Being a PhD candidate isn’t easy. I believe that you can relate to this. Let me assure you – you’re not alone. We all experience similar PhD challenges, ranging from lack of motivation to workaholism.
I’m not saying this to discourage you – don’t get me wrong. Your research can substantially change our understanding of the world we live in or develop innovative solutions that solve the current (and future) challenges we’re facing. Essentially, we’ve got the power to make our world a better place to live!
Regardless of the importance of your research, there’re always distractions and challenges that drain your motivation. And this is fine – as I wrote earlier, it’s not sustainable to succeed all the time.
You need to reduce these as much as you can to drive your research further, develop, prove feasibility and potentially, commercialise new ideas. From my own experience, I’ve realised that there’re several sources of demotivation that can prevent you from reaching your full potential during your PhD.
How to deal with common PhD challenges? Here I list the most pressing PhD challenges that may significantly derail your PhD progress. I share my own reflections on how to best avoid these to reach your full potential and stay motivated during PhD.
Table of Contents
PhD Challenge #1: Uncertainty!
To create solutions to our challenges, we need to go beyond the current state-of-the-art. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have struggled to solve these challenges! Therefore, we’ve got to come up with blue-sky ideas as the current technology or knowledge merely is insufficient or not advanced enough to provide ultimate solutions.
Although uncertainty is an inherent part of the research, it’s the main PhD challenge. It’s rather easy to get demotivated when the direction of your research is uncertain. The power of uncertainty is so strong that it can make you question the importance of your work, especially if nobody else tried to do what you’re doing before. But imagine if this led Stephen Hawking to quit!
Try the following solution to this PhD challenge:
Remember that research is by its nature exploratory. This means that it’s OK that you don’t know something or cannot easily explain something off the top of your head. It’s our role as researchers to make sense of new things and groundbreaking phenomena. We work to develop an understanding of the underlying principles and influencing variables and come up with a sensible explanation that we can share with others to raise their knowledge.
Personally, I found it difficult to transition from the “certain” world, in which each piece of information was given in the task and it was sufficient to use equations from the textbook to the real “uncertain” world.
However, once I understood working with uncertainty is part of the process, I was able to progress with my work much faster. This was because I was OK with making assumptions regarding the systems I worked with. I understood, however, that these assumptions must be well justified!
The sooner you’ll become OK with this part of the PhD process and research in general, I’m sure you’ll see a rapid boost in motivation and productivity. Also, make sure you’ve got a reliable support system that’ll help you get through the tough times!
PhD Challenge #2: Lack of support from or inconsistent supervisory team
Because of the uncertainty and risks associated with your PhD project, you will be supervised by experienced academics. Their role is not only to make sure you complete your PhD on time and up to a required standard. They should primarily develop you as an independent researcher who’ll be capable of leading projects and developing others.