How there isn't a right way to start a PhD

Rosie Mutton is a CREST (Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats) funded PhD student in Politics at Lancaster University. In her guest post today, she reflects upon the very beginning stage of her PhD journey and sheds much-needed light on how she learnt that there is no concrete or ‘right’ way to starting a PhD, and that it’s actually a very subjective process. Follow Rosie on Twitter: @Rosie_Mutton 

I only started my PhD in October last year, so I don’t really have that much experience to share with you (yet!) However, one thing that I really struggled with were my first few days as a PhD student. In my opinion, the initial days of starting a PhD are not talked about much, despite it being such a different experience to any previous university studies. I immediately noticed the lack of both an imposed structure and short-term achievable targets. My overriding feelings were of panic and disorientation. I knew the simple theory behind doing a PhD: you conduct research in order to write your thesis; but the actual reality of ‘doing’ a PhD is a lot more complicated.

As a researcher, my default response to this gap in my personal knowledge was to go and look it up in a book. I read several handbooks about ‘how to do a PhD’, but none mentioned a fixed starting point of where or how to actually begin. Most of the advice offered was fairly generic about writing a literature review or mapping the research process, which is all very useful, but is of more use further along in the process. It is generally assumed that you already know how to ‘get started’, which I found odd and confusing. I had no idea where to begin or how to make sense of the huge, and seemingly unachievable, task that lay ahead.

After the realisation that, for once, a book could not answer my question, I decided to talk to my friends who were further along in their PhD experience, and my supervisors, to ask how they got started. I’m very lucky in that both were (and are) immensely supportive, and offered helpful advice, shared their experiences and made suggestions about things I could try. However, for all their amazing help and advice, they could not offer me what I was looking for: someone to tell me exactly what I needed to do, and that starting in this particular way was ‘correct’.

My first few days were mainly characterised by mild hysteria, but eventually I started to realise that the reason no book, friend or supervisor can tell you the ‘right’ way to start is because there is no ‘right’ way. No one can tell you how to start. It cannot be quantified by a step-by-step diagram as everyone’s experience and journey is different. There are so many variable and subjective factors that can combine in multiple ways, that for there to be a generalizable, rigid, linear framework for students to try to adhere to would be unhelpful. It took me a while to appreciate this, and that I needed to be selective about the advice I followed in order to draw on others’ experience to construct a way of starting my PhD in a way that suited me and the way I work. The point of a PhD is independent research and although you can receive help from an array of books, friends, lecturers and supervisors, ultimately it is up to you to make the decisions about how and where to start.

To a certain extent, I think that there is also a ‘mental block’ about how to approach academia that needs to be overcome. When you are researching for a PhD (particularly in social sciences) you can’t go and look up the answer. You are the person contributing and creating the answer which is a very different approach to any other academic degree you have studied for before. Once you accept that there is no single ‘right’ way to start your PhD experience and that you are developing the answer yourself, this will help you to start being open-minded about how to do things. I have only just recently come to appreciate this, but now that I have, things are getting a little easier.

So basically starting a PhD is hard (bit of an obvious point, I know). But I think that is it hard because of all of the reasons people don’t tell you. Most reflective accounts focus on the amount of work a PhD involves or how isolating it can be as an experience, and these are the things that most people know about (although they certainly are crucial points to be aware of). However, I think that the difficulties faced at the beginning of the PhD process are often not talked about. The key to starting a PhD is recognising and accepting that there are some things books just can’t tell you. As a researcher who spends most of the time reading books, this scares me. Now that I have accepted that, I have been able to focus on making my own way through, in a way that is suitable and beneficial for me. It takes a while to get used to this shift in perspective and the level of control over your own time. It certainly involves a lot of trial and error, and I have by no means completely solved it, yet I have definitely made progress since those first few daunting days.