Estimated reading time: 16 minutes

Over six years, I worked part-time towards a PhD in divinity from the University of Aberdeen. As it entered its final stages, I spent some time reflecting on what I learned about actually doing a PhD and what I wish I had known at the beginning. Here are the 10 lessons I wished I’d known before I started my PhD in Divinity.

Whether you are doing a PhD, thinking of doing a PhD, or pursuing any other long-term project or academic study, I hope you find this interesting and helpful.

1 – You Have To Love Your Subject

This one seems obvious, but I mean that the subject you’re looking at, the question you are trying to answer or the point you are trying to prove, cannot just be interesting.

Your passion has got to last years of reading, writing, editing, and setbacks.

When you have to edit 1500 footnotes, or re-format your bibliography, or when you get feedback from your supervisor that a chapter isn’t working, and you need to do it again after a couple of months’ worth of work. Then you need genuine love and passion for the subject to keep you motivated and moving in the right direction.

When you are reading the hundredth book on the same subject, you need to still enjoy it and not get bored to tears.

It is all about making sure that you don’t get distracted by that interesting idea you just discovered and running off in a different direction, or deciding halfway through that what you were originally looking at is actually less interesting than something you just heard on a podcast that is far more exciting.

Having a genuine, deep love for the topic helps you build the resilience to keep working, stay on topic, and actually get to the end. More people fail to complete a PhD than fail to pass the degree. Which brings us onto…

2 – The PhD Is A Marathon, Not A Sprint

No matter how hard you try, you can’t write 100’000 words overnight. You can’t read all the significant primary and secondary sources and all the relevant journal articles in a week. And you can’t develop your argument in a month.

A PhD takes time! Serious time.

Whether you are doing it full-time at 40 hours a week for three years, or part-time at 20 hours a week for six years, this is not something you can just knock off on a weekend. Even hyper-focusing for a few days won’t help.

This is because the PhD writing is only about a quarter of the process.

Half of your time will be spent reading, taking notes, organising sources, and thinking about your argument. About a quarter of your time will be spent on editing, proofreading, footnoting, bibliographies, more editing, spell checking, grammar checking, and did I mention the editing?

Build a Rhythm of LIfe

Building a healthy, sustainable study rhythm is essential. When do you work best? During the day, in the morning, or in the evening? When are you actually able to study? What other commitments do you have?

I have a full-time job as a Salvation Army Officer. I have two young toddlers, born while I was studying. There are courses I need to attend, books I need to read, and media I need to engage with in order to do my job. I also need to pay attention to my wife if I want any of the rest to happen!

In other words, there are lots of other claims on my time that I have needed to balance.

You have to do the work, but you don’t have to do it all at once, and it should fit with the rest of your life.

Talking through your other commitments with your supervisors early on in the process is both big and clever. Putting in blocks of study time in your diary is sensible. Agreeing on a way of working whilst still being involved in your family and seeing your friends is essential.

3 – You Need To Find Your Own Voice

Here is a tricky one. You need to find your voice. Which means you need to find a way to write which is confident, clear, authoritative, and which sounds like you, not like you’re copying another scholar.

Finding your voice is key to delivering a good-quality PhD.

The sense that a reader gets from reading your text about whether they will trust what you are saying depends a lot on your tone of voice. Do you sound unsure of yourself, or are you making suggestions or giving evidence-based statements with solid rational arguments?

You don’t have to sound like you know it all – best if you don’t actually – but you do need to sound confident in your ability and that what you have to offer matters.

What You Have to Say Matters

Part of this comes from you believing in yourself. You need to believe that what you are doing matters and will make a difference. Otherwise, it’s just a vanity project.

You are doing this insane amount of work for a reason. Make sure the reader knows it. By the end of your PhD, you will be an expert on your chosen topic and will probably know more about it than your supervisors and anyone who is not a specialist. The nature of nicheness which attends PhD study tends to limit the field of expertise.

Like Indiana Jones taking a leap of faith, you must believe!

The only way to develop and grow your voice is to write.

Find Your Voice By Using It

This is something I mention again later, but you must write and write and write until your fingers can barely touch a keyboard anymore. Your voice will only emerge through writing, editing, reviewing, and writing again.

Partly this is about just getting better at writing. Using the active rather than the passive voice. Using declarative statements rather than suggestive. Reducing the number of quotations used to those that are actually necessary, rather than trying to be more persuasive by drawing on other people, because you doubt your own ability to carry the argument.

Like a public speaker learns to get rid of filler sounds, so the writer must learn to dump their filler words.

When editing, the number of little phrases I found myself using to open a paragraph or move the argument along was more than a bit embarrassing. I had to cut out quite a few words, which cost me, word count without actually benefiting my argument, and were simply the written version of an ‘Um’.

Getting your voice right takes time, but it’s really important.

4 – Read Well, Read Widely, Read Wisely

It seems obvious, but reading is absolutely necessary for doing a PhD.

You need to read well. Structure and plan your reading. Remember that you are reading for a purpose, so you need to work out the order in which to read.

It is always better to start with primary texts. If you start with the secondary material, you will already be influenced by what other people think it means or says.

Better to start with the primary material, then go to the secondary material to help understanding and see how it has been used in ways that are similar or different to what you take from it. Of course, always beware trying to make a source for or say what you want it to, rather than approaching it for what it actually does or says.

Read Beyond Your Topic

Once you have moved beyond your primary material, it is important to read widely. Not only authors you are familiar with, but also more obscure ones as well.

Theological dictionaries or topic handbooks can be really helpful for this. Using Ethos to identify what PhDs have been completed on a topic is really helpful. The institutional library is obviously a good place to start. Then, judicious use of Google Scholar.

Journal articles, books, pamphlets, conference papers, and theses are all valid material.

Reading is More Than Books

Don’t forget YouTube videos or similar media, podcasts, blogs, or more ‘trade magazine’ type material. These are growing and impactful areas of research and opinions that need to be engaged with as well.

If you find something in a different language that you can’t understand, it might be worth seeing if you know someone who can translate it, maybe getting in touch with the publisher or author to see if there is a translation already available, or, as a last resort, running it through some translation software.

You Are Reading for a Purpose

This has to be balanced against the reminder that you are reading for a purpose. You need to be wise in your reading. Maybe you only need a chapter from that book. Maybe you just want to use the bibliography to help highlight where your reading should go.

It’s here that it’s important to draw a distinction between work reading and pleasure reading.

Absolutely, read things that are not related to your PhD. This is healthy and will keep you sane. But when you are doing work, reading for the PhD, make sure you stay on mission.

Let go of a text if it isn’t helpful. Don’t feel you have to finish if it turns out to be about something irrelevant. Don’t feel the need to include a quote for every single possible argument one way or another, as long as you can show your working, you don’t need to beat your examiners over the head with it.

5 – You Need To Understand How You Work Best

It’s important to know right from the beginning how you work best.

Do you need a comfy chair or do you prefer a desk? Light room or dark room. Silence or background noise? Early morning or late night? Little and often or big sessions.

Ideally, you will have already worked this out through your previous study. But it’s good to go back and do some self-reflection to remind yourself of how to get the best out of your work. Especially as this will be an extended project. Which is, of course, good training for further academic projects following the PhD.

Talk through with your supervisors how you work, what is best for you, including whether you need hard deadlines to work towards or whether you are good at self-motivation and can plan out your own study windows.

Your supervisors will have their own way of working as well, but it’s important to have that conversation so everyone involved knows when and how you will do your best work.

6 – Have People Who Critically Read Your Work And Aren’t Related To You!

You need people to read your work for you. Not just your family, but also people who will read it carefully and critically. This will take work, time, and effort from them, so remember to factor that in when asking people.

It’s important that you have a good enough relationship with these people that you’re open to their criticism and comments without getting defensive or offended.

Showing someone else your work and asking them to pull it apart for you is like inviting someone inside your mind and inviting them to point out all the bits they don’t like. It takes some courage and grace from both people in that conversation.

Taking time to discuss your thesis and to see if you can explain to people in a couple of sentences what you are doing is an excellent way to gauge how well you understand your material and your argument.

When this is combined with someone who will be able to meaningfully comment on your work, then you have the opportunity to develop yourself in a way which will have marked effects on your capacity as a writer and academic.

As scary as it might be, you must open yourself up to others reading it, take their feedback on board, and then return to your work to develop it further in light of their comments.

Maybe you need to change or adapt something, or make your argument stronger. But you can’t ignore what they have said.

Then, at the end, remember to say thank you. They will have put a lot of work into helping you. Get them a nice present.

7 – Write Other Things As Well As Your PhD

Take the time to write things that are not directly related to your thesis. This may seem strange. Why would you give your time to something else when you could be using that time to work on your thesis?

Giving yourself time to think, read, and write about something different gives your brain a bit of a rest and a refresh. It could be a topic that relates to your thesis, or it could be something completely different.

Either way, giving yourself that space is a good way of keeping on track. Then, when you come back to your thesis, you will have had a chance to stretch your metaphorical legs and ease the wrinkles out of your brain so you can pay more attention to what you have been working on.

Taking the opportunity to write a journal article and get it published, or a conference paper, or an article for a magazine or other publication, also gives you a chance to test the reception of the ideas you have been developing in your thesis.

In the same way that having a critical reader can be beneficial for your writing, having a critical audience is really helpful for your ideas. It means that you can get some feedback before you have to go and sit before the examiners, and you get some practice in your writing.

Give yourself the opportunity to write something different, and your writing in your thesis will be a lot better because of it.

8 – The PhD Is The Beginning Of Your Academic Journey, So Make Contacts Along The Way

The PhD is the start of your journey into the academic world, not the destination.

It opens doors for you and allows you the recognition to engage with the academic community. It can qualify you for teaching or research positions, give you experience managing long-term projects, and build your resilience and confidence in your own abilities.

But more than anything else, it is an opportunity to start to get to know people.

Make Your Contacts Now

Take the time to attend conferences, doctoral fellowship groups, post-grad research days, or any of a dozen different kinds of events and activities put on by universities, societies, and organisations to support PhD scholars.

Making good contacts with people in the early stage of your PhD will not only give you a broader audience who might recognise your name, but will also give you people you might be able to have a conversation with who can give you some helpful advice. The contacts and networks that you build up during this stage of your academic career will serve you well for the coming years.

Beyond the practical, there is the element of journeying with people, which can be really helpful.

Make Sure You Have Friends That Are Patinet

Doing a PhD is often a lonely time. There are only a limited number of people interested in what you are doing. Families only have so much patience for listening to you talk about what you have been doing for the last few years. You will spend hours reading and writing, generally on your own.

It helps to have people to speak to and spend time with who understand what you are doing and why you are doing it, and the particular kind of hardships you will be facing.

Do not do it on your own. Make friends with people. Build a network of contacts. Go to things.

Not only will it make the PhD easier to complete at a higher standard it will also maybe stop you from dropping off the deep end.

9 – Build Your Relationships With Your Supervisors

Your supervisors and your relationship with them can make or break your PhD. Take the time early on to speak to them and get to know them.

Find out how they work best and help them to understand how you work best. Try to build up a good working relationship with them that goes beyond what you have written this month and what you will be reading next month. They are people who have experience for you to draw from for more than just your thesis.

A good supervisor that you have developed a positive relationship with will be able to help you with getting your journal articles published, including helping you find a good place to get published.

They can advise you on which conferences to attend and on preparing and delivering your first conference presentations. Your supervisors can help you when you have finished the PhD to work through the next steps of your journey.

They can advise you on publishing your thesis, on finding out which jobs you might want to be applying for, or on how to integrate your studies into your professional life.

Your work with your supervisors depends upon how much work you put into building up a relationship with them. The more you use them, the better the relationship with them will work out.

If you only contact them when you have to or only talk to them during your supervision meetings, you will only get the minimum out of that relationship.

If you spend time exchanging emails, attending events together, and following up on ideas with them, you will get more out of the relationship.

Like so many things in life, you get out what you put in. Don’t waste the opportunity you get through your supervisors.

10 – Write! You Must Write Straight Away, Keep On Writing Until The End, and Then Finish Strong

Don’t put off writing until the last minute.

As tempting as it is to read, study, work things out, and then write it all, I’d really suggest not doing it. You will do much better getting stuck in and writing straight away.

Even before you are sure where you are going with your argument, and before you know what the conclusions will be, get writing.

Writing will help you develop your themes and ideas. By writing them down and building up your arguments, you will start to see their strengths and weaknesses.

By writing, you will get to know your style, develop your voice, and practice the kind of language you need to be able to engage in the academic process.

Write Straight Away

Writing straight away and consistently throughout your PhD journey, you will keep in the habit of writing, and it will not come as a surprise to you when you suddenly have to write the thing out.

Writing is a skill like anything else, and if you practice it and work at it, then you will get better at it. In the same way that an athlete needs to train, an academic needs to write. It is a key skill that helps people understand what you are trying to say. If you think what you have to say is important, then it is on you to do the work to make it as easy as possible for the reader to take on board your ideas.

You will end up writing far more words than what will actually be submitted. You will delete tens of thousands of words while writing hundreds of thousands. Don’t take this as disheartening, but as an opportunity to learn and develop.

Editing is Painful But Essential

Learning what to delete is a similar skill to learning how to write. Adding and cutting away are key skills for the writing process. One that can only be developed by actually doing the task of writing.

Write test articles and discard them. If you are working on a problem, write it out, then delete it when you understand what you think, and write it again to see if you can write the same thing.

Try to write from memory what you have already written. Remembering that what you have written a couple of years ago will be different from where your thinking is at the end of your journey. Reading what you have written before can feel like reading something that someone else has written.

Use that sense of disruption to challenge you to work harder and write again.

Finish What You Start

Then, you must finish.

The temptation is to keep on writing, to go back and correct and edit and do it again and again, endlessly tweaking. It is difficult to let go of something that you have come to love and send it out into the world where you no longer have control over it.

It is scary to submit something, knowing you could have improved this point or maybe rewritten that phrase.

There will always be something more, something different you can do. You will need to have the discipline to come to a stop and submit it.

You must write. Right from the beginning, you must write and write and write. Then you have to stop writing, submit the thing, and let it go.

Thanks!

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