5 Moments that Make a PhD

It’s no secret: PhDs are tough. Completing a doctorate is hard, gruelling work, over several years. Not all of that work is instantly rewarding.

After all, you’re facing the challenge of becoming an expert in your field, learning to be an independent academic and building the foundations of your career.

None of that is easy. At some point every PhD student has been tempted to just throw everything in the bin and run away to get a real job somewhere. That, or go run a cocktail shack on a beach.

But a PhD is well worth sticking with! You won’t just gain a qualification you can be incredibly proud of: you’ll also have some incredible experiences along the way. The moments that make a PhD worthwhile.

Here are a few of them:

As a researcher, you are going to discover new things. That’s part of the point of a PhD, after all.

At first, these might be small experimental observations rather than field-shattering realisations. But they’re discoveries nonetheless.

And those more significant results will come as you develop your own ‘original contribution to knowledge’.

It might seem hard to believe at the beginning of your PhD while you are struggling to get a grasp on things, but before you know it you are going to start to produce proper ‘findings’.

It’s easy to overlook, but eventually you are going to learn, discover or realise something that you are the only person on the whole planet to know.

That feeling of excitement and the subsequent rush of telling everyone about your discovery will make all the blood, sweat and tears completely worth it.

As an undergraduate, academics are your lecturers and the people who set and mark your exams. As a PhD student, you begin the process of becoming their peer.

This might not happen for a while, but someday you are going to have a conversation about data or research with an established academic who is going to take you seriously. They might even be one of the scholars whose research and theories you used during your Bachelors or Masters!

This might seem surprising now, but it isn’t really.

During a PhD, you’ll become the world-expert in a limited part of your field. This means that people are going to respect your views and opinions about that specialism.

The moment someone important asks you a question not to test you but because they want to know and they trust your answer makes a lot of the struggle worth it.

You started a PhD for a reason. Hopefully, that reason is that you really, really love what you're doing.

Of course, the day-to-day of academic research is nothing like the glamorous stuff of dreams.

And not everything you do is going to end up in those high-calibre publications that captivated your attention as an undergraduate student. (That’s OK, by the way: not everything your supervisor does ends up in them either!).

But, once in a blue-moon, you will get to see something that is really, really cool. Something that is as exciting as whatever it is that got you excited about your field.

It could be a surprising result from one of your experiments: something that you didn’t expect (and no one else expected either).

It could be a rare artefact or manuscript that no one has ever taken the time (or had the chance) to properly examine before.

It could be the chance to conduct fieldwork in an exotic location, or use the sort of equipment your friends still think belongs in science fiction.

Whatever you do, this, ultimately, is what working on a PhD is all about.

A PhD is an individual project, sure, but you might be surprised how strongly you bond with your fellow researchers.

Being a PhD student is a relatively niche and very hard thing to do and this establishes an extraordinary atmosphere of comradery.

The time you spend with the amazing people you get to meet, talking about work or really avoiding talking about work is going to push you through the toughest times.

Ultimately, the friendships you’ll make amongst your research group department or graduate school may well last you a lifetime. After all, your fellow students may well be your fellow academics one day.

It’s impossible to miss this one out.

Holding all the work you are so proud of in your hands in a beautiful, bound book you wrote yourself is the most amazing feeling in the world.

It is not about recognition or about getting compliments about your work – it’s about visualising all that that thesis represents and everything you went through.

When you’re struggling to write your research proposal, wrestling with your literature review or staring down a tough chapter, think about that final moment. It’s all worth it.