Why a PhD is scary and when should you do it: A Practical Guide for Social Science Researchers
If you are reading this, you must be thinking of doing a PhD or planning to apply for one. I am a current PhD student. Hopefully, this article will aid you in your decision-making process.
Imagine you are the CEO of a small telecommunications company (or telco for short) in your home country. All of a sudden, you are tasked to lead your telco’s entry into a foreign market for which you have no experience in.
To make matters worse, the market has already been cornered by three telco giants with established physical infrastructure and recognisable branding.
Even though you have less experience and resources, your job is to put together a compelling business case so that all 3 telco giants will accept and welcome you as the fourth co-equal partner in this new market.
Sounds tough isn’t it? Why will the 3 telco giants welcome with open arms a new entrant to enter the market and eat into their market share?
This is a good, if imperfect, analogy of how hard is it to do a PhD. The commercial world is far more cutthroat, but the academic world is also full of jealousy and pettiness, requiring a certain degree of social finesse to navigate.
Thankfully, for social science PhD research, the 3 telco giants (or the 3 members of your supervisory panel) are usually on your side, i.e., they want you to succeed and would not work actively to sabotage you.
But my main point stands. Doing a PhD requires one to produce a piece of research work that is good enough such that members of your PhD panel (who are renowned experts in their field) will recognise you as a fellow colleague and independent researcher in your own right. That is not easy at all.
In this article, I go through 3 practical considerations that you need to address before thinking about pursuing a PhD degree, and then subsequently 3 reasons why you should still do it (if you really want to).
Quick Summary (Practical Considerations)
- Logistics
- Money
- Risk of Failure
Logistics
The first very practical reason why most people should not consider doing a PhD is logistics. As a current PhD student myself and observing the struggles of other PhD students, I have to say it is really, really difficult to make the life transition necessary to do a PhD.
First of all, you have to be prepared to uproot yourself and move to the university where your supervisor is located. If your preferred supervisor lives in the city that you are currently located, you should thank your lucky stars.
In most cases, we are not that fortunate. Social science departments tend to be a lot smaller than physical sciences, which means that professors are geographically dispersed in universities all over the world.
This also means needing to move to a new country and dealing with all the problems associated with establishing yourself in a brand new place.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of things you potentially have to deal with:
- Finding suitable accommodations
- Getting a new data plan/bank account/residency card
- Getting new furniture/cutlery/crockery
- Finding a new community/friends
- Familiarising with a new place and living several years in a foreign country
- Manage your relationship with family and friends back home
Second, this is further complicated if you already have many existing commitments, such as having a spouse and children, or having to manage a house in your original city. I have seen PhD mothers feeling guilty about spending time away from their children, and of couples having to grapple with whether to move overseas together or deal with a long-distance relationship.
Sometimes, it works out. Other times, you have to make undesirable trade-offs. So, before you take up a PhD programme, stop to consider the logistics and if you are prepared to make these life changes.
Money
Let’s face it, no one is going to be rich while doing a PhD programme. You should only do a PhD while on a full scholarship for tuition fees and a stipend.
According to my friends at the Australian National University, PhD scholars get 36,000 Australian dollars annually, or A$3000 a month. They also get medical insurance coverage and airfare coverage to make the move to Australia.
Despite all this, doing a PhD entails putting yourself into a precarious financial situation. Many of my PhD friends have families. With rent costing between A$1500-A$2000 a month, that is easily 50–75% of their stipend going to rent. For sure, opportunities for part-time tutoring and other research assistant jobs will help.
However, after meeting your basic needs you will not be able to save a great deal of money. This means that you may not have a lot of buffer room for unexpected emergencies and sudden expenses.
In terms of benefits foregone, compared to full-time employment you will not be getting annual increments or promotions. You will certainly not be getting employer contributions to your 401k plan equivalents. You will likely not have money for other luxuries like going on expensive vacations.
The cognitive load associated with budgeting and keeping your finances under control, will further add to the stress of doing a PhD. If you are not prepared to do so, this is something that will make you miserable very quickly.
So unless you have strong independent means or other sources of income, stop to consider how your lifestyle will change or will need to be downsized to accommodate your reduced financial ability while doing a multi-year PhD programme.
Risk of Failure
Another thing to consider is the risk of failing to complete your PhD after investing significant time and resources into it. Generally, if you are diligent, motivated, and receive good advice from your supervisor, you should be able to complete your PhD. Universities do not want to fail PhD students.
However, the risk of failure is real. Anecdotally, 2 out of 5 PhD students fail to complete their PhD. Some decide that a PhD is not for them after all, choosing to cut losses and move on to something else. Some take much longer to realise that and waste a great deal of time before being gently “let go” by their supervisors.
Otherwise, most PhD students are generally able to finish their PhD and make a modest contribution to their field. The key is to strive for something “good enough”, not a magnus opus. As one of my PhD friends put it to me, “the best PhD is a finished one”.
For motivated and diligent researchers, the main risk of failure is not being able to muster the mental strength and fortitude to keep going, or being overwhelmed by its sheer scale.
Indeed, doing a PhD is very painful. In the social sciences, PhD students are generally expected to produce a big book thesis of between 80 000 to 100 000 words. This requires nothing less than herculean willpower and insane levels of mental fortitude bordering on obsession.
Just four months into my PhD, I suffered one panic episode when I was worried I would not be able to secure the elite interviews I needed or collect useful data for my planned research project. Luckily, my supervisor nipped it in the bud quickly.
Looking at my PhD project from the foot of the mountain, I must confess I am more than a little daunted. The key is to break up this very large project into more manageable chunks, and chip away at it one step at a time, celebrating the small wins.
So consider carefully if this is something that you want to do. Do not take up a PhD programme unless you are prepared to embark on such a large project and deal with the uncertainty and stress accompanying it.
If you manage to read till this part, good job. Keep in mind the three practical considerations (logistics, money, risk of failure). Now, if you still want to do it, here is three reasons why and when you should still do a PhD.
Quick Summary
- A bigger life plan
- Professional development
- Pioneer something new
A bigger life plan
Do a PhD if you want to “pattern-interrupt” your comfortable routines and do something that will induce massive personal growth.
Doing a PhD is about putting yourself in an extremely uncomfortable position and forcing yourself to grow when doing it, both academically and non-academically.
A kind of “shock therapy”.
Why will anyone want something like that?
The same reason why someone will go to a theme park, do extreme sports, take a gap year, or go on mountainside retreats. We want to take a little risk, venture out into the unknown, to rediscover and reinvent ourselves.
Before I moved to Canberra for my PhD, I was worried that I would not be able to deal with the cold weather during winter. I had come from sunny Singapore and had never experienced snow in my life. I had said in half-jest to my friends in Singapore that as a “tropical boy”, I will hibernate during winter and emerge when spring arrives.
Although it was indeed very difficult to adapt to the cold weather, I slowly became better at managing it. Needless to say, had I stayed in Singapore, I would not have been able to experience something like this. It also taught me something about how the identities and labels that we attach to ourselves can be self-limiting.
It is why the PhD is not solely an academic pursuit. If you want “shock therapy”, you need to be damn sure about your “why”.
Expressed in one way or another, one piece of advice that I have consistently gotten from other PhD holders is this: The PhD needs to be part of your bigger life plan, it is not an end in itself.
For me personally, the PhD is how I have decided to lead by example and do something that I am deeply and personally convinced about. I believe that more Singaporeans need to pay attention to Indonesia and Southeast Asia. In my own small way, I hope to contribute to knowledge about Indonesia and encourage more Singaporeans to pay attention to our region.
So you should do a PhD if the PhD you plan to embark upon fits into your larger life plan.
Professional development
The second reason why anyone should do a PhD is for professional development. A PhD is a necessary part of their professional development for social science researchers who want to develop a book length study and become academics in a university context.
If you have been working as a research assistant or an entry research role in a university setting, know that a long-term career in academia almost invariably requires a PhD for career progression and eventually shift to a tenured professorial track.
Without a PhD, you inevitably reach a glass ceiling latest by the 3–4 year mark in your career. If at this point you decide that an academic career is not for you, it is far better to cut your losses and do something else than to embark on this long journey to do a PhD.
If on the other hand you decide to climb the academic ladder, know that the PhD is just the start of the long journey to a tenured professor position (assuming everything goes well).
At the very least, you are looking at a minimum of further 6–8 years to progress from a post-doctorate, to assistant professor, to associate professor. This is roughly a 9–12 year journey (including your PhD) in total.
For me personally, after my 4-year stint at my research institute, I decided that pursuing a career in research is what will give me the greatest amount of fulfillment and happiness. That was ultimately what led me to decide to do a PhD.
So you should do a PhD when it fits into your professional development plans and you are damn sure that climbing the academic career is something that you want to spend at least the next decade doing.
Pioneer something new
Third, the PhD is an opportunity to focus intensely on doing something brand new and to produce a breakthrough in your field.
This is the essential attribute that differentiate research in an academic setting from either the private sector or the public service. In the private sector, research work is a form of service delivery that you perform to the parameters specified by your client. In the public sector, research work is used as an input for the policy process and to inform policy decisions.
Only in an academic setting is the act of research geared towards discovery of something novel and have intrinsic value in of itself. This is why academics and PhD students all tend to share a certain level of egoism. It is this egoism that motivates us to want to produce a piece of work that is novel, unique, and which we want to share with the rest of the world.
For me, I have previously worked in research roles in government and in a political risk consultancy. While I also enjoyed my research work in these other settings, I found that academia’s intrinsic valuation of original research and that I could conduct the type of research I wanted was what most resonated with me.
So you should do a PhD if you believe in and are willing to spend the time and attention on your research project, and that you by extension have to sacrifice a great deal of other things in order to achieve your goal.
Conclusion
What I have explained above, the 3 practical considerations and 3 reasons why to do a PhD, is to help people who want to be very deliberate in making such a momentous life decision.
Most certainly, if you are unencumbered by family considerations, have a large inheritance, or simply want to cap a long and successful career with a PhD degree, then most likely what I said above does not apply to you.
However, for early-career researchers who must weigh their PhD decision in light of other potentially equally fulfilling pathways in life, then a great deal more care is needed.
Good luck, and I hope that this will help you in making the best possible decision in light of your own unique circumstances. Feel free to share and comment if you have thoughts on my article or your own advice for prospective PhD students.
