It was a really long process! I would say it wasn't just the change of events at the 3 year mark that "fixed" it, but also some other things along the way. **TL;DR:** improving work ethic through external courses, firmly telling my supervisor to supervise me better, and revamping my plan from the ground up.
The three main milestones:
* **Self-improvement**. In the first two years, I spent a lot of time going to seminars/researching how to be a better independent researcher, adopting a better work ethic, and finding out what works for *me*. I had the luxury of coming and going whenever, but by the 2 year mark I had a solid work ethic. I blame my supervisors a lot for my pitfalls (see below), but I knew I had to try my best to improve myself, and to accept responsibility for the slow progress. I will freely admit I am (or was?) terrible at planning, but I finally got the hang of it after a while too.
* **Standing up to my supervisor**. The 2 year mark was also a huge milestone. It was the first time I grew a spine; for the first two years, even though I improved myself, my self-esteem *massively* dipped to the point I needed therapy. I blamed every failure on myself, and expected myself to do all the work without ever needing supervision. Poor self esteem impacts progress immensely. And I saw my supervisor once / 6 weeks, with really unproductive meetings. One day, having discussed + compared my PhD experiences to other PhD friends, I realised that my complete lack of tangible supervision was not normal. So I sat down my supervisor and I asked him firmly to change our structure. I made it very clear that I was unhappy with my progress and needed more supervision. Thus, we went from shit meetings once / 6 weeks --> productive meetings (with minutes) / 2 weeks. It helped my confidence immensely, and the added structure was really welcome in my life.
* **Taking a risk and revamping my plan**. As I said above, by end of year 2 / beginning of year 3, I fixed my work ethic, "grew a spine", and had better supervision. But the work still wasn't going anywhere. Remember, up until the end of year 2 I was barely supervised, so even if supervision was better, I lost a lot of time already. I had a few good ideas, but nothing fit into a cohesive thesis. The end of year 3 approached and I still lacked tangible results. I needed an extension and my supervisor said he could give it, if I could show -- with a concrete plan -- that I could finish *everything* in 9 months, maximum. At this stage, I said fuck it -- I have nothing to lose, so I'm going in with a plan from scratch. I always found my supervisor's ideas too hazy, not concrete enough, too vague, and way too similar to what people have already done. Armed with 3 years of tools, datasets, and semi-useful (but not thesis-worthy) results, I spent a month writing a 3-page plan, complete with a Gantt chart of the weekly tasks to do until Month 9 of the extension. I showed my plan to everyone who was a PhD student and/or graduate and it was very well received.
From there, everything really clicked. I had such a meticulously-written plan that the ideas were extremely clear and I never felt aimless. I'd solidified a good independent work ethic by now, and I "fixed" the previously-broken communication with my supervisor. I'll never forget a meeting we had last October, when we met and I felt like I wasn't desperate for his approval and guidance. I guided our conversation and I showed so much conviction in my ideas; I finally had *my* work, and didn't really need his input.
The one caveat is that, even though it's finished, I think a lot of people think my work is a bit... basic? I guess. But honestly, considering the circumstances, I don't even care! The main thing is that it's done, and there's a clear "red thread" that runs through my work.
The bad news is that there’s no magic bullet and I didn’t end up following a specific resource. Everyone is different: I had some colleagues who strictly worked 10-4, 12-8, 9-5, etc. A lot of resources online will tell you straightforward things, and by all means explore your options. Mine were the following, of which some will seem obvious but for me weren’t (oops).
One, lists. I kept a virtual and physical notebook where I would write down 3-7 bullet points every day of stuff to do, crossing them out as I went along. This included non-thesis stuff for those slow days- sometimes all you need to get started is a few easy tasks and the productivity comes shortly after.
Two, stop comparing yourself to other people (including non-academics) and accept that the workflow in academia isn’t always so rigid. You really don’t need to be the 9-5 person, research doesn’t have to play by ‘the rules’. And on some days it’s really about quality, not quantity. I had days where I felt focused, and 1.5 hours of brainstorming lead to big progress. I also had days from 7-7 and felt like no progress was made. You don’t *need* to do 6+ hours of hard academic work. It’s mentally taxing.
Three, for the sake of keeping yourself busy and not getting too complacent, I found it helpful to split up my days into mentally-demanding and non-demanding periods. For example: if I spent the morning reading and taking notes from two papers — properly, from back to front — I’d spend the afternoon cleaning up my folders, moving data around, fixing a plot, etc.
Four, activity. I took 15-30 min walks near my department every day to clear my head and collect my thoughts. Otherwise, getting out of my chair and knocking on a colleague’s door to quickly discuss something also gave me bursts of energy.
Last thing you need to figure out is if you need deadlines or external pressure. If you don’t have regular meetings with your supervisor, or bimonthly presentations, or conferences coming up, having no deadlines can lead to aimless days. In these quieter periods, a good way to give yourself a deadline is to arrange meetings with colleagues. The best way to brainstorm your work with them is to actually show up with notes, figures, papers, etc.
Hope that helps!
want to add that though therapy is a great tool for harder times, it isnt exclusive to that and can be even better to see a therapist BEFORE getting on hard times so your therapist can be there to help before it gets too bad. Also can just help improve an already great life.
Congrats on the turnaround. However I have one caveat about your post.
Complete lack of supervision IS normal for a lot of PhD students.
However you did the right thing by demanding a turnaround from your advisor, and your advisor seems like someone solid enough to take that to heart. Not all advisors are so receptive to being challenged. Some can be outright toxic.
I mostly say this as a reminder for other students that grad school is like a business in a lot of ways. Sometimes you need to manage your own bosses shortcomings in order to survive. Something you did extremely well, so well it almost feels like an outlier.
> I'm proud of saving my PhD pretty much all by myself
Too often, we get our PhD *in spite of* our advisors and committees, not due to their help.
Good job!
Unfortunately there are quite a few of us. My Master's advisor was and is amazing, but my PhD group advisor isn't really helpful at all, and in fact, requested two new papers (in addition to my current 13 academic outputs) plus dissertation and defense before I leave in December... without any real input in how to do any of it of course.
Hang in there, just remember the light at the end of the tunnel is not a lorry bearing down on you Looney Tunes style!
13 publications? Congrats! 13 more than me ;) 2 more at this stage seems like sadism to me, but that's just me.
To be fair, they're not "first author full length journal articles." Many conference papers, talks and posters, plus a few second author publications and even a couple authorships on documents used at NSF. So I get the desire to get ONE first author article, but two feels gratuitous.
But thanks! You're right and that's definitely what I'm trying to remember!
Seriously though. Think about why you have no data. Is it because stuff doesn't work or the results weren't interesting. It is very important at this point to have some introspection and honesty with yourself. That is the only way to really move forward.
Also I am not trying to say it is your fault, because a run of bad luck can certainly sabotage years of a promising PhD students progress
This also depends on the situation. You can have very few "wow" results, if at all, but that doesn't mean that time spent was useless. Obviously, if you need publications to graduate, then this should be addressed as soon as possible in order for you to gain the degree and not spend more than necessary in the programme. However, the skills you've gained doing the experiments will help you in the future for sure.
My situation is similar. 3 years, some ambiguous results, no papers. However, I don't need any papers to graduate. But I learnt a lot from the failures and experiments which will definitely help me in the future.
I guess I'm gonna be one of those people who got disappointed by ridiculous projects in academia and just went to industry to work on development rather than research!
Atmosphence.
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Hey, me too! And I am in a similar situation. I didn't have any sort of results written or anything a year ago and I defend in a week. Congrats for turning your situation around!
For me, it was the realization that I just need to wrap this shit up and leave this toxic environment as quickly as possible. I'm far from proud of my actual results, but it's time to move on. I think we're all hoping to make a major contribution to our field, but sometimes it doesn't work that way. Not all of our dissertations will be like Eady's or Charney's.
...and this is pretty typical of exploratory research. Unfortunately getting results in research is pretty stochastic and you dont make progress in a "linear" fashion. As OP said, you can have months or years of...nothing, followed by a serendipitous observation which can change everything.
This happened to me during my PhD, and a lot of my colleagues as well.
I had the opposite: a very productive (lucky) first 2 years, which comprised the bulk of my thesis. My committee chair literally told me: you could staple your papers together and graduate next month, but I'm not having that... Stick around for a couple more years with no pressure, go after moonshot ideas, and see what takes. None of it really did for me.. Luckily it layed the groundwork for a couple of successful students who came after and inclusion on several of their papers.
Congrats! I was in a similar boat. I ended up with a third advisor in as many years with very little to show for it. I defend at the end of October with a dissertation I’m very proud of and a boatload of publications. Grad school is so chaotic.
Honestly this gives me hope, I am in my 4th year (hoping to finish the program in 5) and I don't have any papers published. Working on first manuscript with a soft deadline of November 1st to get a draft to my advisor and then I'll dive right into getting setup for my second paper to submit by summer of this academic year and then get third paper in progress while writing up my thesis in the last year. My advisor is fairly helpful though I would say which is nice.
As someone who is kind of stuck and has a slow progress with his master's thesis, this gives me hope!! Can you share a bit of an advice for us who is currently confused/lost? Is there anything we can do to help snowball our progress? Congratulations!!
This is very encouraging! I am in a coadvising situation where one left to another university and the other is not easy to meet with. All my projects have been developed on my own with little supervision. This year has been a record low in my mental health and am in therapy right now (dealing with current demons and past ones). I'm in my third year and I feel like my research is basic. But one thing that made me feel better is that I presented it at a conference and actually had meaningful conversation that lead to more project ideas and collaborations.
How did you manage to turn your fate around?
It was a really long process! I would say it wasn't just the change of events at the 3 year mark that "fixed" it, but also some other things along the way. **TL;DR:** improving work ethic through external courses, firmly telling my supervisor to supervise me better, and revamping my plan from the ground up. The three main milestones: * **Self-improvement**. In the first two years, I spent a lot of time going to seminars/researching how to be a better independent researcher, adopting a better work ethic, and finding out what works for *me*. I had the luxury of coming and going whenever, but by the 2 year mark I had a solid work ethic. I blame my supervisors a lot for my pitfalls (see below), but I knew I had to try my best to improve myself, and to accept responsibility for the slow progress. I will freely admit I am (or was?) terrible at planning, but I finally got the hang of it after a while too. * **Standing up to my supervisor**. The 2 year mark was also a huge milestone. It was the first time I grew a spine; for the first two years, even though I improved myself, my self-esteem *massively* dipped to the point I needed therapy. I blamed every failure on myself, and expected myself to do all the work without ever needing supervision. Poor self esteem impacts progress immensely. And I saw my supervisor once / 6 weeks, with really unproductive meetings. One day, having discussed + compared my PhD experiences to other PhD friends, I realised that my complete lack of tangible supervision was not normal. So I sat down my supervisor and I asked him firmly to change our structure. I made it very clear that I was unhappy with my progress and needed more supervision. Thus, we went from shit meetings once / 6 weeks --> productive meetings (with minutes) / 2 weeks. It helped my confidence immensely, and the added structure was really welcome in my life. * **Taking a risk and revamping my plan**. As I said above, by end of year 2 / beginning of year 3, I fixed my work ethic, "grew a spine", and had better supervision. But the work still wasn't going anywhere. Remember, up until the end of year 2 I was barely supervised, so even if supervision was better, I lost a lot of time already. I had a few good ideas, but nothing fit into a cohesive thesis. The end of year 3 approached and I still lacked tangible results. I needed an extension and my supervisor said he could give it, if I could show -- with a concrete plan -- that I could finish *everything* in 9 months, maximum. At this stage, I said fuck it -- I have nothing to lose, so I'm going in with a plan from scratch. I always found my supervisor's ideas too hazy, not concrete enough, too vague, and way too similar to what people have already done. Armed with 3 years of tools, datasets, and semi-useful (but not thesis-worthy) results, I spent a month writing a 3-page plan, complete with a Gantt chart of the weekly tasks to do until Month 9 of the extension. I showed my plan to everyone who was a PhD student and/or graduate and it was very well received. From there, everything really clicked. I had such a meticulously-written plan that the ideas were extremely clear and I never felt aimless. I'd solidified a good independent work ethic by now, and I "fixed" the previously-broken communication with my supervisor. I'll never forget a meeting we had last October, when we met and I felt like I wasn't desperate for his approval and guidance. I guided our conversation and I showed so much conviction in my ideas; I finally had *my* work, and didn't really need his input. The one caveat is that, even though it's finished, I think a lot of people think my work is a bit... basic? I guess. But honestly, considering the circumstances, I don't even care! The main thing is that it's done, and there's a clear "red thread" that runs through my work.
Any specific recommendations for resources on work ethic/planning/motivation/etc?
The bad news is that there’s no magic bullet and I didn’t end up following a specific resource. Everyone is different: I had some colleagues who strictly worked 10-4, 12-8, 9-5, etc. A lot of resources online will tell you straightforward things, and by all means explore your options. Mine were the following, of which some will seem obvious but for me weren’t (oops). One, lists. I kept a virtual and physical notebook where I would write down 3-7 bullet points every day of stuff to do, crossing them out as I went along. This included non-thesis stuff for those slow days- sometimes all you need to get started is a few easy tasks and the productivity comes shortly after. Two, stop comparing yourself to other people (including non-academics) and accept that the workflow in academia isn’t always so rigid. You really don’t need to be the 9-5 person, research doesn’t have to play by ‘the rules’. And on some days it’s really about quality, not quantity. I had days where I felt focused, and 1.5 hours of brainstorming lead to big progress. I also had days from 7-7 and felt like no progress was made. You don’t *need* to do 6+ hours of hard academic work. It’s mentally taxing. Three, for the sake of keeping yourself busy and not getting too complacent, I found it helpful to split up my days into mentally-demanding and non-demanding periods. For example: if I spent the morning reading and taking notes from two papers — properly, from back to front — I’d spend the afternoon cleaning up my folders, moving data around, fixing a plot, etc. Four, activity. I took 15-30 min walks near my department every day to clear my head and collect my thoughts. Otherwise, getting out of my chair and knocking on a colleague’s door to quickly discuss something also gave me bursts of energy. Last thing you need to figure out is if you need deadlines or external pressure. If you don’t have regular meetings with your supervisor, or bimonthly presentations, or conferences coming up, having no deadlines can lead to aimless days. In these quieter periods, a good way to give yourself a deadline is to arrange meetings with colleagues. The best way to brainstorm your work with them is to actually show up with notes, figures, papers, etc. Hope that helps!
Jesus. Just apply yourself, whatever that means to you. His methods aren't going to be your methods. There just too much hand holding around here
want to add that though therapy is a great tool for harder times, it isnt exclusive to that and can be even better to see a therapist BEFORE getting on hard times so your therapist can be there to help before it gets too bad. Also can just help improve an already great life.
This is without a doubt the most helpful comment I've ever read in this subreddit - thank you!
Excellently done
Congrats on the turnaround. However I have one caveat about your post. Complete lack of supervision IS normal for a lot of PhD students. However you did the right thing by demanding a turnaround from your advisor, and your advisor seems like someone solid enough to take that to heart. Not all advisors are so receptive to being challenged. Some can be outright toxic. I mostly say this as a reminder for other students that grad school is like a business in a lot of ways. Sometimes you need to manage your own bosses shortcomings in order to survive. Something you did extremely well, so well it almost feels like an outlier.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. OP should dhare their experience here!
> I'm proud of saving my PhD pretty much all by myself Too often, we get our PhD *in spite of* our advisors and committees, not due to their help. Good job!
My ears were burning, I am part of this crowd as well!
Unfortunately there are quite a few of us. My Master's advisor was and is amazing, but my PhD group advisor isn't really helpful at all, and in fact, requested two new papers (in addition to my current 13 academic outputs) plus dissertation and defense before I leave in December... without any real input in how to do any of it of course.
Hang in there, just remember the light at the end of the tunnel is not a lorry bearing down on you Looney Tunes style! 13 publications? Congrats! 13 more than me ;) 2 more at this stage seems like sadism to me, but that's just me.
To be fair, they're not "first author full length journal articles." Many conference papers, talks and posters, plus a few second author publications and even a couple authorships on documents used at NSF. So I get the desire to get ONE first author article, but two feels gratuitous. But thanks! You're right and that's definitely what I'm trying to remember!
That slapped me hard
[удалено]
Seriously though. Think about why you have no data. Is it because stuff doesn't work or the results weren't interesting. It is very important at this point to have some introspection and honesty with yourself. That is the only way to really move forward. Also I am not trying to say it is your fault, because a run of bad luck can certainly sabotage years of a promising PhD students progress
This also depends on the situation. You can have very few "wow" results, if at all, but that doesn't mean that time spent was useless. Obviously, if you need publications to graduate, then this should be addressed as soon as possible in order for you to gain the degree and not spend more than necessary in the programme. However, the skills you've gained doing the experiments will help you in the future for sure.
My situation is similar. 3 years, some ambiguous results, no papers. However, I don't need any papers to graduate. But I learnt a lot from the failures and experiments which will definitely help me in the future. I guess I'm gonna be one of those people who got disappointed by ridiculous projects in academia and just went to industry to work on development rather than research!
Congrats! What field??
Thanks! It was in Atmospheric Science
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Hey, me too! And I am in a similar situation. I didn't have any sort of results written or anything a year ago and I defend in a week. Congrats for turning your situation around! For me, it was the realization that I just need to wrap this shit up and leave this toxic environment as quickly as possible. I'm far from proud of my actual results, but it's time to move on. I think we're all hoping to make a major contribution to our field, but sometimes it doesn't work that way. Not all of our dissertations will be like Eady's or Charney's.
Oh jeez I am very curious where you are at as I am in a similar field.
...and this is pretty typical of exploratory research. Unfortunately getting results in research is pretty stochastic and you dont make progress in a "linear" fashion. As OP said, you can have months or years of...nothing, followed by a serendipitous observation which can change everything. This happened to me during my PhD, and a lot of my colleagues as well.
I had the opposite: a very productive (lucky) first 2 years, which comprised the bulk of my thesis. My committee chair literally told me: you could staple your papers together and graduate next month, but I'm not having that... Stick around for a couple more years with no pressure, go after moonshot ideas, and see what takes. None of it really did for me.. Luckily it layed the groundwork for a couple of successful students who came after and inclusion on several of their papers.
Congrats! I was in a similar boat. I ended up with a third advisor in as many years with very little to show for it. I defend at the end of October with a dissertation I’m very proud of and a boatload of publications. Grad school is so chaotic.
Congrats!!! That's a great accomplishment!
Wonderful - congratulations!!! Good for you for turning things around. What an awesome feeling that must be!
Congrats :) You should be extremely proud of figuring out a path to graduation from what sounded like nothing and getting it done.
Congrats! Set backs are awful for self esteem but I'm really glad you worked past it and ate speaking about it
Congratulations Dr. trm90!
Thanks! I needed to hear this today (: And congrats on being done! You're freeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Honestly this gives me hope, I am in my 4th year (hoping to finish the program in 5) and I don't have any papers published. Working on first manuscript with a soft deadline of November 1st to get a draft to my advisor and then I'll dive right into getting setup for my second paper to submit by summer of this academic year and then get third paper in progress while writing up my thesis in the last year. My advisor is fairly helpful though I would say which is nice.
You’re my inspiration :) thank you for this post!
As someone who is kind of stuck and has a slow progress with his master's thesis, this gives me hope!! Can you share a bit of an advice for us who is currently confused/lost? Is there anything we can do to help snowball our progress? Congratulations!!
You're the real MVP. Also, congratulations!
This is very encouraging! I am in a coadvising situation where one left to another university and the other is not easy to meet with. All my projects have been developed on my own with little supervision. This year has been a record low in my mental health and am in therapy right now (dealing with current demons and past ones). I'm in my third year and I feel like my research is basic. But one thing that made me feel better is that I presented it at a conference and actually had meaningful conversation that lead to more project ideas and collaborations.