How does a PhD work? The FULL guide!

hello my beautiful friend so today we're going to talk about how a phd program actually works and what it looks like from a student's perspective on a day-to-day basis you know considering that it is a pretty big undertaking all right let's look at that if you're new to this channel please remember to subscribe and hit that bell notification because i talk about everything phd related topics and more um and i'd love to share everything i've learned from doing a phd and all of the postdocs afterwards so subscribe and you'll get all of that delicious content

okay now let's look at what a phd program actually involves now a phd program is something that shouldn't be taken lightly in terms of you know should you do it um a phd program has got essentially sort of main components which is like uh you know research producing a thesis and doing a viva but i'm going to talk about those individually but also i think it's important to understand that even though from an institutional and university perspective perspective like it's like we need phd students to essentially complete these tasks to get to the end i

also want to tell you what it's like from a phd student's perspective so that you understand what you're really going to undertake because i don't think there's anything like it and i have haven't experienced anything like a phd since leaving a phd program on graduating uh yeah it's a strange old world okay so first of all let's have a little look at what like a textbook phd means so it really comes down to these key components so first of all the length the length of time it normally takes about three to four years of research

to produce what is kind of deemed enough work to satisfy a phd uh panel that you've done enough to complete a phd all right yes that makes sense so yeah three to four years um as an international student so i was born in the uk but i came to australia to do my phd um why not you know it's a beautiful country and i stayed here by the way now i'm in australia forever um and yeah it's uh it's three to four years so because i was an international student i had to be finished within

three years otherwise it was going to cost me 20 000 to do the fourth year which i couldn't afford and also i had a scholarship so a scholarship because i got a first class masters from the uk they waived the student fees the international student fees and another fee which i can't remember what that fee was but essentially they where they waived or they gave me a scholarship as well so i was able to get some money for um you know a small amount i think was 20 000 australian dollars a year thereabouts and that

was enough to live on so that i didn't have to worry about getting a job and i could focus purely on doing my phd so i had to be done in three years and so that was really great motivation domestic students in australia tend to go for like four and four and a half years and the longest phd i've ever heard or seen about first hand is ten years there was a guy who was doing his phd for ten years and yeah it can blow out if you let it and and so sticking to kind

of three to four years is so very important so there we are that's the first idea of the sort of time commitment that you need to give this it's kind of the equivalent of an undergraduate length of time but it's so much less directed that you can just sort of like float around doing rubbish experiments and not really sort of honing in on the end goal which is to produce original research let's talk about that now another aspect of a phd that is so very important is that you are doing original research now what that

means is that you are essentially collecting data and analyzing a part of the world that no one has ever analyzed and looked at before and yeah it's a great idea that um people like to talk about which is you know you imagine all human knowledge as a single sphere and your phd is pushing out on that sphere a little bit and essentially everyone who does a phd in research is pushing out on that sphere a little bit a little bit and our sort of amount of knowledge is growing and your contribution is that tiny little

bump in your field and yeah original research the way you find out whether or not you're doing original research is you when you first join a phd program you essentially conduct a literature review so go check out my other video on how to write a literature review but essentially it's about looking at what has already been done and finding gaps in that research to fill and that's becoming harder and harder and also it's becoming more kind of interdisciplinary which means that you know no longer pure physics or pure mass they tend to be a little

bit like uh in between an overlap of different um fields and mine was probably chemistry physics and engineering i was kind of in that little bubble um and yeah that's that's the re the reality of it so a phd how it works really is that you have to dedicate a lot of time to doing something that no one has ever done before which means there's an inherent risk right which is like you're trying something it may or may not work but that is part of the phd process is like how do i understand this part

of the world a little bit more and that is original research and to convince a phd admin panel or like checking panel that you've done enough it has to be like novel research that is one of the key components the third aspect that's really important is that you produce either peer-reviewed papers or a thesis now when i was doing my phd in 2016 to 2011 people really didn't produce papers by which to have their phd examined like you produce papers but there's now a thing called phd by publication where if you produce about three to

five i think i think they like it closer to five to be honest papers um you can end up with a phd without having to write a thesis what you do is you get your literature review you kind of put your papers together and you put a little connector kind of page in between each one to explain how it's connected to the overall aims of your research and yeah i've known one or two people do that but to be honest with you i think it is becoming more popular but producing a thesis is just kind

of more common at the moment so yeah how it works how a phd works is you spend a lot of time doing original research and then packaging it up so you can send it to a phd panel that says yes you have done enough to satisfy the qualification of a phd and that kind of makes it a little bit more subjective you know these experts that are on your phd panel admissions panel you know they're assigned by you and your supervisor and they look at your thesis or your papers at the end and that's all

they have really to judge whether or not you have done enough to satisfy getting a phd um yeah it doesn't really get much more kind of complicated than that uh the issue is is that that end goal can feel so out of reach when you start a phd and so yeah you just have to work consistently throughout it and okay now let's talk about the final last little thing that a phd requires so the last kind of element of a phd and how it works is that with your original research you've produced your thesis or

your papers you package that up you send that out to your phd admissions panel and uh they or or examiners i think they're more commonly called so you send it out to your phd examiners and they say yes no otherwise you get the opportunity to change your thesis a little bit um so when you send out your thesis they will have their comments you send it back and really i've seen it kind of fall into these categories first of all an outright fail i've seen one of those in the course of my academic career so

go check out my other video on how to fail a phd i talk about it in more detail in that video but then you have options for major corrections so major corrections are you know whole bits of science that they just don't believe or that you haven't explained properly or um yeah there's sort of something fundamentally wrong with the research you've done and they the examiners want to see it again and yes that is just an option so you can get it back and then have to spend another six months or so doing experiments to

satisfy the questions of the phd examiners now the thing is is that your supervisor shouldn't let you send off anything that is scientifically dodgy so major revisions aren't that common if you have a supervisor that you're talking to and they've looked over your thesis in detail before you've sent it off um another type of thing and this is much more common is pass with minor corrections and that's what i got and that's what a lot of people get so with minor corrections it's like oh you know this isn't explained very well you know one of

my examiners even said there were a few full stops left off in your reference section and there were a few middle initials missing how on earth did they know that that's pretty incredible so my my examiner went through it in detail and yeah he also said there were a few annoying spelling mistakes um but yeah overall uh it looked like it was not scientifically sort of dodgy it was robust enough to pass the experts kind of filter i guess for lack of a better term and yeah it was just kind of minor corrections that meant

that they didn't want to see the thesis again so that meant that i was able to then submit it to my university they would cross-reference my changes with what the examiners asked for and say yes you've done it well done you now earn a phd and the last way that you can get a phd is if the examiner says yes pass with no corrections and i've seen that twice in my phd in academic career and that is the examiners looking at it and going yes this is perfect it adds to the scientific literature it is

novel and interesting and they've explained it well the science is robust it's explained really well there's no corrections that i can see in this thesis well done and yeah that is kind of what everyone is aiming for but like i said i think in my experience the majority of people ended up with pass with minor corrections and the last thing that a phd student goes through is a fiver or what is commonly known in oral defense now in a covid world i think this is probably changing but in the past you would get the examiners

to fly in to your home institution and you would give a presentation about you know your work and they would ask you questions and essentially they would test you on your knowledge of your own thesis and i've known examiners go right to the very fundamentals of like well can you explain to me this can you explain to me that can you draw up this equation can you explain in more detail why and essentially they're just digging and probing because you know you need to be an expert and a thesis is one way that you can

prove that you're an expert but ultimately the experts need to challenge you on the bits of uh your thesis that they weren't quite sure of and they need to just sort of like prod and probe and a thesis examination can go oral defense can go from i don't know can go from like one hour up to three hours and then the panel get together they have a little bit of a discussion about you they invite you back in and they say yes or no and that's the end of it and then um yeah that's uh

that's a oral defense um and i i should mention as well that the whole process of a phd submission so the moment you submit your your thesis to kind of getting the uh result and becoming a doctor can be like six to eight months and mine was when i submitted my thesis it took about three or four months to actually get the results back and the examiner's comments back and then i had to do the changes and send it back and then it took another couple of months to get the panel to sign off on

my thesis and the changes that i'd made so it takes a very long time potentially and i believe now that the examiners are meeting online there's less international travel obviously and so yeah there is a part as well where some universities do not do an oral defense um they just rely on the thesis and yeah that's just up to the institution and the sorts of money they have to fly people internationally because they love to fly business class i've been told when they come to uh do an oral defense yeah that's pretty expensive so there

we are that is all of the different steps of essentially how a phd works you go all the way from actually doing the research over a long period of time to producing a thesis and some publications packaging that up in some way whether or not it's a thesis or thesis by publication you send it off to examiners examiners say yes no otherwise they've got their different levels from fail to pass with no corrections and everything in between then you make your corrections and then you send it back to them or you just send it to

your phd admission panel in your university and they say yes this is great this satisfies the examiner's comments and questions and then you have a you can have an oral defense as well and then yeah then you get your phd hat and gown that's good isn't it um yeah so those are all of the steps you know from a from a student's perspective the the main bulk of a phd and how it works is those three to four years where you're just working your ass off to produce original research to get experimental data to present

it well to do all of these things that will get you to the end goal so really what i've discussed is kind of really the end point but the how a phd works for a student is that it's just the daily slog for three years go in produce papers and go check out my tips for phd students the other video that i've produced because i'll go through everything you need to know there and yeah look it's it's a challenging time but there is a process and that is generally the process that universities follow and yeah

that's it so there we are that's how a phd works i hope that was enlightening for you let me know in the comments what you would add or your experience or if it's different and i shall see you in the next video if this video has been helpful please remember to give it a thumbs up share it with whoever you can and also subscribe because i love it helps a lot and i'd love to share more information with you about doing a phd and making the right choice for you alright then i shall see you

in the next video have a lovely weekday month or whatever until you watch the next one