Insights

By Juliane Päßler and Tobias John, University of Oslo

While doing our PhDs, we gathered some insights into the academic system that are not obvious from the outside. Some things just work differently than what most people expect. We think it is very valuable to know these things beforehand, so you can have an easier time following the unwritten rules of academia (or to challenge them).

Although scientific papers seem to offer universal truth, the reality is that publications are as much marketing as anything else. The way how research results are presented is a crucial factor when it comes to deciding the acceptance of a paper. It is hard to master this without any experience, so you should not be surprised if some of your papers get rejected because of this reason. In general, it is important for all aspects of scientific publications to sell your ideas and yourself well. This applies to papers as well as to talks. The most successful researchers are also often good writers and/or confident speakers (although there are of course exceptions…). Learning how to present your ideas is a craft that can only be achieved by practising it. We had many opportunities at our summer schools to practice giving talks in a friendly environment, which was very helpful. You can probably find similar events, e.g. seminars in your group, so sign up for them. Your experience with these “unnecessary” talks will help you with the important ones.

Speaking about your research group: the work environment matters a lot for your academic success. This applies mainly to your colleagues and their experience in your field. Experienced professors and postdocs know many unwritten rules of academia and taking their advice seriously brings you a big step closer to making impactful research. But also your department and its funding have a big impact. If you have a nice office with good equipment and a supportive administration, your life will be much better. Do not hesitate to make use of the administrative staff. They are there to support you and are often very happy to help you out. For example, we got extra cameras, monitors, laptops and a separating wall by just asking for them nicely. In short: be nice to the administrative staff and ask for everything that makes your life easier.

It is important to position your work in the field and refer to relevant existing work. Ideally, existing work should justify the relevance of your contribution. If not, one needs to spend extra care on providing arguments as to why the considered problem is worth investigating. Reviewers often only have a limited understanding of your research field, so you need to be as explicit as possible about your motivation. One way of getting a good overview of the existing work is to write a survey paper. In this way, you can also identify gaps in the literature that you can explore in your research. Although this works well for some topics and PhD students, we experienced that it is not good to do them at the beginning of the PhD if you are new to the research field because they require some understanding of the topic.

Doing a PhD has quite a big impact on your personal life, maybe more than other jobs. The consequences are often hard to foresee and some of us struggled with this more than others. In general, most PhD students are expected to be flexible, e.g. in which city to live, to travel to conferences on rather short notice or to work overtime before paper deadlines. This often interferes with private life and creates problems, some of which occur so often that they have their own dedicated Wikipedia article. However, it is possible to find compromises if you fight them. Several of us founded families and had children during our time as PhD students, so this is definitely possible if you are planning to do so.

However, your PhD can, of course, also have many positive impacts on your personal life, some of which we list here. Working independently on a research topic will help you both to be more independent in your life outside of academia and to trust yourself more. You will have to make many decisions, be it which research direction to pursue, which conference to submit to, which people to collaborate with, or which project to prioritise. Of course, there will be some decisions that you will not be happy with afterwards, but these will also help you to figure out what you want and what is important to you.

Besides the insights that we got during our PhD, we also collected advice for your PhD journey in some of our other blog posts:

Disclaimer: This is a personal blog written using the input of several people. Any views or opinions represented in this blog are personal and do not represent those of people, institutions or organisations that the owner may or may not be associated with in professional or personal capacity, unless explicitly stated. Any views or opinions are not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organisation, company, or individual.