The road less traveled: How to ensure your Ph.D. journey is a successful one

As summer winds down and the new school year starts in earnest, college seniors often ponder about what their next steps will be. Similarly, new first-year Ph.D. students struggle to anticipate the unknowns of their upcoming graduate career. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Education at a Glance report, only 2% of the U.S. population pursues a Ph.D. Why do you think that is?

I can understand that getting multiple degrees is not everyone’s forte. It is a great commitment and not many people feel it is necessary for their career choice. However, some people are hesitant to commit the next five years to a particular study solely based on some less than favorable experiences that circulate through academia. From being harshly scolded by their Ph.D. mentor, to feeling like you’re ostracized from everyone and everything.

I’m here to tell you those situations are improbable if you adhere to the following essential tips. I believe these are needed to not only be successful in graduate school but also to make your time during your Ph.D. more enjoyable.

1. Choose your mentor wisely.
This first tip is by far the most important and will undoubtedly govern your Ph.D. journey. I strongly believe that your mentor choice accounts for a whopping 90% of your success for the next five years. This should be a person who you feel comfortable around, enjoy sharing scientific ideas with and understands that you have a life outside of lab. Yes, their area of research should be of some interest to you, but the character, determination and relatability of your mentor matter the most.

"Let your passion be what separates you from the next candidate and what drives you to want to succeed even more."

-- Janiece Glover, M.S.

2. Surround yourself with an amazing team.
This second tip is a given, but it must be said that it is beneficial to surround yourself with like-minded people. This will include, but is not limited to, other peers within your same program. Who better to talk to about struggles or hardships than the people going through the same thing? Similarly, this tip applies to the people who you’ll be around the majority of the time, day to day: your lab mates. They will be the individuals you turn to the most because of their access to you and, in most cases, their shared experience. Also, your family and friends, who constantly uplift you and feed you words of encouragement when you’re down, are essential.

3. Organization really is key!
As a graduate student, you will be very busy, and because you will have a lot going on its easy for things to slip through the cracks. This next tip is pretty simple: stay organized! Have a physical planner and a virtual planner and utilize apps like Trello that help you remember all your To Do’s. Make it a point to organize your findings into specific detailed folders. I found it useful to draft results into figures as they come in. The amount of data that you will collect, and the manuscript revisions and grant applications you will inevitably write over the next five years, will be a lot. If you start your graduate career highly organized, it will save you so much time when deadlines quickly occur, and trust me, they will occur quickly.

4. Find your passion.
For this next tip, I feel it is necessary to find your passion within your field and let that drive you in moments of weakness or lack of motivation. For me it was discovering that I enjoy being at the lab bench and perfecting techniques in the hopes that my experiments will help the patients suffering from the disease I’m studying. I am also driven by teaching the next generation of future scientists, guiding them into finding their passion in the sciences. Let your passion be what separates you from the next candidate and what drives you to want to succeed even more.

5. Treat yourself!
You deserve this last tip and don’t let anyone tell you any different. You’re getting your Ph.D., what an awesome but sometimes draining task! It is essential that you find the appropriate breaks and go and treat yourself. Ph.D. students tend to burn themselves out and once we hit that plateau, it’s hard to recover. Whether it’s taking a weekend to catch up on your favorite show, traveling to Dubai, or leaving the lab at 4 p.m. instead of 7 p.m. for a week, give yourself an opportunity to relax and recharge so you come back to lab reinvigorated.

Hard times will inevitably hit all of us, either personally or academically, and they have the potential to derail you from your plans and leave you wondering why am I here? While this guide can’t guarantee that you will never face such hard times, my hope is that these tips will provide you with tools to overcome those obstacles. 

I have experienced this feeling before and I felt like giving up. But having successfully implemented these tips, like having a supportive mentor and an uplifting team of peers surrounding me, I was able to come through these moments of doubt and give myself the encouragement I needed to press on!

It is my hope that this guide will give you some tools to make sure that your Ph.D. journey will be a positive one. And to those that are contemplating pursuing a Ph.D., give it a try and don’t let those graduate school horror stories control your future.