PhD advice

[Singyourheartout]

Posting on here for traffic.
Interested in doing a PhD in English literature, can anyone tell me about their experiences and cost and time during it? How you prepared? Did you work, how much savings did you need. I believe I might be able to do a study ship with the university I attend and get funding from the government which would be 25000 for three years to cover tuition and such. Does anyone know anything about this?
I will be working during my PhD but I'm looking for what hours people could cope with.
Thanks

All great advice :)
I was adviced to look into a PhD early by one of my lecture who suggests I do a PhD.
Only just started masters already have a firm idea for diss just waiting for the lectures to start while I do research around the topic.
I'm really comfy at the uni I am in as I get of really well with the lecturers, do you think I should also look else where as I might be able to get funding at the bigger unis?

If you were open to looking further afield, you could apply for a Phd in Sweden and receive a salary, plus no fees.

I was a part-time PhD student and worked full-time (not as an academic) and had 2 DCs. It is doable . There are a number of similar threads over in academics' corner.

To counter Guitargirl

I was a full-time, fully funded PhD student and cannot fathom how anyone can stay sufficiently motivated to complete the thing with a different logistical set-up.

I know many who did or are doing so, but I found my PhD extremely hard going.

See if you enjoy Master-level dissertation writing first.

Absolutely look around. Try to find out who the leading professors are in your field, and what research they are doing, and speak to them about opportunities, funding arrangements, and so on.

I would echo the advice not to do a Phd without full funding (PhD & stipend) or you are doing it solely as a recreational endeavour and have the means of supporting yourself for the duration of the study.

As someone else has said the impact of completing a PhD in your relationship and mental health is savage. Like a previous poster, it nearly led me to to the divorce courts.

However enthusiastic you are about your project, after a certain point in the process, it stops being fun and becomes an all encompassing soul sapping endurance test. I nearly jacked it in on at least five separate occasions and that was with the benefit of full funding, without that I'd have definitely done so.

As someone else has said the impact of completing a PhD in your relationship and mental health is savage. Like a previous poster, it nearly led me to to the divorce courts.

Crikey! I thought I was the only one, relationships-wise. You learn something new every day.

Thirding this. A PhD is not good for your physical, mental and emotional health. Come to Academics Corner for some straight talking, if you haven't already, I didn't check.

I reckon OP it's great to ask around as widely as possible to get the views of lots of people. BUT ultimately your experience of the PhD, should you decide to embark upon one, will be unique to you. The same as with any education experience, or raising children for that matter. People come here to ask for advice but ultimately no-one will have the exact same experience as you and we can only tell our own stories.

I guess what am trying to say is that, yes, listen to advice but don't let anyone put you off. There is diversity in the PhD experience. The voices of those who have completed by the less-than-conventional full-time study, fully-funded routes often get shouted down. I have posted on these kind of threads before and what usually happens is I tip-toe in to stick my hand up and say, there is the part-time option and then get subsumed by a load of full-time PhDers saying that anything 'less' than a full-time, fully-funded option is a threat to mental health, homelife and future career. There is a great deal of satisfaction and a sense of achievement to be gained by completing the PhD by any means. That sense of achievement when it is finished whilst simultaneously raising a family and developing a career feels fab! Don't let anyone tell you it can't be done. I am living proof that it can - with relationship intact (and not even remotely threatened to be honest) - as are thousands of others!

Ultimately you need to look at your own circumstances and decide what is best for you.

Some very good advice here. I usually give undergraduate students the same advice as orangeglove: don't do it if you don't get funding (unless you are so independently wealthy that the cost is trivial to you, something not entirely uncommon among the students / parents of students that I teach!)

The reason for this is that, although hard to get funding, it's still much easier than getting an academic job. So not getting funding at the beginning is a strong signal that your topic isn't going to look attractive enough at the other end either. And students with full funding tend to be regarded, rightly or wrongly, as the "stars" from the start. What I would recommend is applying several times, if you can face it, to see if you CAN secure funding.

If it really is a pure hobby and you can't NOT do it, then maybe consider going ahead anyway, but with realistic expectations.

If your topic is anywehere vaguely close to medical humanities, then the Wellcome Trust is very generous...

Good luck.

If you like reading, I have a book called "Achieving a PhD - Ten Students' Experiences" which I recommend. I have a side interest in the PhD as process and have various resources I can share, some of which are more likely to scare you off than others.

I just finished my PhD (in a health related topic) whilst working full time and having a child - it took almost 7 years. I was partially self funded, partially funded by my department and I paid reduced fees because I worked for the university. As others have found, it became a bit of an endurance test for me as it progressed and my marriage broke down right as I finished - the PhD wasn't the cause of the breakdown but it was certainly a contributing factor because it sapped so much of my time and physical/emotional energy. I'm not sorry I did it (though it perhaps opens more doors in my field than yours, I don't know), but if I had my chance again I'd want to do it full time, with full time funding - I actually enjoyed the intellectual challenge but would've enjoyed it a lot more if I could've concentrated my time on it and didn't have to do it on top of everything else.

Speaking as an employer of phd students - I don't often interview self-funded phd students. I specifically request recruiters to focus on finding phd students/graduates who were funded as it shows: 1) their research was genuinely useful 2) that they have the skills to work with other people and negotiate budgets and 3) they have a higher potential.

I work in economics though which is full of sub-standard phd students who pay for low value degrees in Asia.

I'm a self-funded part-time PhD student who has just entered my completion year. I started back in 2010! Had to take some time out along the way. I work full-time in an unrelated job and have a child.

I often wish I had never started. I no longer know what it's for. I started out thinking I wanted to be an academic, but I no longer want that (the hours, my dear, and the marking). My research does have real-world applications, but there are other, less cumbersome, ways I could have made myself attractive to prospective employers.

You need to think coolly and calmly in terms of return on investment. If part of the return is the sheer pleasure and stimulation you get from the process, by all means factor that in. And if it's a prerequisite for where you want to end up, that answers that question. But otherwise, spend some time thinking about whether there are alternative routes to where you want to go.

I'm over at academic corner ATM, it's really usefully but lots of conflicting infomation.
I'm going to look around and university but ulitimatly I think I'll stay at the one I am at as the lectures I will be using as a suprioviser knows me and I know them and we have a good working relationship. That if I still go through with it.
Funding wise I will apply for the studentships at the univisrsity and maybe some other that aren't univiesity based that are general.

I also will book a session with careers to look where PhD would take me and get some cold hard facts

Another 'think very carefully before doing it unfunded' vote. Seven years on from finishing a handful of my PhD cohort (from one of the most prestigious universities in the country) have academic jobs, and a smaller proportion have secure, permanent jobs. When I was struggling to get academic work post-PhD one of the ways I comforted myself was that I could think of it as four years doing an interesting job for low pay, and if I now had to find another career so be it. I can't imagine how much worse that period of endless applications and constant rejection would have been if I'd sunk a lot of my own or family money into those years.

If you're set on doing at your current uni, a key thing is to look seriously at who would supervise you (have a look on their web pages to make sure they have research interests that overlap with yours) and approach them with your plans.
They will be able to advise you on internal, as well as external funding opportunities and a whole host of other things.

I'd also suggest seeking out existing PhD students in your department and picking their brains. Something I've realised in my 5 years of PhD-ing is how important the opportunities and support you get from your department are - is there funding to attend conferences? Does the department support you publishing during your PhD? What training is available? Will you have opportunities to pick up teaching work? Will you get desk space within the department?
If you're wanting to go into an academic career, publishing, presenting and teaching experience is what you want to have, and evidence of successfully winning grant money of some kind (which is one reason funded is preferable to self-funded!) alongside actually passing the PhD of course!

I notice that your lecturer encouraged you to do a PhD. That's nice, but be careful - sometimes they say (and mean) this without thinking about the broader implications on a person's life. If you really can't imagine not doing it, of course you should, but jobs in English lit are hellishly competitive. I teach at a US university in Humanities (not English) and for the last posts that our English department advertised, they had over 700 applications, most of them from perfectly good candidates.

The thing about ft funded v. pt unfunded is that you need to factor in loss of earnings. It would have cost me more to do a funded PhD because I would have missed out on three years of earnings.

Using OP's example of £25k over three years as funding, if I'm sacrificing a salary income of (let us say) £20k after tax each year in order to live on the stipend, I've given up £60k to do the funded PhD over three years, so there's a difference of £35k between salary and stipend. I'm also paying fees of £10k out of my earnings, but overall, I'm still better off by £25k to self-fund (not exact figures, as too lazy to work them out).

Of course, there is the prestige that comes with having secured funding, but against that, I can demonstrate what I've achieved in employment (which in my case, includes securing project funding, so that box is ticked).

This applies more to the humanities, where a pt PhD doesn't present the same logistical difficulties as one in science, and it presupposes that you're at a point in your career where your earnings are a lot higher (taking tax into account) than a PhD stipend. If you can shoot out of a ft PhD into a job that pays higher than the job held during a pt PhD, that would also affect the calculation.

I agree with bibliomania's points about the economics. It all depends on the nature of any paid work you undertake whilst studying (if any) and what you plan to do afterwards. For me, my full-time job meant I was able to demonstrate a whole host of industry-specific skills which I wouldn't have had if I had been solely studying. It was simply not the case for me that my part-time PhD was a hobby or a recreation - it complemented my work. And managing part-time study, full-time work and a family has meant I have an iron-clad response to any interview question involving time management skills for the rest of my working life .

Using OP's example of £25k over three years as funding, if I'm sacrificing a salary income of (let us say) £20k after tax each year in order to live on the stipend, I've given up £60k to do the funded PhD over three years, so there's a difference of £35k between salary and stipend. I'm also paying fees of £10k out of my earnings, but overall, I'm still better off by £25k to self-fund (not exact figures, as too lazy to work them out).

That's true, but I know very few humanities PhD students whose part time jobs paid them £20k net per year (I don't know anyone who did a science PhD part-time at all). Also, you haven't taken into account that while full-time means three years of not doing other paid work at all, part time might mean six or seven years of working part- not full-time, so there's a big cost there, especially at the sort of salaries you quote. By all means encourage people to run the figures for their own situation, but I don't think many people would be better off unfunded.

£25k over three years isn't full funding, by the way. I don't know current stipend rates but I got £12.5k a year (plus all fees paid) and that was ten years ago.

I would be doing it full time defiantly, to me stretching it out sounds like torture.
I get what people mean by funded and self funded but honestly either way it shows aptitude and dedication. I will be booking a tutorial with my lecturer to see what he can tell me about my chance and what the PhD will entail with him. And about conferences and such and if there is anything extra I can do to prepare.

You need to think coolly and calmly in terms of return on investment.

I would extend this to not just financial investment and opportunity cost in terms of actual salary, career progression, and so on, but also physical and emotional investment. I spend the entire of my time as a PhD student wondering whether I would quit or not. After I had finished, I gave myself two years to decide whether or not I regretted having done it. It took me until four years out to decide that I did not and to start to feel proud of myself.

It is not all doom and gloom. I feel privileged to have been given the opportunity I was given, I love my supervisor and my office mates and I learned a heck of a lot in both academic terms and soft skills. It was grueling though.

You're right that it will be different for everyone, Margaret. I should perhaps have said that I'm coming from the perspective of a mature student, so it's not that unusual to earn more than £20k net.

And if you don't like reading, don't do a PhD in Eng Lit

Good point erin. I had no idea of the emotional cost of doing a PhD. I went from a cheery sense of accomplishment at finishing my Masters (I have mastery of this subject!) to years of agonising, guilt-ridden floundering.