Book review: PhD Voice and PhD Voice Community (2023) 100 Tips for Doing Your PhD

PhD Voice and PhD Voice Community (2023) 100 Tips for Doing Your PhD on Amazon

I’d never heard of PhD Voice, but according to Amazon, it “has become a leading figure for PhD students around the world. It has interacted with 100,000s of PhD students, resulting in PhD Voice having unparalleled experience and knowledge of the problems and challenges PhD students face every day.” I came across this title while browsing for resources for new doctoral students and thought I’d take a look. The format of this book means that it’s not something you are going to sit down and read from cover to cover like a novel, but I’ve dipped into it a number of times, looking through the contents page to select tips I want to read about.

It pretty much does exactly what it says on the tin – it lists 100 bitesize tips for surviving a PhD, including

advice on how to begin:

• Pick a Good Supervisor
• Formulate the “Question” of Your PhD Simply
• Make a Plan of Your PhD
• When First Starting, See Your Librarians

useful practical suggestions:

• Make Notes of Each Paper You’ve Read in a Simple Spreadsheet
• Work on at Least Two Things and Alternate Between Them
• Attend Conferences and Talks

motivational messages for dealing with failure or discouragement:

• Accept That You Did Your Best
• Don’t Be Afraid to Admit That You’re Wrong, Even to Yourself
• Learn From Your Mistakes

and self-care suggestions:

• It’s OK To Be a Little Lazy Sometimes!
• Eat Well
• Don’t Forget to Have Fun!

Tips are categorised as blue star (research tips), gold star (well-being), red star (motivation and productivity tips) and green star (career tips). Some tips cross the boundaries of these categories and get more than one star.

This book is big on work-life balance and dealing proactively with stress. It encourages playfulness, exercise, and good sleep and extols the virtues of making friends with other PhD students. Initially I read these thinking that it is all pretty obvious stuff, but then it occurred to me that I hadn’t exercised at all during the first week of my PhD and that this really wasn’t the way to go. So maybe I do need these reminders?

I certainly appreciate some of the study tips, as they are things I hadn’t though of. For example, I get bored pretty easily (to the extent that I have considered getting assessed for ADHD), so I really liked the suggestion of working on two things and once and swapping between them to keep things fresh. There’s also practical advice on publication, for example organising your paper’s author order early. This is something I really wish I had done when I was a research assistant before starting my PhD, and I probably need to be more assertive about it.

And I probably also need to hear that You Won’t Like Your Supervisor All the Time, And That’s OK, as I like to like people and be liked by them. Inevitably there’s going to come a time when I disagree with my supervisor or we get into conflict, and I need to remember not to take this to heart. It won’t be the end of the world, and it will pass.

Overall, there is nothing startling in this book, and you could probably come up with most of the suggestions between you if you sat and talked with your cohort to share survival tips. But it is a good roundup of advice and I’m glad I’ve thumbed through it, as I’m still in the induction phase of my PhD and feeling a little lost.

Have you read a useful book on surviving your PhD? Please let us know in the comments!