This article is aimed at those considering apply for a PhD, but who don’t know much about what the PhD experience is actually like. Here are 4 things that I think you should consider to help you decide if a PhD is the right path for you.
Why do you want to do a PhD?
This is the first point to consider, and carefully. A PhD is not an easy undertaking, spanning 3-4 years of your life that will involve a lot of hard work and stress. The main benefit of studying for a PhD is that you are interested in and enjoy your work, but (as pointed out below) there are also a lot of negatives. Think carefully about whether these negatives will outweigh the positives.
Are you truly interested in your subject matter? Are you excited about pushing the boundaries of human knowledge and potentially making a difference to the lives of patients? Do you want to continue to work in academia afterwards? These are the sorts of questions you should be asking yourself.
I would say that going into a PhD because you’re scared of not being a student anymore (as I partially was) is a mistake. You should study for a PhD because research really interests you, not because the alternative sounds worse.
Is a PhD the best way to achieve your career goals?
I understand that this is a difficult one. Many of us don’t actually know what we want to do after graduating. And if you know before going into a PhD, your plans could have changed wildly afterwards.
The PhD is essentially a training period for working in academia as a researcher. You learn not only techical lab skills such as how to run a western blot or how to culture cells, but more importantly how to think like a scientist. How to analyse your data, how to deisgn experiments to answer a research question and have enough statistical power. How to critically analyse your own work, but also the work of others. And how to explain this work to others, in written form, as a poster or an oral presentation.
Thus, if you want to go further in academia (e.g. a postdoc or research fellow) then a PhD is essential. However for other routes (such as working at a biotech company) then there is some flexibility. I’ve attended open days at biotech companies and been told that a PhD isn’t really that important to them, as they could teach you the skills of a PhD in-house, and you’d be earing more money and working your way through the company in that time. Obviously that story is annecdotal and shouldn’t be applied to all biotech companies. And even if you don’t want to work in academia, a PhD is valuable. As I described above, you learn a number of transferrable skills during a PhD that can be applied to many different roles.
Is a PhD financially suitable for you?
This topic is a bit of a minefield to be honest. There is now a growing view in academia (mostly among PhD students) that PhD students are not payed enough for the amount of work they do or for the level of expertise that they possess. In early 2022 there were a slew of tweets and posts from academics and PhD students like this one or this claiming that PhD students were living below the poverty line.
Furthermore, the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) report 131 on UK PhD student life, published in 2020, claims that “The National Minimum Wage from April 2020 for those aged 21 to 24 is £8.20 per hour and for those aged 25 and over it is £8.72 per hour. This means, regardless of age or location, the average PhD student in this dataset is not earning the National Minimum Wage for the work they do. Of course, not being employees means that students are not entitled to the National Minimum Wage. However, this level of pay means they are earning far below what they would expect to if they entered the workplace after graduating with their good Master’s or first-class Bachelor’s degree”. These calculations were based on surveys conducted by the Wellcome Trust and Nature publishing group, concluding that on average PhD students work 47 hours per week, and that the minumum UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) stipend for 2019/2020 is £15,009 per year. The full report can be found here, and I would highly reccomend reading it. Obviously the results of the report should not be taked as gospel, but it does contain stark information regarding the PhD experience.
There is some positive movement on this front. This article published in the guardian reports on an open letter signed by more than 5000 PhD students to the UKRI in 2022, asking for an increase in minimum stipend costs. And this was successful. In late 2022, the UKRI announced that it would be further increasing the minmum stipend by an additional 10% to £17,668, from the previously-announced £16,062.
These figures raise 2 main points: (1) almost all graduate jobs will pay more than a PhD. This means that by choosing to do a PhD you will be losing out on money that would have otherwise earned. (2) Consider carefully whether you can actually afford to study for a PhD. Last year I negotiated with my supervisor for a pay increase because I relaised that between rent and food, I was actually eating into my savings, rather than having any stipend left over to put into savings. Personally, I feel that if you don’t have savings, have a family that can financially suppport you or are otherwise in a financially stable position, then you should not do a PhD. The experience is already stressful enough without having to worry about money. PhD stipends are increasing, but probably not by enough. Additionally, while stipends in London are increased to account for the increased cost of living, the same is not done elsewhere. I live in York, one of the more touristy and expensive places to live in the North of England, but my stipend doesn’t take this into account.
If you do want to study for a PhD, what factors associated wth the position are important to you (e.g. location, lab culture, project topic, supervisor style, etc)?
Assuming that with the other 3 considerations you decide you want to do a PhD. Well you need some set of criteria to rate different applications by. This is because, in my opinion, you have to prioritise which projects to apply for and which not to, rather than stretching yourself too thin and applying for everything you think sounds interesting (don’t even consider projects that don’t sound interesting). I don’t believe that you have enough time to make a quality application to every project that catches your eye.
I listed above a few things such as location, lab culture, project subject matter, etc. So for example, you can rank two different projects against each other based on the city they’re in. I recieved PhD offers from York and Leicester, both of which had projects that sounded equally interesting. So how did I decide? Well, as a child I’d grown up visiting York frequenly on holiday with my parents, so I knew the city quite well. I’d also visited the Biology department there when first applying to university, so I knew the campus was very beautiful with a lot of green spaces. I also knew that York was much smaller and felt like less of a city, which was something I wanted. In the end, it was the location that swung it for me, not the project. I think there is an opinion that the project and facilities should be most important. But really, if you’re going to spend 3 to 4 years of your life based wherever the project is, then I think you’ll enjoy your experience much more if you enjoy the place.
All this said, I do think that you should sit down and decide for yourself what are the important factors associated with the PhD project that are going to be important to you personally.
Final points
Ultimately, the point of this article isn’t to persuade people not to do a PhD. Rather, I want to support students to make an informed decision on whether to study for a PhD. Personally, I feel as though I went into my PhD not fully understanding what it would entail. A large amount of this was because I didn’t properly do my research, but also I feel as though I didn’t know where to get information from. My hope is that by writing this I can inform others to make the correct decision.
“Knowing yourself is the begining of all wisdom” - Aristotle
Photo by David Pisnoy on Unsplash