By Phoebe Harding-Walker

There is a tremendous amount of advice available to anyone starting a PhD, so much so that it’s difficult to know what to filter out and what to pay attention to. If you Google ‘advice for new PhD students’, as soon as you press that enter key, a whopping 206 million results are available to you. When I took the leap back into academia, I found myself sifting through this information for hours and realised I couldn’t relate to a lot of it. I found that a lot of this advice was aimed at people carrying on their studies from Bachelor’s or Master’s level and not for people who had been working full-time since completing their degree(s).

Working 9 to 5

I completed my undergraduate degree in 2017 and was lucky enough to find a job straight away. I didn’t feel ready to head into the working world so abruptly, but money is a big factor in deciding what you’re going to do next. So, I worked in administration (a necessary evil). I was based in a huge office block, and it always seemed to have a bit of an electric hum about it. There wasn’t much serenity about that office; it was fast-paced, goal-oriented and the working style was particularly rigid.

There’s a certain rhythm to working a full-time job; I had a fixed routine (Monday-Friday, 9-5), my work had structure and it was predictable. One thing I found a real challenge was being told my work allocation. The managers would set these work allocations, we were given action plans and our progress was monitored. Now I understand that many businesses work in this way but ultimately, the more time went on, the more that this way of working grated on me. It also didn’t help at all for preparing for my next step – the PhD!

Upending your life

When you start a PhD, everything you learned as part of your full-time job goes straight out of the window. You don’t have your work allocated for you, you work alone, and you have to be self-motivated.

Over the first couple of weeks, you attend a series of welcome talks from the Doctoral Academy at the University of Manchester. You attend lots of training and introductory sessions – that are all very useful – but, when you’re faced with your PhD project for the first time (and that blank Word document you’ve entitled ‘thesis’) you are overwhelmed with a mix of emotions – the biggest one for me was the fear of the unknown. There isn’t a clear direction yet. There isn’t a clear routine: it is your responsibility to manage your time and your project. And what is that project going to look like in 1 year, 2 years, 3? This is a lot of pressure!

Your supervisors and your academic advisor are the people to voice these concerns to. They will completely understand. What I needed was something a bit more fixed, and permanent. So I wrote 3 lists that I could refer to at any time, which reminded me of why I am doing the PhD, what my goals are and why I feel I am capable of completing a PhD. I refer to these when I’m feeling a little lost, and they almost act as an annual review to me. These lists not only help me reground myself, but they also help give my work a little more direction. You end up so bogged down in the detail, sometimes you need to take a little step back to help you navigate your path.

Sometimes routines mean diddly squat

Before starting my PhD, I thought I worked best when someone else was portioning off my time. So, I thought I had a genius idea: create a timesheet – that’s got to help with the transition. Oh, how wrong I was! I began to feel really guilty for not producing as much output as I expected I would. I began to work extremely long hours until I just couldn’t keep it up anymore. A conversation with one of my supervisors made me realise that I needed to be more forgiving of myself. Just because I couldn’t physically see an output didn’t mean that I wasn’t working. Now I work when I feel like it; one day, I might work for 12 hours and the next, I might work for 3 but it’s exactly the working pattern that is right for me, based on what I do as a PhD researcher. And that’s exactly what you need to do: be adaptable, be flexible and, most importantly, forgive yourself for not working 7 hours a day, or all hours under the sun.

Full-time work has nothing on a PhD

There’s a kind of fluidity with PhD studies that is quite unique to the position. It’s something completely different, and it’s nothing you expect when you press that ‘Accept’ button on the online University system.

I enjoy being a PhD researcher miles more than my admin job but that doesn’t mean it is void of challenges. However, there are so many positive things about doing a PhD: you have the freedom to study what you want to, when you want to, however you want to. The beauty of this is that you can work in a way that suits you. If you want to keep an office routine, you can. If you want to do something a bit more like me, you can. Who knows? Embracing a change in routine could be the best thing you’ve ever done.