• Question: How difficult / long was your phd ?

    Asked by mony532true56 on 15 Dec 2025.
    • Photo: Felicity Carlysle-Davies

      Felicity Carlysle-Davies answered on 15 Dec 2025:

      My PhD was approximately 4 years. I had funding for 3 years so the last year I was working part time which meant it took a bit longer. I really enjoyed my PhD and made the most of the opportunities that it gave me to go to conferences and experience new things, building up my skills beyond just the science that I was studying which has definitely helped me in my job roles since graduating (but it did mean that my PhD overall took longer). There are always challenges when carrying out research as you are never going to get everything to work first time and you may have to change strategy or come up with new ideas. For me the key things were my supervisor and the other PhD students around me. My supervisor was an expert in the field which opened a lot of doors, but she was also very supportive and helped me to work independently but with a good safety net for when I got stuck! The other PhD students became some of my best friends and we all helped each other through when we were facing challenges. I know a lot of people who found their PhD experience really difficult but because I had a great supervisor and friends I really really enjoyed mine.

    • Photo: Jonathan Mound

      Jonathan Mound answered on 15 Dec 2025:

      I spent 4 years working on my PhD. It was definitely challenging at times, it needed me to learn new skills and work more independently then I had before. However, both my supervisor and my fellow graduate students were a great source of support.

    • Photo: Charlotte Gale

      Charlotte Gale answered on 16 Dec 2025:

      I have been working on my PhD for 3 years, and I have almost 1 year left. I am writing my thesis at the moment, which is like a report on my research project, and is due after 3.5 years. After this, I will have an oral exam with experts in my field, and will spend another few months preparing a shorter report called a journal paper to show other scientists what I have done.

      My PhD has been fun so far, but it has been difficult. It has taken time and hard work, and I sometimes have to prioritise my work over other things. The most difficult thing I have found has been that the final deadline is set, so if I get delayed or something goes wrong, I have to make that time up. However, it has been very rewarding and I have not regretted choosing to do it once

    • Photo: Joel Goldstein

      Joel Goldstein answered on 16 Dec 2025:

      I did my PhD in the U.S. so it took a bit longer than U.K. PhDs – just over 5 years.

      In the U.K. system there is normally limited amount of funding (normally 3-4 years) and most universities require to submit your thesis within 4 years or so. In the U.S., the funding and submission deadlines are much more flexible.

      For me, that meant that while I was doing my PhD I was able to work on a variety of things and get lots of experience, without worrying about finishing on a tight deadline. Some of that extra experience is what helped me get subsequent jobs.

      The most difficult thing about a PhD is keeping going – it is a long time to be concentrating on one piece of research.

Comments

  • Photo: melissau

    melissau commented on :

    I did my PhD over three years, full time. About one third of this time (split into periods of a few months each) I was living in a remote part of southern Africa, going out to small villages each day to collect data about horses and their owners, and the rest of the time I was based in the UK at the university where my supervisors were working. When I was in Africa, I had no internet connection and no mobile phone signal so I had to leave my Out Of Office message on my email account to let people know that I wouldn’t be able to respond to their message until I got back to the UK. I was living in a location where I had electricity for two hours every evening, which was important because it meant that I could use a microscope to look at the poo samples and run the blood samples which I collected from the horses through a blood analysis machine that I had taken with me for the study. You can imagine that I had a lot of emails to read when I came back to the UK! I also had to pull together all the information I’d collected from owners and horses while in Africa and do lots of analysis on the data to figure out what the research was telling us. The funding for my PhD lasted three years, so I had to spend the last few months of that three year period writing my thesis (this can feel quite boring, when you’re used to being busy collecting data, but at the same time it’s quite exciting because I was bringing all the information together to explain what we’d found out and to figure out how to use the findings to improve the animals’ and owners’ welfare) I needed to finish writing my thesis within the three year period of the funding so that I could start a paid when the funding ran out. Some of the other students at the university where I was based did their PhD over four years rather than three and some, who were doing theirs part time, while also doing a paid job part time, took up to six years to complete their PhD.