Andrea Jones

I think I’d wish I’d known how important, this is particular for social science, how important the proposal would be, how important to get quite early on a kind of framework around the PhD.  In the School I’m in; Education and Social Work, you have to do a proposal by the Spring of the first year and I remember thinking that didn’t make any sense at the time because it seemed like you were almost writing a mini PhD at the beginning but having that structure to where I was more or less going, even though I changed some of it, was the most important thing for keeping me sane for the next two or three years.

Antony Walsh

Probably that the PhD isn’t really the be-and end-all of your research project, I think you need to know from a very early stage what its limits are and that there is a word count.  Part of the art of it is writing for the requirements of the regulations and the word count rather than the difference in work on whatever your research project is, I think the same as well for an article or a chapter or a book you’ve got to know what you’re writing for, and if you go on in that basis that can avoid you getting into a long, withdrawn project that you can’t see the end of.

Auday Al-Mayyahi

I wish I had learned my research question and project plan ahead of my PhD journey and I think this would help me save a lot of time and also I wish I would have identified and learned training skills and that I believe would expedite my PhD progress as well.

Camilla Briault

I think I wish I’d known that there were other options available to me, other  than an academic career at the end of my PhD because that’s what I was aiming for and it doesn’t work out for everybody, for a variety of reasons. I’m doing something different now but I’m still working in the University and I think it’s really important for doctoral students to know that they can do all sorts of different things. The skills that you learn whilst being a PhD researcher can be applied in all sorts of different careers.

Catherine Pope

I wish that I’d had more faith in my ability to complete the PhD. I spent a lot of time worrying when I should have been getting on with it and also looking at solutions to those problems. So I wish now that I’d really thought about the problems and found ways of solving them and moving on.

Christine Wanjala

A number of things. The first thing I wish I knew is that the PhD doesn’t have to be that one big thing, a ground-breaking research. It has to be something you think through, the reality of life really and what are you capable of, what are you able to handle within a short period?  Because I was really looking at a big area within Education and it’s like I’m answering everything about Education – which cannot be done.

Emma Scanlan

I wish I had known more about how my PhD would work for me once I had finished my doctorate so I went into my doctorate specifically because I wanted to teach and become a lecturer.  So for me in a way, it’s a vocational qualification move into a teaching post. However it wasn’t until I started my PhD and was in fact two years in that members of faculty would have candid conversations with me about how useful a PhD was for going into my chosen field.  Obviously it’s a necessity but also there are extra curriculum activities that you need as well as your PhD and so as the field becomes more competitive, needing to have published, needing to have participated in conferences and even in running conferences as well which  puts a huge amount of extra pressure on your time when you’re doing your PhD.

Josh Hutton

I think the key part is that it’s  ok to seek advice, a lot of the time a PhD gets characterised as a very solitary journey, it’s talked about as ‘a PhD is very isolating’ and it is true, it does feel very isolating but  at the same time, you can still go to other PhD students for advice, you have your supervisor there, you have a number of other support services around the University and I think one of the hardest parts of , at least for my personal PhD journey, was building  up the willingness and the capacity to seek advice when I needed it and to build up  my confidence to ask questions rather than to sit there and think ‘ I don’t know what’s going on’.

Lucy Robinson

I think I’d wish I’d known that I was going to finish it, because no one quite expected that.  I think I wish I’d known that I should have had more confidence in what I was doing but actually really listen to the advice about what needs to be done. I think I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time doing bits that really didn’t need to be done but I thought they were vaguely interesting. Work out how mercenary you want to be, workout whether or not you want to be able to noodle down at every single exploratory area or whether what you want to do is deliver a PhD in a certain time and take responsibility for that I think.

Maria Silvia D’Avolio

I been told many times from different training courses that it seems that we have lots of time, but time flies so we need to plan everything ahead and have a strict schedule of our journey but yes, this is true that time flies, but on the other hand it doesn’t so it’s important to have time to enjoy this life on campus because having the flexibility of planning our own week in advance we need to be focused on what we’re doing but also if it’s a sunny day and your friends are going to the beach, you don’t have to be stressed and in the department trying to work. You are able to take a day off and enjoy, because you’re going to be refreshed and open minded the following day and it’s not a waste of time too much because there are not that many sunny days!

Peter Overbury

I would say that time commitment but I think also how much you’ll get from interacting from other PhD and other post grads in subjects that are completely irrelevant to your PhD but I do informatics for my PhD, I’ve gone to a lot of the talks on things that I thought wouldn’t be that fun, on things like deep philosophical questions but it’s amazing what you take away form the  question of how do you present an argument like this, how do you break down those things and just general experience form people.  A lot of people will be like, ‘well I was doing my PhD whilst doing this and this, I really found this helped’.  You walk away with something like a recommendation of an app or something and it saves you like 2 hours a day, it’s just really good.  I feel that a lot of supervisors brush past it because when you’re getting down into the nitty gritty of it, they probably use the same programme that they sued when they were doing their PhD, which might not be the one that works for you.

Yumiko Kita

I wish I had known that a doctoral course would be long and tough journey, and, even having submitted my thesis, I would be still in the learning process. When I started, I was so excited and I was full of motivation for my research, but it was very hard for me to keep motivated for my research  because there were so many articles, so books so many researches that I hadn’t read and there were so many things I didn’t know. So for me, it was very difficult to keep the motivation.

I was sometimes disappointed with myself, my skills and my abilities when I came across brilliant research, report and intelligent researchers. But I had to keep reminding myself that I was and I have been in a learning process and as such, I should appreciate the challenges when I faced with difficulties.

I think it is essential to have mental and physical stamina to survive the long and hard journey.