The Biggest Mistakes I made in the First Year of my PhD
Starting a PhD can be both exciting and daunting, and when you start, you have a whole vision in your head of how it’ll play out and what you’ll accomplish, and it never unfolds how you expect it to. People say the first year is a learning curve, but as a part-time, self-funded student living alone and running my own business, it turns out, the first two years were a massive learning curve. Everything in my life has changed since starting my PhD, from how I view my relationships, work, mental health, finances, behaviours and interests, thoughts, and talk about and who I open up to.
Today, I want to share the biggest mistakes I made during the first year of my PhD. It should be noted that these are mistakes I made during very specific circumstances and environments, so many of these may not be a problem for you. It will all depend on your subject, economic and social background, support network, student status, learning disabilities, health conditions, etc.
Mistake #1: Following Other PhD Students’ Advice Online
Point number one is incredibly ironic coming from me, a PhD Student, giving advice, but hear me out. Before I started my PhD, I subscribed to and followed many PhD students online, on YouTube and social media, and I tried to do everything they did. I tried to copy how they read, took notes, how they set up their Notion pages, their work schedules, the apps they used, etc. They were successful students, so why not take a shortcut and copy them? After all, they've figured it out for us all, right? Wrong. Following advice from other students online was the biggest mistake I made, and that mistake set me back a full two years' worth of time and research.
If I could go back in time, I would never have followed any of them or watched a single video. Trying to do what other PhD students did screwed up my whole approach, and I fell so far behind because none of their working methods worked for me. I thought that to be a PhD student, I needed to emulate other PhD students, when in reality, I had to become a PhD student, and that process is entirely self-taught. Sure, you can pick up tips such as useful apps and browser extensions to try out. I cannot stress this enough: there is less than a 50% chance the way other people read, write, research and work will work for you, and it’s a much faster and safer approach to your PhD journey just to stay well clear of outside inputs that are deeply personalised, such as setting up Notion pages or note-taking methodologies, for a good year and figure out how you work best.
Mistake #2: Underestimating How Personalised the PhD Journey Will Be.
This point follows from the first, but I cannot stress this enough. No amount of blogs, Instagram pages, or YouTube videos will prepare you for your PhD journey because every single PhD journey is like a fingerprint: yours will not match anyone else’s. Going into the PhD, we understand that our subject matter and topic of research will be unique to the world, but we learn the hard way that that uniqueness extends to every single facet of your PhD journey. Undergraduate and Masters experiences are pretty standard: you have set time-tables books to read, the same environment, and probably all taking out the same loans.
All that goes out the window regarding a PhD: no one is the same. Some have chronic health conditions, are self-funded and live alone on a single income; some are fully-funded students with a spouse paying their rent and bills and cooking all their meals for them; some are single parents with full-time jobs doing a PhD part-time living an hour away from an academic library, whilst others have learning disabilities, dealing with a death in their immediate family or going through a brutal divorce whilst pregnant with their third child.
Every single one of these factors changes the trajectory of your PhD journey: your health; learning style; energy levels; finances; emotional, physical and financial support network; age; career; mental well-being; funding status; living situation; learning disabilities; children and other dependents; as will your university, relationship with your supervisor; your cohort (or lack thereof); your university library and other resources; your supervisor’s professional standing, network and experience; the administration team and support services available at your university and so much more.
Those are a lot of varying factors, which means it is near impossible for you to compare and then try and map someone else’s PhD process successfully onto your own life and hope it fits. It won’t fit. Never compare your PhD journey to someone else’s because the comparison will debilitate you, and never default to attributing academic success to intellectual superiority when it can easily be attributed to privilege.
Mistake #3: Presuming People Will Be Supportive
One of the toughest lessons I learned from the very eve of my PhD success was finding out how few people would support or understand the PhD journey. I ended my long-term relationship over their immediate lack of support for the news I’d passed my PhD interview the December before I started my PhD. Since then, I have found so many people unsupportive of my PhD journey: either they become jealous and competitive or actively belittled and diminished my academic endeavour.
Now this is where following PhD students online was incredibly helpful: camaraderie and feeling less alone. As a part-time, distance learning student, I don’t have a cohort, so following other PhD students online to hear them express their thoughts and feelings was far more beneficial to me as a student going through all of this than any of their practical advice ever.
On top of that, whilst the realisation that many people in my life didn’t have my best interest at heart, the cleansing of these people from my life was the best thing that has happened to me in years, and though my close network is a fraction of what it used to be, the people in it are the most supportive, kind-hearted, trustworthy and glorious people I’ve ever known. I’m fortunate to have them.
