree such as a standalone master's degree, an MA or MSc. So you turn up to lectures, you take exams, maybe do a short project and they're over and done within a year. That is a full year, they're not normally restricted to the standard university terms or semesters you experience as an undergraduate. You can find yourself working September through to the following August, graduating the January afterwards. Now the student finance implications of doing these PGT degrees are also a little complicated. You can find that it might be financially worse for you to do a BSc plus MSc rather than an integrated four years master's. But the standalone master's degrees are more widely recognised internationally and give you a little more time and experience. You might also get a tuition discount or bursary if you stay within the same university or department to continue with a PGT degree. Now postgraduate research degrees can include things like MSc by research. Now these are master's degrees that are much more heavily weighted towards doing full-time research on a project that lasts most of a year. And these by research degrees tend to be on a sort of sliding scale so the purpose and categorisation may vary from place to place. At one end they're taught like an MSc but with a bigger research component and at the other end they're effectively the first year of a PhD itself allowing you to convert directly to a PhD at the end if you're successful. Now in fact the first year of a PhD programme is often on paper at least a master's degree to give you like this exit after a single year. So if not MSc then MFIL or similar. This is something you should definitely check before saying yes to any PhD position. So one of these master's degrees will be your likely escape route to 12 months in if you need it. Anyway my advice if you're applying for any kind of PGR or PGT degree is to have a very good talk with the admissions people wherever you're applying to. Read the websites carefully, attend the open days and prepare and ask good questions. You have nothing to lose by being over informed. So this brings us to where the PhD fits into all of that. So a PhD is a postgraduate research degree, a PGR and is a higher level degree qualification that's awarded for contributing original research. In short to get a PhD you need to in some way expand human knowledge in a fairly notable way. Now this requires writing a long form dissertation known as a thesis and it's a massive report on everything you've done and discovered and learned throughout your time on the programme. So it's a document that will take over your entire life, it will live in your head for months on end, you will spend endless weeks proofreading it and you'll still discover a major typo on the first page the instant you get the final hard bound copy back. Now at the end of all of that, once you've submitted it, the thesis is reviewed by a panel of relevant expert examiners. In the UK the standard is for two to three people at most, in other countries it may even be a much larger panel you have to face down in a Viva and a Viva is an interview slash discussion slash argument normally lasting between two and many, many hours. You will spend a couple of weeks panicking about it, the first half hour the Viva itself you'll be stressed to hell but thankfully it's never as bad as you expect, it's certainly a breath for anyone to fail at the Viva stage. Its main purpose actually is to ascertain whether you've plagiarised anything by making sure you know your own work, I mean that's it really. They have had fancier purposes in history but that's the usual modern rationale for having them. Now your PhD experience is not necessarily all research, there may be some sort of taught component involved, however they tend to be done more as continual personal development or CPD activities and for that you will often have access to a lot of staff training courses as well as student ones. So these activities can be a lot more varied and diverse than the courses you see on a PGT or a undergraduate degree. My for instance range from learning about an obscure form of ex spectroscopy that I have never actually used to do in media training like a full course on how to deliver interviews to the news on radio and to camera. It's probably one of the things I still directly use the most now but predominantly a PhD is research and that puts you at least in a STEM context on the lowest rung of the research ladder. You're an actual workhorse of science at this stage. So you see when you read these wonderful inventions and the news stories and scientific developments you get to read all the quotes from the superstar academics and they get all the credit but the real work the actual hands on doing is usually all in the hands of their postgraduate researchers who often go uncredited. That's one of the downsides and one of the things people are fighting to change to get better recognition for PhD students who do that work. So to put that rung in more context you normally go from an undergraduate to a postgraduate researcher and then to a postdoctoral researcher or postdoc. So postdocs are the people who are full-time members of staff but aren't lecturers. Their job is entirely research and publishing papers about it. So they will have contracts that all tend to be fixed term normally between one and five years. They tend to move around a lot and if you want to consider the academic route you should learn about these positions too before going into a PhD. Personally I sort of skipped that postdoc stage because I went from PhD to teaching fellow which is this weird hybrid where you take on all the teaching responsibilities of a full member of staff but with the respect and salary of a postdoc. So after a few jumps around my job title is now lecturer and if you want to do the academic route that's the end goal. So yay I made it onto that track which also puts me in the minority. That's why I have to put a caveat on everything I say. This is my experience. It is not by any stretch of the imagination universal. So the ideal academic route is that you go from postdoc to postdoc to electorship. In North America they describe that as a principal investigator or PI. These are people who are responsible for running a lab, for recruiting postgrads, postdocs and training them and importantly writing up papers and grants to fund the research. So terms like lecturer, senior lecturer, reader and professor are all ranks within that which reflect your responsibilities and success. So for completion's sake in North America these titles are variations on professor like associate professor or assistant professor. Of course this is a difficult track. There are fewer and fewer people at each step and it's worth pointing out at this stage there are also proportionately fewer fewer women going up these steps and fewer and way fewer people of colour there. I don't want to get into that too much because it's sort of out of scope of this discussion but it's a thing. A bit of a sour thing to end an introduction on but it's definitely a thing. The upside is that progress is being made and the structural and systematic barriers in this pipeline are really being taken a bit more seriously now. It's not perfect yet I don't know but it's slowly getting better. Maybe if you're watching this you can become part of the solution too. Right let's talk money. There is a more specific primer on the terms and possible funding models available on finderphd.com but I'll cover the fundamentals here. It's boring and horrible but we need to do it. It'll lay the groundwork for later on. Most PhDs in sciences are funded that means a project supervisor has written a successful grant application and has money to pay you as a researcher for your time. You may be able to get funding in the form of a scholarship and the supervisor will pay up with resources but that's one of the specifics I don't really want to do a deep dive into. Again read around always check funding before applying. Generally speaking completely unfunded PhDs are very uncommon in science and are honestly only accessible to the independently wealthy. You really cannot expect to fund your rent food and life for several years on a simple part-time job while doing a full-time research degree. Some people have done it but I pretty much guarantee they did not have a good time doing it at all. Also you really should not be supplying universities with free labour. Anyway most STEM PhDs are full-time that's five this week each week of the year in and out of turn time but they are normally paid too. You will probably get a stipend for all your trouble. This is not quite the same as a salary for one thing it's usually paid in terminally or quarterly installments and another it's not taxed. Again that might vary from situation to situation but it is the common way to get paid. Normally isn't much usually just about breaking minimum wage if not slightly less when you divide two by the full hours you end up working but hey you're still a student so student discounts yay. You can also supplement this income through teaching. For chemistry that normally means teaching lab demonstrating. Usually that's paid on the order of like 10 quid an hour plus some nominal amount for marking. That's not a lot but not too shabby if you can get a lot of it. But if you spend too much time demonstrating your supervisor will get annoyed at you because you're taking time out that technically they're still paying you for so you need to balance it. The exception to that might be graduate teaching assistant jobs sometimes known as teaching scholarships. Again the terms vary from place to place. These are contracts where you're doing PhD research but you fund it and earn your stipend by working for the university as a demonstrator. Usually you have a minimum number of contracted hours per year that you work for for free and then you can get paid by the hour if you exceed that. Now if that sounds like a swindle then yeah it kind of is but the flip side that sweetens the deal is that one you're usually only expected to work four days per week on research and one teaching. Two it can come with additional teacher training and in some cases higher education fellowships. Three you usually get your final year funded too. Normally stipend funding lasts three years three a bit years and you're on your own for your final one because you're only supposed to be writing your thesis at that point. So you do get a year completely unpaid. We'll get to that. We will definitely get to that. The main point of a PhD really is that it's basically the minimum entry requirement to work in academia. I'm gonna taunt the PhDs. Hey guys I heard an assistant professorship just opened up. At the University of Psych! But of course not all PhDs go on to work in universities as postdocs and then lecturers. As a qualification it does have some use in making you more qualified to do an industrial job and also schools and teacher training will claw at you and throw a lot of cash at you if you have one. So those are also options but to go back to industry if you want to work in the chemical industry a PhD can put you on a higher starting point but and this is where we caveat this with being my perspective in my experience. You do have to weigh that against an opportunity cost. So a PhD will take between three and four years of your life meanwhile it is in principle to start a job with an undergraduate degree and climb up to that higher level anyway without a PhD and without any of the associated downsides. So you could use a PhD to leap over that experience but it's not always guaranteed that it would be faster or better. It would depend on your job and your experience and simply how good and impressive you are for a company. There are also cases where industries if they really like you will pay your way through a PhD part-time. That takes closer to seven years to finish but if a company believes in you that much and well you're on to a good thing you would be working throughout it and probably have a better salary and support at your back throughout. But again none of that is guaranteed either leaving with the BSc or MCEM taking a punt on a graduate recruitment scheme and then hoping that a company just throws money at you for the next decade or so to get a doctorate is a big risk. It's not impossible or even rare but I wouldn't say it's in any way common practice and guaranteed. So to my mind whether you want to do a PhD and why comes down to the actual three to four years you will spend on it and nothing else. So do you want to do it? Well that's what we'll cover next. A friend of mine once said that doing a PhD was like spending six hours a day moving boxes from one end of room to another in exchange for 10 minutes on a roller coaster. Actually it may have even just been five minutes. So it's a very odd feeling and an odd bit of motivation that you need to be able to access. There are lots of boring bits, lots of fiddly bits, a lot of planning and preparation and training and with the occasional payoff scattered around. Whether you really want to do it will depend on what it is. So I'll formalize this into three parts. One the science, two the supervisor and three the environment. I'll go over all three of those. So let's assume you've found a PhD that you want to apply for. If you're thinking of it maybe you're at this stage already and maybe you already have an inkling about whatever you want to work in. Maybe you did a master's project on environmental sensors and now want to look at environmental modelling. Maybe you did one on CH activation catalysts and now want to work with something in the realm of organometallics. So chemistry is weird isn't it? First look at the science. What is the project about? Do you like it? If yes, great. But what if it's not exactly what you want? Well my advice there is actually to keep an open mind. One of the things about postgraduate research is that you're expected to drive and direct your own research almost entirely. You are there to do the work your supervisor tells you to. Yes, but by your third year you're the expert, you're telling them what to do. So there is always scope to take a project that's sort of what you want and divert it closer to where you want it to be. The scope is an infinite of course, you still need to do the work the supervisor has funding for and you may have industrial co-sponsors to satisfy, but you will have the chance to meet people, collaborate and provide quite a bit of steer yourself. So be prepared to be flexible with what project you want and what you will take on. Find one you enjoy, sure, but if you're wedded to the idea of a PhD don't be inflexibly wedded to the one project. If you're wedded to the one project and nothing else you may find you have to move on and forget about the whole thing if it doesn't work out. So do think about the science you want to do. Then there's the supervisor. I would say again my experience this is the most important part. You will have three, four years working with them so you should want to work with them. All supervisors have different personalities and styles and honestly there is no one right or wrong way to think for them to work. One of the interesting things is that their supervision style and their research might not be reflected in their lecturing either. So if you have experienced this person from just being sat on a lecture bench taking notes from them that might not give you the impression that you need. There are plenty of times I hear first year students talk about how awful a particular professor is and how they're boring and a hard ass in lectures. Full disclosure here this is true for every university I've worked in whoever you are thinking of they are not the only one. But then project students say they're fantastic and they get an amazing experience and invaluable training. So try to understand the person as a supervisor. Some supervisors are very hands-on. They look over your shoulder a lot and you know they demand continued reports and presentations and are checking on you again and again and again. Others on the other hand all are more hands-off. You might only see them once a month occasionally even less if you're also actively trying to avoid them yourself. So those two ends of the scale might see different people. Some students want the continuous attention and others would hate it. There is no right or wrong way there is only compatible and incompatible relationships. You need to figure out what you want and find out if it suits you. Some supervisors will be very pushy and want you to present at conferences as soon as possible. Others might be a bit more chill and allow you to spend a lot more time dicking about with the teaching lab with the undergraduates. Both of those can be good experiences if that's the experience you want or need. Then the third factor is the environment and I mean environment in the broadest terms. Do you want to move to a new city? Which one? Will you like it there? Is it cheap enough to get a house or are you going to be stuck in a one-room studio flat under a train line for two grand a month? Is it bustling and busy or is it a lot more easy going? And then there's the university and its location. Is it a nice place? Does it inspire you? Is it easy to navigate around? Do you want to keep some aspects of the student lifestyle such as sports and societies? So what are they like in that area? And also consider the research group around you. Like your supervisor, perhaps perhaps even more so than your supervisor, these are going to be the closest working relationships you have. So what is the group like? I'll give you two examples from the two extremes of what I mean here. So when I was working on a PhD, one of the groups who worked across the corridor were very, very active. Their writing room was full of photos of them on their days away, theme parks, hiking at mountains with their supervisor, everything. This was a really tight knit social bunch and that was fine for them. On my side of the corridor you had a bunch of nerds who could just about be tempted to the pub to get shit faced about once every six months if that. Otherwise we talked in the writing room crowded around spectrometers but didn't really meet up outside a lot unless we decided to drag each other out somewhere on a special occasion. And that was fine for us. Again there is no right or wrong way, just what you want and what you think you're compatible with. A weekend's camping with a pub lunch on your supervisor's credit card might sound great to some people but actually nightmarish to others. So you need to consider the science, the supervisor and the environment. If you like all three, fantastic. But you will probably have a good time with any two out of the three. And counterintuitively the least important is probably the science. You can probably manage to get through that or even eventually start to love science that you're not exactly sold on initially. If you have the rights of a vision and the right colleagues. A very bad relationship with your supervisor is harder to overcome with science you love and colleagues are great though it's it is possible. That's all part of the decisions and compromises and risks that you have to take with this decision. But if all you have is one of those things or even none of those three things you will not have a good time and it definitely will not sustain you during the worst bits. Okay the bit you've all been waiting for now what's the downside? So you've got a great supervisor your friends are great the town is wonderful you're making bank in the teaching labs what's the worst that can happen? Well a lot really these projects last years and it's effectively impossible for it to be plain sailing throughout. At some point you're going to hit challenges that feel insurmountable. You'll feel like you've hit a dead end and you haven't done anything productive for weeks if not longer. You might even not do anything at all for weeks you might have failed experiments that will seem hopeless. You may not understand what is going on and feel after your death again and feel hopeless. Now that might sound normal you probably experienced unproductive spurts in your undergraduate labs and projects but here everything is scaled up. The weight of responsibility is huge. You're responsible for the project you're responsible for its direction any bad results or failed experiments are on you to fix. There is no magic textbook of answers for real research and that's hard. You've moved from a tort environment where everything can be solved with a quick email and an understanding course organiser to a research environment where it's a lot more complicated. There may not even be a solution to your problems and stumbling on that revelation could take weeks of work time that you've effectively wasted. That feeling of failure is not an easy prospect to face down and it gets worse because that's just your run-of-the-mill obstacle. You get used to failure and unproductivity it's part of the growth you go through. The bigger problems arise when that failure becomes chronic or internalised and you begin to see it not as a reflection on the difficulty level of the research but on yourself. You will start questioning whether you belong there. You'll see countless other people presenting at conferences publishing papers getting awards and mentions and you'll be sat there with nothing or at least what feels like very truly nothing by comparison. This feeling is very persuasive and it's not easy to get rid of no matter how often you hear the disnormal that won't help no matter how often you hear or the people going through it that won't help it's a crushing feeling and it won't allow you to hear that there is an end to it or a way out. You will feel that you're the one true exception I'm not making up I'm not perceiving it it's just true I'm a failure and I shouldn't be here and people will tell you that's not true and it won't help. So to be blunt at least one depressive episode is a given you've banked a lot of your future on this thing and you've started to construct an identity around it you've gone from doing science to being a scientist and if it goes wrong or it stumbles that becomes a personal attack on you. Now there's a lot we can say about building that identity as a scientist or researcher because as fun as it is it's also the thing that can bite you the hardest. Broadly that identity can be easily weaponised against you to make you overwork or do extra unpaid work. You do hear a lot of academic scientists describe it like that like I'm a scientist or my job is my hobby whatever and then they go on to say how that motivates them to put in 80 hour working weeks 100 hour working weeks whatever and all that stuff. But that often comes from successful professors at the very top of the game they've made it and they have the salaries to show for it and probably have kids who've grown up and left so fewer family responsibilities is that really helpful advice and a mindset for 20-somethings barely making minimum wage probably not is it the bedrock of a deep rooted inferiority complex and imposter syndrome that will take years or even decades to shift quite possibly so who do you turn to for help well no one really okay that's a little unfair and absolute what I mean is that if you look at your colleagues around you they will be going through the same thing they'll have an empathetic ear but they won't have the solution that's why a good rapport with your research who does come in useful you have that shared experience to help providing you do fit in with them but at the same time the research project is yours no one else can help do it for you and at the end of the day it's not a group project everyone is writing their own damn thesis you can't get someone to do it for you and you can't do it for someone else either and that can be incredibly isolating friends and family can be there but there's often a lack of understanding of what it is you're doing if you're a first-generation student in particular you might never manage to convince your parents that what you're doing is a job and not just doxing at uni for another four years and your friends from your undergraduate degree may have left and moved on and started having a successful career in the quote unquote real world and it will look like they're having all of the success and you've held yourself back now i've grown into a world where having a PhD is comparatively normal all my colleagues have them by default and a surprising number of my friends have done them in all sorts of places from nuclear fusion to an analysis of profanity in Scottish theatre um so i have a network of friends that understands now but at the time that didn't exist very few people at the time understood at all and you can't help but feel like you're on your own there so if you plan taking the full academic route you also have to plan for the fact you might not stay in the same place for more than a year if that for the best part of a decade to come and even then restricted only to those university towns and cities with departments you can work in if you want to get married and have children if you want to buy a house you know all those things that is on the back burner until your 30s at least maybe that sounds fine to you in which it's great it's not everyone's priority but you can still find yourself feeling incredibly isolated from partners and friends that won't be able to travel with you and might just not get what you do at all then let's look at the funding running out typically stipends last four three years that's where you do the core of the research after that you get what's called a writing up yeah where you assemble everything and write a thesis in the ideal situation you get your research done then it's a couple of months hanging around a computer in the library typing uh bang done submission a month later the external examiner has finished reading it and you have your viber you have two hours talking in a room then well done doctor and you've got a new postdoc or research associate contract assigned ready to go before you even graduate that's the best case scenario and most people don't really achieve that and many more come nowhere near that at the other end of the scale you have your three years research and then another four year working and writing at the same time trying to get it done before your clock officially runs out oh it's a much stricter clock than most undergraduate work as well you don't just submit a mitigating or extenuating circumstances form and get an extra two weeks with effectively no questions asked even if you could two weeks is unlikely to help you if you can't submit on your due date you're probably going to need months extra if they let you hang around with access and ensure you for that long because it's not actually cost neutral for the university to keep you around for months on end so you could be looking at with an extension 14 or 15 months extra full-time work and then another month or so while the assessors work through it and you try to arrange a viber date and then another another two months for corrections and amendments or or longer if it happens to be major correction that they demanded and with a potential for a second examination on top of all that so at the worst case end of the scale you could be looking at three years of research and then half that again just in the writing upstage and that's unpaid full-time unpaid work you could be looking at a full year of worrying about how you'll pay your rent how you're going to eat I mean there's this running joke about PhD students and their 5p ramen noodles and terrible diets but it's gallo as humor based on a pretty grim reality no food for you grad students till you grade 3000 papers and you might think you could supplement that with some benefit previously housing benefits currently universal credit uh yes that that's nice as possible but good luck with it because there is no tick box for someone who is working full-time as a PhD student so can't get another full-time job it's hard to claim anything as they just don't know how to treat you and assess whether you're eligible that's a recurring theme with PhDs you're not a student in full-time education not quite a job either so nothing in the outside world is really set up to understand what it involves maybe a bit more of that in a minute anyway my experience I landed somewhere in between the two extremes my time expanded into most of the fourth year and I managed to get through it because by that time I had a partner in work full time who could pay the rent and it wasn't entirely extortionate rent at the time either so I had the freedom to do more teaching I've demonstrated and ended up putting in almost as many hours as the GTAs did but getting paid for all of them and I also did some part-time work over the summer and in the downtime during the corrections period to help supplement that but that was really just treading water at best I still left a couple of unpaid council tax bills and energy bills in my wake that took quite some time to clear off actually you know I was at the end of an overdraft for years and it's it's not a good feeling I can spiral into full depression very very easily so for most PhD students you are looking at a high chance of suicide ideation or even suicide attempts stress anxiety continued worrying about finances while also worrying about whether you're making any progress and whether you even belong there worrying about whether you should take a year off or just quit entirely then you worry about whether that failure means your supervisor and colleagues all hate you then you worry about whether opening up to friends will just result in them telling you that you should quit because it's your own fault it's a lot that said it does end happily for me I got a teaching fellowship and that was enough to get me financially stable and to fix the fallout of having a year or so completely unpaid at least for a little on short term contracts is not cheap and moving expenses usually aren't available unless you find a contract that lasts more than three years so you can get into a lot of debt and then it can be really hard to clear it off quickly afterwards and you have to ask why would someone put themselves through that well it comes back to that identity thing you would be surprised at what you will put yourself through if it feels like it's an integral part of your self-worth okay fine but that's not very healthy in fact treating the overworked poverty-stricken aspects of a PhD as a romantic rite of passage is one of the major stumbling blocks towards fixing the experience it's already incredibly exclusionary to all sorts of underprivileged groups and these aspects just make it worse and glorify it now this speaks to the wider systematic problems within academia where there's a culture of overwork those top scientists tell you their job is their hobby and let's them put in a hundred hours a week etc so they demand that you have to feel the same right so this intersects with a lot of complicated things but it's where if you're applying for a PhD you need to look closely at your potential supervisor and what they are like it's very easy to find ones that demand you work absurd hours and do things above and beyond your expectations it's very easy to find ones that will take on exceptional students you know ones with a lot of intern experience and probably even publications from their undergraduate projects and they'll take them on not because they actually want such an exceptional student but because they just can't be bothered to pay a postdoc you know a PhD is meant to be a training and mentoring program but some supervisors may be looking for people already trained so they can get you to do a postdoc job for less than half the salary it's not common but it does happen so back to who you are as a PhD student generally a PhD is a very odd limbo situation where no one really knows what you are i've alluded to that already but it really comes into its own when you consider your relationship with a university are you an employee or are you a student and that's the thing you're both and neither when it comes to making you do work and giving you a contracted workload that you must perform you're an employee you are paid if they say jump you say well i've read these papers that suggest how high i said jump and i've already jumped 10 times but when it comes to things like workers right to any kind you're a student the students are exempt from access to employee benefits or silly or things like paid time off it's a recipe for exploitation and you can be easily guilted into some very bad practices you know particularly for students with scholarships or demand from their own country's funding bodies there can be a strong incentive to cheat this can involve faking data or manipulating it it can involve paying predatory journals hundreds of pounds or dollars to publish your papers with minimal oversight just because you need it the pressure is on and if it doesn't go smoothly all the incentives are stacked towards you doing something stupid and in science that sort of stupid can be dangerous remember i'm talking from a chemistry perspective here what we do in the lab as chemists can be hazardous or deadly and the pressure to get work done to get results to get papers written and published and to get data for conferences all in a short time frame can lead to you doing some very bad things and making some very bad decisions people find themselves working in labs out of hours doing risky practical work without anyone in the building on Saturdays Sundays holidays closures most of us have probably tried it and got away with it but those pressures can and have killed people sounds great right so how do you apply first you will need to check the entry qualifications you'll need a degree normally a master's but a bsc to phd jump still happens frequently enough normally the grade qualification is a 21 and up a second degree there are arguments that this shouldn't be the case but it's the standard you don't need to be top of your class but that 21 or higher is seen as evidence that you're at least engaged and interested in the subject if you're applying you'll need to start a report to get to know your potential supervisor soon this could involve setting up some casual or informal inquiries by email usually there's like an invite to start these conversations on most academic jobs and psd placements look for the contact details for inquiries and informal inquiries and make sure that the academic ones not a generic hr or admissions email address my advice here is to read the advert in depth and then read the profile of the supervisor if the PhD is attached to a grant read a bit more about that grant award was there a press release about it again no downside to being over informed about all of this the thing to not do is simply email someone out of blue say hey i'm interested in a PhD can you tell me more about it it's probably getting deleted on site most of us are getting at least weekly emails asking about phd positions that don't actually exist or are completely irrelevant to us because someone has blatantly spanned their cv at a thousand email addresses so you need to make sure you look like you've done the reading and know what you're talking about ask a question ask two in fact ask all the questions you have in one message rather than playing an annoying game with ping pong about it make sure none of them are easily answered by the job posting itself you can talk about your project work your interests how they overlap basically you're selling your enthusiasm for the project of course remember you're not applying at the stage you're striking up an informal conversation about the project and this is to mine for information that you can use in your covering letter and cv it's to make you stand out there could be hundreds of people going for this and you need to float to the top so a good informal discussion is the best way to both get your name out there so that they recognize it when it comes to sifting cvs and to get the best information to make you become the most attractive candidate ready for an interview now at this point full disclosure i'm probably not the best person to ask about this how i got my phd was that i did a master's project and then there happened to be funding for a handful of positions in the same research group the year after uh so i arranged a chat about it and what i thought about it and what the possible projects were about and at the end of that they said uh okay we will say we've interviewed you and we'll start on the paperwork and so i did my interview without realizing it was an interview maybe that's not surprising to the people who know me i very much blindly stumbled around my career so far almost none of it is intentional so assume you put in a blind over an application and get to an interview time to panic not really if you're at an interview stage that means you're qualified you've been judged to be capable uh the interview is just to make sure you you are who you say you are so certainly don't lie on an application form and to see if you really want it because you're interviewing them as well remember all that good advice about picking a good supervisor here you can meet them and talk it over if you haven't got an interview don't worry that that still doesn't mean anything because there may have been hundreds of applications you just got unlucky so you keep trying the same advice for applying for industrial placement holds the main reason for not getting one is giving up what do people want to see in an interview well we're not looking for perfection we're looking for potential you need to show that you're someone who can get on and do the work now that doesn't mean being the perfect fountain of knowledge indeed pasties can be so specialized it would be utterly unreasonable for you to come pre-trained so instead focus on how you might solve a problem if there's a question that you can't answer it's okay to say you don't know providing that you know how you'd find out for instance show that you know how to sci find our own web of science to find answers how you'd consult with the right people like colleagues or how you'd approach asking your supervisor for help because ultimately no one wants a helpless phd student um let's be frank about that you need to do a lot of work yourself over three to four years it doesn't need to be perfect and certainly not perfect first time but you need the confidence to take the obvious steps yourself and that should definitely come across at an interview so finally do you really want to do all that it's not all doom and gloom there are genuine upsides there's the sense of achievement the recognition the opportunities and ultimately a lot of freedom to manage your own time and drive things in the direction you want ultimately it comes down to what you want to do think about what you want to spend these three to four years doing don't think of better employment prospects and don't think about getting on a career ladder because those downsides of the bad moments the depressive episodes are a real risk and just treating a phd as like a three-year prison sentence you need to serve in order to get a better job that won't sustain you instead think about the science you want to do the research you can contribute think about the relationships you can cultivate and the experience you can get so i've presented to four auditoriums of people who really wanted to hear what i have to say i've had advice from people famously at the top of their field who wanted to talk to me and i've done that while having a lot of freedom to try things and to go this way or that way on my own terms and that has been great not always plain sailing but you know nothing ever is you just need to be prepared for it so if you are interested in a project you've seen go for it take the punt apply do your best to get out there and get heard because the very worst that can happen is that you actually get it