phd failure dissertation

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How to Avoid Failing Your Ph.D. Dissertation

By  Daniel Sokol

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I am a barrister in London who specializes in helping doctoral students who have failed their Ph.D.s. Few people will have had the dubious privilege of seeing as many unsuccessful Ph.D. dissertations and reading as many scathing reports by examination committees. Here are common reasons why students who submit their Ph.D.s fail, with advice on how to avoid such pitfalls. The lessons apply to the United States and the United Kingdom.

Lack of critical reflection. Probably the most common reason for failing a Ph.D. dissertation is a lack of critical analysis. A typical observation of the examination committee is, “The thesis is generally descriptive and a more analytical approach is required.”

For doctoral work, students must engage critically with the subject matter, not just set out what other scholars have said or done. If not, the thesis will not be original. It will not add anything of substance to the field and will fail.

Doctoral students should adopt a reflexive approach to their work. Why have I chosen this methodology? What are the flaws or limitations of this or that author’s argument? Can I make interesting comparisons between this and something else? Those who struggle with this aspect should ask their supervisors for advice on how to inject some analytic sophistication to their thesis.

Lack of coherence. Other common observations are of the type: “The argument running through the thesis needs to be more coherent” or “The thesis is poorly organized and put together without any apparent logic.”

The thesis should be seen as one coherent whole. It cannot be a series of self-contained chapters stitched together haphazardly. Students should spend considerable time at the outset of their dissertation thinking about structure, both at the macro level of the entire thesis and the micro level of the chapter. It is a good idea to look at other Ph.D. theses and monographs to get a sense of what constitutes a logical structure.

Poor presentation. The majority of failed Ph.D. dissertations are sloppily presented. They contain typos, grammatical mistakes, referencing errors and inconsistencies in presentation. Looking at some committee reports randomly, I note the following comments:

• “The thesis is poorly written.”
• “That previous section is long, badly written and lacks structure.”
• “The author cannot formulate his thoughts or explain his reasons. It is very hard to understand a good part of the thesis.”
• “Ensure that the standard of written English is consistent with the standard expected of a Ph.D. thesis.”
• “The language used is simplistic and does not reflect the standard of writing expected at Ph.D. level.”

For committee members, who are paid a fixed and pitiful sum to examine the work, few things are as off-putting as a poorly written dissertation. Errors of language slow the reading speed and can frustrate or irritate committee members. At worst, they can lead them to miss or misinterpret an argument.

Students should consider using a professional proofreader to read the thesis, if permitted by the university’s regulations. But that still is no guarantee of an error-free thesis. Even after the proofreader has returned the manuscript, students should read and reread the work in its entirety.

When I was completing my Ph.D., I read my dissertation so often that the mere sight of it made me nauseous. Each time, I would spot a typo or tweak a sentence, removing a superfluous word or clarifying an ambiguous passage. My meticulous approach was rewarded when one committee member said in the oral examination that it was the best-written dissertation he had ever read. This was nothing to do with skill or an innate writing ability but tedious, repetitive revision.

Failure to make required changes. It is rare for students to fail to obtain their Ph.D. outright at the oral examination. Usually, the student is granted an opportunity to resubmit their dissertation after making corrections.

Students often submit their revised thesis together with a document explaining how they implemented the committee’s recommendations. And they often believe, wrongly, that this document is proof that they have incorporated the requisite changes and that they should be awarded a Ph.D.

In fact, the committee may feel that the changes do not go far enough or that they reveal further misunderstandings or deficiencies. Here are some real observations by dissertation committees:

• “The added discussion section is confusing. The only thing that has improved is the attempt to provide a little more analysis of the experimental data.”
• “The author has tried to address the issues identified by the committee, but there is little improvement in the thesis.”

In short, students who fail their Ph.D. dissertations make changes that are superficial or misconceived. Some revised theses end up worse than the original submission.

Students must incorporate changes in the way that the committee members had in mind. If what is required is unclear, students can usually seek clarification through their supervisors.

In the nine years I have spent helping Ph.D. students with their appeals, I have found that whatever the subject matter of the thesis, the above criticisms appear time and time again in committee reports. They are signs of a poor Ph.D.

Wise students should ask themselves these questions prior to submission of the dissertation:

• Is the work sufficiently critical/analytical, or is it mainly descriptive?
• Is it coherent and well structured?
• Does the thesis look good and read well?
• If a resubmission, have I made the changes that the examination committee had in mind?

Once students are satisfied that the answer to each question is yes, they should ask their supervisors the same questions.

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My supervisor is suggesting I will fail my PhD, is this possible?

I am a final-year PhD student in Canada studying cybersecurity. During my PhD, I did not have very good supervision. I told them I wanted to defend soon. However, one of my supervisors keeps on telling me: “Don’t rush, you may fail”.

I got one first-author paper in IEEE Transactions and 3 medium level first-author conferences accepted. How can I fail? Is it possible? Has anyone ever failed the PhD defense?

• Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat . –  Bryan Krause ♦ Commented Jan 13, 2023 at 16:47

8 Answers 8

There are definitely fails in PhD defenses. It may depend on the specific system and I don't know about Canada, but I know of a number of them in the UK, where the candidate was asked to rework and come back in a year or so. Also PhD examiners in the UK don't have to accept a thesis just because there are publications. I do think some published material shouldn't have been accepted, and not everything I have seen published is in my view acceptable at PhD level.

• 4 I'd say that "major revisions" are not a fail necesarily. If you are told to work a bit more on it, yeah you fail as you don't get a PhD, but its not fail as "bye no PhD for you ever". –  Ander Biguri Commented Jan 13, 2023 at 11:29
• 6 @AnderBiguri That's a fair enough objection to my use of terminology, however if you plan to apply/go for a postdoc or anything you need a PhD for directly after your defense, the immediate practical consequences are those of a fail. –  Christian Hennig Commented Jan 13, 2023 at 11:38
• Totally agree with that :) –  Ander Biguri Commented Jan 13, 2023 at 11:42
• 6 yep, I remember an English student at Oxford who had published an entire book with Springer and was failed, which sounded like a real scandal to my ears. A friend of mine at Cambridge, was asked to completely rewrite his thesis, in Finance, spent a year doing it, sent the revision, did not hear from anyone for months, when he finally contacted them they said "Oh you passed last year". Nightmare. –  PatrickT Commented Jan 13, 2023 at 19:16
• 2 @Tom There is some variation, also within the UK. I have seen both cases, where the viva had to be repeated, and where people were just told upon resubmission that they had passed now, even with major corrections. I don't remember exactly anymore but chances are I have even seen a form in which examiners could choose between these options (on top of minor corrections). –  Christian Hennig Commented Jan 14, 2023 at 11:04

Your supervisor is aware of expectations for a PhD program. Their role is to help you understand these expectations and develop your PhD work to this standard.

Having one IEEE Trans publication and a few proceedings is good, but not necessarily indicative that your work meets the criteria of a PhD award. Normally, PhD dissertation is a major piece of academic research, which can be compared to a manuscript (a book). A journal paper is a more scoped contribution compared roughly to one chapter of your PhD thesis. Having one journal paper published does not guarantee you a PhD. I am aware of some candidates with 5+ journal publications, who failed their defence because they rushed and did not write an adequate PhD dissertation. It definitely happens.

Having a postdoc offer before you completed your PhD is a good sign that your work is interesting and promising. However, if your postdoc offer is conditional on you completing the PhD successfully, you still have to complete your PhD. Seeing your advisor as an obstacle is not constructive or helpful. Once again, they are trying to help you, and you should see their expertise as a resource.

• 22 Everything here is correct, but I'll just caution that 'your supervisor is aware of expectations for a PhD program' does not imply that supervisors have a 100% track record of being right when they predict a fail. –  Daniel Hatton Commented Jan 12, 2023 at 20:30
• 2 @DanielHatton True. But they hedged their bets: "you may fail" is always true. –  PatrickT Commented Jan 13, 2023 at 19:17
• This is mostly good but "they are trying to help you" is not always true. –  aquirdturtle Commented Jan 14, 2023 at 22:34

Why PhD Defenses fail rarely

The main reason why PhD defenses fail rarely is that the process is structured so that in general people attempt their defense only when they are almost certain to pass. If there are any issues and objections, there is a strong preference to have them resolved before a defense, not have them be raised during a rejecting vote in the defense process. No one wants to waste all the formal process effort on a failed attempt, so supervisors and committees will know that someone is likely to fail and strongly advise them to not make the attempt and postpone it, so in general a failure should happen only if the student has been warned that they are likely to fail and disregards this advice to make the attempt anyway. This sounds suspiciously similar to what you are describing.

• This answer could be seen as slightly misleading. OP is in a situation where they have been warned by the supervisor that they could fail the PhD if they submit with the current results. In that situation, the chances of actually failing the PhD are much higher than in the average case. –  lighthouse keeper Commented Jan 13, 2023 at 13:46
• 22 @lighthousekeeper that's exactly what the answer is saying‽ –  leftaroundabout Commented Jan 13, 2023 at 14:33
• +1 for speaking to this specific case for the OP. This is probably the most useful answer to pay attention to. Maybe add some whitespace to guide readers? –  Mike M Commented Jan 13, 2023 at 22:07

Yes it is possible to fail a PhD defence and it does happen. Thankfully this is rare.

I’m not in CS so I cannot compare with your peers but you should not make the error of thinking that you need so many publications to get a degree.

If anything, compare a situation where you have x publications as a single author with a situation where you have x publications with many co-authors. Obviously your intellectual contribution to each publication matters; your supervisors and members of your PhD committee can decide you have not done enough even if you have 2x publications because your contribution to each publication has been minimal. I want to emphasize I’m not talking about writing codes or some other such tasks: a PhD is a research degree so your advisor needs to convince your committee and eventually the external examiner that you have made significant and novel contributions to these publications.

I have heard of students failing at the defence stage. This is not pleasant, and it’s a situation everyone wants to avoid. It often (but not always) happens because the candidate is rushed by external events - some visa issue, some family matter, whatever.

In most systems I know, candidates will first go through a sort of “internal defence”, where the student may have to present their work to the committee, or there is some big committee meeting where the final draft of the thesis is evaluated before the thesis is sent to the external examiner. Nobody wants the student to fail so having the committee on board minimizes but does not eliminate the risk of failures. If the thesis is marginal and some committee members still have issue, but the thesis goes out anyways, there could be trouble at the defence with the external examiner.

If you think you have done enough but your advisor does not agree, it’s time to have a frank discussion with your supervisory committee to sort things out, and establish clear milestones for the completion of your degree.

The reason it is rare to fail a Ph.D. defense is that supervisors make sure nobody defends until they are ready. Don't push to be the exception.

Good answers already, but I think this might also be relevant.

Have you found your institution's academic regulations relating to research degrees? If not, you should. They might be a boring read but they should lay out the exact procedure and requirements for a PhD assessment as well as all the possible outcomes. There will be "failed" outcomes in the regulations. Sadly there will also be stories of students who have failed (even with publications). There might be resit opportunities, too. The regulations might also detail the appeals process if you do fail.

There is some debate in the comments here as to whether "major revisions" are considered a fail or not. The short answer is that depends on your institution's academic regulations.

One thing that the academic regulations are very unlikely to say is "1 good journal + 3 medium conferences = pass", so although your chances of passing are good, your chances of failing are unlikely to be zero.

From reading your other question, your supervisor isn't really saying that they think it's likely that you fail.

I need to submit one paper to a journal and write one conference paper, then I am ready to write my thesis.

I got a postdoc position in a great research lab. The tentative start date is the beginning of May. They asked for a letter from my supervisor, stating that I am going to defend before the beginning of May. However, my supervisor keeps on telling me he can only state that I can submit my thesis before that date. He wrote a letter for that.

Your current timeline has you starting, finishing, submitting, and defending your thesis in less than 4 months (really more like 3 months), with your defense being sometime in late April. Even if you and your supervisor do everything perfectly there are still a lot of outside factors that can impact that, the biggest one being when can/will your committee get together to hear your defense. Your timeline is so tight that if you submit your thesis and the committee takes a week to review it and then says we want some minor changes, we'll be able to review those changes in another week... What are you going to do? Or if one person can only meet on Wednesday and another person is unavailable on Wednesday so they have to schedule your defense for a week later? (Or two, or three...)

If you submit your thesis but don't have time to do the changes then it's possible that you could fail. It's even more likely that you don't fail but you don't pass your defense on your timeline . Your supervisor is (wisely) unwilling to commit to other people doing things that are outside of your control.

If your advisor says "it's time to get ready for your defense", your odds of passing are extremely high. If you try to defend against your advisor's will, that's a different story.

I would suggest you talk with your advisor about why they think you are not ready. It could be that they are not happy with your work and need more. It could be that they think you should take as much of the free study time you have in grad school and make the most of it: trust me, you will miss this aspect later in life!

If you believe you are being treated unfairly by your advisor in this situation, I would suggest you discuss with the chair.

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• PhD Failure Rate – A Study of 26,076 PhD Candidates
• Doing a PhD

The PhD failure rate in the UK is 19.5%, with 16.2% of students leaving their PhD programme early, and 3.3% of students failing their viva. 80.5% of all students who enrol onto a PhD programme successfully complete it and are awarded a doctorate.

Introduction

One of the biggest concerns for doctoral students is the ongoing fear of failing their PhD.

After all those years of research, the long days in the lab and the endless nights in the library, it’s no surprise to find many agonising over the possibility of it all being for nothing. While this fear will always exist, it would help you to know how likely failure is, and what you can do to increase your chances of success.

Read on to learn how PhDs can be failed, what the true failure rates are based on an analysis of 26,067 PhD candidates from 14 UK universities, and what your options are if you’re unsuccessful in obtaining your PhD.

Ways You Can Fail A PhD

There are essentially two ways in which you can fail a PhD; non-completion or failing your viva (also known as your thesis defence ).

Non-completion

Non-completion is when a student leaves their PhD programme before having sat their viva examination. Since vivas take place at the end of the PhD journey, typically between the 3rd and 4th year for most full-time programmes, most failed PhDs fall within the ‘non-completion’ category because of the long duration it covers.

There are many reasons why a student may decide to leave a programme early, though these can usually be grouped into two categories:

• Motives – The individual may no longer believe undertaking a PhD is for them. This might be because it isn’t what they had imagined, or they’ve decided on an alternative path.
• Extenuating circumstances – The student may face unforeseen problems beyond their control, such as poor health, bereavement or family difficulties, preventing them from completing their research.

In both cases, a good supervisor will always try their best to help the student continue with their studies. In the former case, this may mean considering alternative research questions or, in the latter case, encouraging you to seek academic support from the university through one of their student care policies.

Besides the student deciding to end their programme early, the university can also make this decision. On these occasions, the student’s supervisor may not believe they’ve made enough progress for the time they’ve been on the project. If the problem can’t be corrected, the supervisor may ask the university to remove the student from the programme.

Failing The Viva

Assuming you make it to the end of your programme, there are still two ways you can be unsuccessful.

The first is an unsatisfactory thesis. For whatever reason, your thesis may be deemed not good enough, lacking originality, reliable data, conclusive findings, or be of poor overall quality. In such cases, your examiners may request an extensive rework of your thesis before agreeing to perform your viva examination. Although this will rarely be the case, it is possible that you may exceed the permissible length of programme registration and if you don’t have valid grounds for an extension, you may not have enough time to be able to sit your viva.

The more common scenario, while still being uncommon itself, is that you sit and fail your viva examination. The examiners may decide that your research project is severely flawed, to the point where it can’t possibly be remedied even with major revisions. This could happen for reasons such as basing your study on an incorrect fundamental assumption; this should not happen however if there is a proper supervisory support system in place.

PhD Failure Rate – UK & EU Statistics

According to 2010-11 data published by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (now replaced by UK Research and Innovation ), 72.9% of students enrolled in a PhD programme in the UK or EU complete their degree within seven years. Following this, 80.5% of PhD students complete their degree within 25 years.

This means that four out of every five students who register onto a PhD programme successfully complete their doctorate.

While a failure rate of one in five students may seem a little high, most of these are those who exit their programme early as opposed to those who fail at the viva stage.

Failing Doesn’t Happen Often

Although a PhD is an independent project, you will be appointed a supervisor to support you. Each university will have its own system for how your supervisor is to support you , but regardless of this, they will all require regular communication between the two of you. This could be in the form of annual reviews, quarterly interim reviews or regular meetings. The majority of students also have a secondary academic supervisor (and in some cases a thesis committee of supervisors); the role of these can vary from having a hands-on role in regular supervision, to being another useful person to bounce ideas off of.

These frequent check-ins are designed to help you stay on track with your project. For example, if any issues are identified, you and your supervisor can discuss how to rectify them in order to refocus your research. This reduces the likelihood of a problem going undetected for several years, only for it to be unearthed after it’s too late to address.

In addition, the thesis you submit to your examiners will likely be your third or fourth iteration, with your supervisor having critiqued each earlier version. As a result, your thesis will typically only be submitted to the examiners after your supervisor approves it; many UK universities require a formal, signed document to be submitted by the primary academic supervisor at the same time as the student submits the thesis, confirming that he or she has approved the submission.

Failed Viva – Outcomes of 26,076 Students

Despite what you may have heard, the failing PhD rate amongst students who sit their viva is low.

This, combined with ongoing guidance from your supervisor, is because vivas don’t have a strict pass/fail outcome. You can find a detailed breakdown of all viva outcomes in our viva guide, but to summarise – the most common outcome will be for you to revise your thesis in accordance with the comments from your examiners and resubmit it.

This means that as long as the review of your thesis and your viva examination uncovers no significant issues, you’re almost certain to be awarded a provisional pass on the basis you make the necessary corrections to your thesis.

To give you an indication of the viva failure rate, we’ve analysed the outcomes of 26,076 PhD candidates from 14 UK universities who sat a viva between 2006 and 2017.

The analysis shows that of the 26,076 students who sat their viva, 25,063 succeeded; this is just over 96% of the total students as shown in the chart below.

Students Who Passed

The analysis shows that of the 96% of students who passed, approximately 5% required no amendments, 79% required minor amendments and the remaining 16% required major revisions. This supports our earlier discussion on how the most common outcome of a viva is a ‘pass with minor amendments’.

Students Who Failed

Of the 4% of unsuccessful students, approximately 97% were awarded an MPhil (Master of Philosophy), and 3% weren’t awarded a degree.

Note : It should be noted that while the data provides the student’s overall outcome, i.e. whether they passed or failed, they didn’t all provide the students specific outcome, i.e. whether they had to make amendments, or with a failure, whether they were awarded an MPhil. Therefore, while the breakdowns represent the current known data, the exact breakdown may differ.

Summary of Findings

By using our data in combination with the earlier statistic provided by HEFCE, we can gain an overall picture of the PhD journey as summarised in the image below.

To summarise, based on the analysis of 26,076 PhD candidates at 14 universities between 2006 and 2017, the PhD pass rate in the UK is 80.5%. Of the 19.5% of students who fail, 3.3% is attributed to students failing their viva and the remaining 16.2% is attributed to students leaving their programme early.

The above statistics indicate that while 1 in every 5 students fail their PhD, the failure rate for the viva process itself is low. Specifically, only 4% of all students who sit their viva fail; in other words, 96% of the students pass it.

What Are Your Options After an Unsuccessful PhD?

Appeal your outcome.

If you believe you had a valid case, you can try to appeal against your outcome . The appeal process will be different for each university, so ensure you consult the guidelines published by your university before taking any action.

While making an appeal may be an option, it should only be considered if you genuinely believe you have a legitimate case. Most examiners have a lot of experience in assessing PhD candidates and follow strict guidelines when making their decisions. Therefore, your claim for appeal will need to be strong if it is to stand up in front of committee members in the adjudication process.

Downgrade to MPhil

If you are unsuccessful in being awarded a PhD, an MPhil may be awarded instead. For this to happen, your work would need to be considered worthy of an MPhil, as although it is a Master’s degree, it is still an advanced postgraduate research degree.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of stigma around MPhil degrees, with many worrying that it will be seen as a sign of a failed PhD. While not as advanced as a PhD, an MPhil is still an advanced research degree, and being awarded one shows that you’ve successfully carried out an independent research project which is an undertaking to be admired.

Finding a PhD has never been this easy – search for a PhD by keyword, location or academic area of interest.

Additional Resources

Hopefully now knowing the overall picture your mind will feel slightly more at ease. Regardless, there are several good practices you can adopt to ensure you’re always in the best possible position. The key of these includes developing a good working relationship with your supervisor, working to a project schedule, having your thesis checked by several other academics aside from your supervisor, and thoroughly preparing for your viva examination.

We’ve developed a number of resources which should help you in the above:

• What to Expect from Your Supervisor – Find out what to look for in a Supervisor, how they will typically support you, and how often you should meet with them.
• How to Write a Research Proposal – Find an outline of how you can go about putting a project plan together.
• What is a PhD Viva? – Learn exactly what a viva is, their purpose and what you can expect on the day. We’ve also provided a full breakdown of all the possible outcomes of a viva and tips to help you prepare for your own.

Data for Statistics

• Cardiff University – 2006/07 to 2016/17
• Imperial College London – 2006/07 to 2016/17
• London School of Economics (LSE) – 2006/07 to 2015/16
• Queen Mary University of London – 2009/10 to 2015/16
• University College London (UCL) – 2006/07 to 2016/17
• University of Aberdeen – 2006/07 to 2016/17
• University of Birmingham – 2006/07 to 2015/16
• University of Bristol – 2006/07 to 2016/17
• University of Edinburgh – 2006/07 to 2016/17
• University of Nottingham – 2006/07 to 2015/16
• University of Oxford – 2007/08 to 2016/17
• University of York – 2009/10 to 2016/17
• University of Manchester – 2008/09 to 2017/18
• University of Sheffield – 2006/07 to 2016/17

Note : The data used for this analysis was obtained from the above universities under the Freedom of Information Act. As per the Act, the information was provided in such a way that no specific individual can be identified from the data.

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PhD Failure Rate: How to Successfully Complete your PhD

Many students fail at dissertations because of several reasons. One major reason is that PhD students often believe they can execute their projects on their own without any thesis help or guidance. And do they not fail woefully for such misconception?

If you are the type who thinks getting your PhD or thesis done without any form of help or thesis guidance will score you some high-rated grades, then you are wrong. You need help, not to just get some good grades, but to also avoid adding up to the piling statistic of failed PhD students and people kicked out of a PhD program.

PhD students should know that your dissertation is everything. If dissertations are badly conceived, the whole PhD program is threatened. But there are ways to successfully tackle PhD failure. From learning about the failure rate, the problems associated with it, to seeking high-quality writing help, this article will show you what to do.

PhD Failure Rate: Why Are You Failing?

The rate at which doctoral students fail their PhDs is significant. According to a report conducted in 2003 by Frank Edgar with a concentration on North American Ph.D. students, it was found that only about half of those who enrolled in doctoral programs actually completed them. The other half, therefore, failed. That makes it a 40-60 chance of Ph.D. failure rate. Here are some of the factors responsible for Ph.D. failure.

• Wrong Dissertation Counselor: Also known as a thesis or dissertation advisor, this is the first point of action for PhD students. And if this action is done wrong, your PhD is in doubt. To avoid cases of “my PhD advisor ignoring me” you need to carefully find and choose a professional advisor who is accessible and has a great feedback turnaround.
• Unmet Expectations: Lazy grad students base their expectations on others and pay heavily for it. All expectations should be first and foremost reliant on you. To survive a Ph.D., you need to learn to rely on yourself for most of the tasks and stay dogged and committed to them. Otherwise, you risk being included in the statistics of failed Ph.D. students.
• Broad Topics: If you’ve ever failed masters thesis due to a poor thesis, you would know what dissertation means for a PhD. Unfortunately, Ph.D. students do not simply understand what is required of them for a dissertation. So, usually, they want to cover all the topics and include everything instead of them narrowing it down. The result is that sooner or later, they are confronted with complexities too huge for them to handle. This often leads to PhD failure.
• Wrong Online Dissertation Help: One of the many ways PhD students unburden themselves from academic challenges is by seeking online thesis help. But most just don’t hire the right ones and therefore end up regretting it. If you must seek help, seek trusted dissertation help services that are not only affordable but also of high quality. This helps you to avoid Ph.D. failure.

What Percentage of PhD Students Finish University?

As mentioned earlier, about 60% of Ph.D. students finish university . This is also the PhD completion rate. The remaining percentage is, therefore, the failing percentage. However, this report was based on the findings of Frank Edgar. And it was corroborated by a report executed by the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) for England in 2007.

In another report of a study of 26,076 PhD students in the UK and EU, conducted by the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) for England, but this time in 2010-2011, revealed that 4 out of every 5 PhD students who enrolled for a program would complete that program.

Comparing both HEFCE’s results, the report in 2010-2011 is a significant upgrade to the report of 2007. This upgrade has largely been credited to improved university systems, improved students’ commitment and preparation, and improved thesis supervision and guidance.

What Percentage of PhD Students Drop Out?

The negatives cannot be overlooked. If 4 out of 5 Ph.D. students passed and completed their programs, then by relativity, 1 out of 5 would fail and drop out . This is the PhD dropout rate. While this is not general, it is what can be deduced from the records above.

Also, if the upgrade is attributed to thesis help and assistance, among others, the downgrade should move in the same way. Therefore, we can say lots of PhD defense fail due to the absence of thesis supervision, guidance, and assistance.

Looking at this, we don’t see why seeking writing help and dissertation assistance should not top your priority as a PhD student. Securing that “Doctor” title is never easy but we are here to do the easy things in fun and affordable ways for you.

Successful Ways to Handle PhD Problems

There are proven ways to avoid dissertation defense failure and Ph.D. failure generally. If you’ve ever wanted to finish a PhD successfully or what you’re facing are PhD supervisor problems and want to know how to handle such problems, this list is for you. The list contains proven and successful ways you can deploy to handle all sorts of Ph.D. problems.

• Hire professional help: No one promised your PhD would be stress-free. But is getting a PhD hard? Not really, if you know how to cope with the stress. Whenever you feel disoriented due to workload, the best thing is to take some time off to prioritize and restrategize. If your dissertation takes much more time than necessary, get professional thesis help.
• Keep yourself motivated: We know you are not the only one who thinks “Why does a PhD take so long?”. The duration consumes and demotivates, and so you should find ways to remain motivated. Think about your goal, remind yourself of your purpose, and stay committed to the course to avoid getting kicked out of PhD program.
• Share your experiences: If you are confronted by PhD supervisor problems, the best way to go about it is to share your experiences with people you can trust. You can even share with the school authority. If the problem is associated with stress and complaints about your PhD thesis, why not hire thesis help? Thesis writing help is affordable.
• Look after yourself: PhD holders who get to be called “Doctors” did so by never joking with their welfare. They explored all possible means to not be among the Ph.D. failure rate. This means if they felt the workload was more than they could bear, they wouldn’t hesitate to outsource and seek thesis help and guidance from PhD dissertation experts.

Complete PhD Through Help With Research Paper

Dissertation and PhD failure is caused by personal problems and can be the result of academic brunt. Whatever the reasons are, students are often the major drivers of the problems and so face the most consequences.

Rather than grunt and bemoan your workload, or belittle your chances, or leave your academic integrity under question, or find yourself getting kicked out of PhD program, seeking help with research paper is forever cheap and available.

With proven experience in dissertation writing and thesis homework or assignment as well as being thesis supervisors for many years ourselves, we recommend you seek help to complete your thesis and walk the tedious PhD journey with you.

Perhaps you’re wondering, in your own words, “why is my dissertation is bad?” or “what is a thesis defense like?”. With thesis help, you wouldn’t have to bother about thesis workload. A very good thesis will keep your work original, custom, and confidential.

Are You Struggling With Your PhD?

While Ph.D. failure rate and Ph.D. dropout rate fluctuate over the years, people fail and pass regardless. People who complete their Ph.D. programs have one common factor attributed to their success and that is good thesis supervision, guidance, and assistance. Drawing strength from this, through professional help and high-quality dissertation writing services, no Ph.D. applicant should be left behind not completing Ph.D. programs. These services are what we offer at affordable prices through our Ph.D. dissertation experts who have been there and know what brilliant doctoral dissertations mean to your degree.

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• CAREER COLUMN
• 18 October 2018

Teach undergraduates that doing a PhD will require them to embrace failure

• Irini Topalidou 0

Irini Topalidou is a molecular biologist and geneticist who works as a research scientist in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Washington in Seattle. Twitter: @irinakitop

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

My own graduate experience and 20 years in academic research have taught me that someone can be a good student without necessarily having what it takes to get a PhD or a career in academia. Often, students I see think that a solid undergraduate degree should guarantee later academic success, but the reality is quite different.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-06905-0

This is an article from the Nature Careers Community, a place for Nature readers to share their professional experiences and advice. Guest posts are encouraged. You can get in touch with the editor at [email protected].

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Dealing with failure as a PhD student

PhD students are extremely prone to experiencing failure. All academics are much more likely to experience failure (repeatedly) in contrast to other professions. But there are strategies to learn how to better deal with ‘academic failure’.

Dealing with failure in academia

PhD students can deal with failure more constructively by realizing that failures are an inevitable part of academic work.

Additionally, the following strategies help to deal with failure and build lasting resilience:

What counts as ‘academic failure’?

In this article, the authors address failure as something that is not in line with desired or expected results. This definition draws attention to the emotions and individual experiences of failures. What constitutes a failure for one person, might not be considered a failure by another.

The highly subjective character of perceiving failure also provides hope. While rejections and negative feedback are never pleasant, we can learn to redefine what we see as a failure and build resilience.

#1. Understand that all academics encounter failure

Academics also regularly apply for grants and project funding. Competition for many grants and scholarships is extremely high. The acceptance rate of many grants lies below 5%!

#2. Celebrate your courage to take risks

Celebrating successes is great. However, when it comes to long-term resilience building, it draws attention to the wrong outcome. Instead of (only) celebrating your successes, start celebrating your courage to take risks.

#3. Openly share and discuss your failures

In 2016, Professor Johannes Haushofer from Princeton University went viral with what he called his “CV of failures” . Instead of listing his successes, he compiled an honest resumé that included everything he tried to achieve but failed to do so. It included job applications, research funding applications and paper rejections.

Knowing that you are not alone in this and that everyone fails once in a while, helps enormously. And similarly to celebrating your courage, celebrating your colleagues’ milestones. Praise ‘trying’ over ‘succeeding’.

#4. Give yourself time to grieve

At the same time, there is some truth to it. Just because you consciously know that failures are part of academic life, are normal and will ultimately help you to grow as an academic, you still need to take the proper time to allow for emotional processing.

#5. Find a good academic mentor

If you experience failure, you should talk to your academic mentor. Explain how you feel. How crushed you are. If you respect the opinion of your mentor, you will also believe their honest assessment of the quality of your work.

Master Academia

Get new content delivered directly to your inbox, energy management in academia, dealing with conflicting feedback from different supervisors, related articles, 37 creative ways to get motivation to study, clever strategies to keep up with the latest academic research, the best way to cold emailing professors, introduce yourself in a phd interview (4 simple steps + examples).

Elisa Granato

Microbial ecology & evolution, phd tips – dealing with “failed” experiments.

“PhD tips” is an ongoing series of blog posts written by postdocs and aimed at graduate students at the University of Oxford (Department of Biology). I wrote this in April 2021.

[Update Dec 2022: this article is now published in The Microbiologist ]

Hi everyone!

I hope you are all doing well. This week, I want to talk about dealing with “failed” experiments.* I put “failed” in quotes because, as I will argue below, only a very small fraction of experiments perceived as failed have actually failed in the sense that they were completely pointless.

The first thing to realize is that the core of experimental science is an iterative process: you do a thing, it does something (or not), you think about it, you do it a little different next time. Crucially, this process works the same way whether the results made you happy or not (for whatever reason). You think about what happened, you change stuff, you do it again the same way, you do it again with a twist, or you do something else entirely. A very normal experience as a scientist is to – on average – be a little disappointed in the outcome of your experiment. See below for a list of outcomes that tend to make people unhappy. Again: this is normal and part of the process. The most “successful” projects are built on a foundation of “failed” or semi-failed attempts at doing something.**

The second thing to realize is that learning is at the core of this iterative process: a thing has to happen for us to better understand what we’re dealing with. This means that the essential goal of each experiment is to learn something, anything! And this “lesson” doesn’t usually come in the shape of a perfect plot that’s publication-ready on the first try. Instead, the next learning item usually comes from a mangled mess of an experiment or dataset.

What exactly you are learning from each attempt depends of course on the details of your project, but below I am giving a few real-life examples of typical experimental outcomes that tend to make people unhappy, and some suggestions on what one could learn from them.

• Not failed at all, this is a valuable negative result.
• Outcome: solid scientific insight.
• Not failed at all, this is valuable data we can learn from.
• Potential next step: figure out if noise is biological variance or technical measurement error, or both.
• Outcome: a better understanding of your system, solid scientific insight
• Example: forgot to wash cells before treating them.
• Semi-failed, this is valuable data we can learn from. By comparing the washed cells with the unwashed cells we can learn how this step in the experiment influences the final results. Can be useful for future troubleshooting.
• Outcome: an experimental protocol where we understand better what each step does, or where we realize one step is less important than previously thought; honing of lab skills.
• Example: positive/negative control didn’t yield the expected result, even though it has always worked before and the experiment was (to the best of your knowledge) executed as usual.
• Semi-failed. An opportunity to evaluate the reliability of the protocol/equipment/material.
• Potential next steps: introduce checklists and more note-taking to ensure little details are adhered to; evaluate assumptions e.g. is the control genotype actually this genotype, is something contaminated, is the machine still working, etc.
• Outcome: a more reliable experimental protocol, honing of lab skills
• Example: algae grow over all your aquatic plants and kill them
• Semi-failed. An opportunity to evaluate “housing” conditions for your organism.
• Potential next steps: pilot experiment to optimize housing conditions before doing “actual” experiments; investigate whether the contaminant did something interesting
• Outcome: a more reliable experimental protocol; chance of a random cool discovery with the contaminant
• Example: dropped tube with the sample on the floor. Cannot be recovered.
• Close to “actually failed”, but still an opportunity to introduce better safety measures / risk assessment.
• Potential next steps: introduce safety procedures to ensure better sample preservation, labelling etc.
• Outcome: a more reliable experimental protocol

The third thing to realize is that feelings of frustration, anger, sadness, fear, are all very common in the wake of a “failed” experiment, especially if it took a long time. And trying to think about the next steps while still frustrated can turn into a vicious cycle where you make mistakes because frustrated brains are bad at solving problems. So, instead, allow yourself to feel these feelings, get a good night’s sleep, and then start troubleshooting the next day with a fresh and relaxed mind.

So, to summarize: doing your PhD, and science in general, is about learning. Every experiment, no matter the outcome, can teach you something. Some of the lessons are perhaps a bit more appealing and easier to swallow than others, but they are all useful and necessary. So next time an experiment “fails”, try taking a nice little break if you can, and then list all the things you still learned about your experimental setup, or organism of interest.

Finally, I would like to share a little mental trick I developed over the years that has helped me with dealing and accepting experimental setbacks. I like to imagine that any given project will take me X hours to complete, including setbacks, trials by fire, random distractions, dead-ends etc. In science, X is usually unknown. But importantly, there is always an X. Every time I conduct an experiment that “fails”, and let’s say it took me 6 hours, I have now reduced X by 6 hours. Not bad! I am one step closer to finishing the project. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek of course, but it still helps me see my work for what it is: I gave these 6 hours my best and the outcome doesn’t change that.

*If you work on theory you can probably replace “failed experiments” here with “theoretical approaches that didn’t work out” or something along those lines and maybe some of this might still be helpful.

**This is the science version of “The master has failed more times than the student has even tried”.

10 easy ways to fail a Ph.D.

The attrition rate in Ph.D. school is high.

Anywhere from a third to half will fail.

In fact, there's a disturbing consistency to grad school failure.

I'm supervising a lot of new grad students this semester, so for their sake, I'm cataloging the common reasons for failure.

Read on for the top ten reasons students fail out of Ph.D. school.

Focus on grades or coursework

No one cares about grades in grad school.

There's a simple formula for the optimal GPA in grad school:

Anything higher implies time that could have been spent on research was wasted on classes. Advisors might even raise an eyebrow at a 4.0

During the first two years, students need to find an advisor, pick a research area, read a lot of papers and try small, exploratory research projects. Spending too much time on coursework distracts from these objectives.

Learn too much

Some students go to Ph.D. school because they want to learn.

Let there be no mistake: Ph.D. school involves a lot of learning.

But, it requires focused learning directed toward an eventual thesis.

Taking (or sitting in on) non-required classes outside one's focus is almost always a waste of time, and it's always unnecessary.

By the end of the third year, a typical Ph.D. student needs to have read about 50 to 150 papers to defend the novelty of a proposed thesis.

Of course, some students go too far with the related work search, reading so much about their intended area of research that they never start that research.

Advisors will lose patience with "eternal" students that aren't focused on the goal--making a small but significant contribution to human knowledge.

In the interest of personal disclosure, I suffered from the "want to learn everything" bug when I got to Ph.D. school.

I took classes all over campus for my first two years: Arabic, linguistics, economics, physics, math and even philosophy. In computer science, I took lots of classes in areas that had nothing to do with my research.

The price of all this "enlightenment" was an extra year on my Ph.D.

I only got away with this detour because while I was doing all that, I was a TA, which meant I wasn't wasting my advisor's grant funding.

Expect perfection

Perfectionism is a tragic affliction in academia, since it tends to hit the brightest the hardest.

Perfection cannot be attained. It is approached in the limit.

Students that polish a research paper well past the point of diminishing returns, expecting to hit perfection, will never stop polishing.

Students that can't begin to write until they have the perfect structure of the paper mapped out will never get started.

For students with problems starting on a paper or dissertation, my advice is that writing a paper should be an iterative process: start with an outline and some rough notes; take a pass over the paper and improve it a little; rinse; repeat. When the paper changes little with each pass, it's at diminishing returns. One or two more passes over the paper are all it needs at that point.

"Good enough" is better than "perfect."

Procrastinate

Chronic perfectionists also tend to be procrastinators.

So do eternal students with a drive to learn instead of research.

Ph.D. school seems to be a magnet for every kind of procrastinator.

Unfortunately, it is also a sieve that weeds out the unproductive.

Procrastinators should check out my tips for boosting productivity .

Go rogue too soon/too late

The advisor-advisee dynamic needs to shift over the course of a degree.

Early on, the advisor should be hands on, doling out specific topics and helping to craft early papers.

Toward the end, the student should know more than the advisor about her topic. Once the inversion happens, she needs to "go rogue" and start choosing the topics to investigate and initiating the paper write-ups. She needs to do so even if her advisor is insisting she do something else.

The trick is getting the timing right.

Going rogue before the student knows how to choose good topics and write well will end in wasted paper submissions and a grumpy advisor.

On the other hand, continuing to act only when ordered to act past a certain point will strain an advisor that expects to start seeing a "return" on an investment of time and hard-won grant money.

Advisors expect near-terminal Ph.D. students to be proto-professors with intimate knowledge of the challenges in their field. They should be capable of selecting and attacking research problems of appropriate size and scope.

Treat Ph.D. school like school or work

Ph.D. school is neither school nor work.

Ph.D. school is a monastic experience. And, a jealous hobby.

Solving problems and writing up papers well enough to pass peer review demands contemplative labor on days, nights and weekends.

Reading through all of the related work takes biblical levels of devotion.

Ph.D. school even comes with built-in vows of poverty and obedience.

The end brings an ecclesiastical robe and a clerical hood.

Students that treat Ph.D. school like a 9-5 endeavor are the ones that take 7+ years to finish, or end up ABD.

Ignore the committee

Some Ph.D. students forget that a committee has to sign off on their Ph.D.

It's important for students to maintain contact with committee members in the latter years of a Ph.D. They need to know what a student is doing.

It's also easy to forget advice from a committee member since they're not an everyday presence like an advisor.

Committee members, however, rarely forget the advice they give.

It doesn't usually happen, but I've seen a shouting match between a committee member and a defender where they disagreed over the metrics used for evaluation of an experiment. This committee member warned the student at his proposal about his choice of metrics.

He ignored that warning.

He was lucky: it added only one more semester to his Ph.D.

Another student I knew in grad school was told not to defend, based on the draft of his dissertation. He overruled his committee's advice, and failed his defense. He was told to scrap his entire dissertaton and start over. It took him over ten years to finish his Ph.D.

Aim too low

Some students look at the weakest student to get a Ph.D. in their department and aim for that.

This attitude guarantees that no professorship will be waiting for them.

And, it all but promises failure.

The weakest Ph.D. to escape was probably repeatedly unlucky with research topics, and had to settle for a contingency plan.

Aiming low leaves no room for uncertainty.

And, research is always uncertain.

Aim too high

A Ph.D. seems like a major undertaking from the perspective of the student.

But, it is not the final undertaking. It's the start of a scientific career.

A Ph.D. does not have to cure cancer or enable cold fusion.

At best a handful of chemists remember what Einstein's Ph.D. was in.

Einstein's Ph.D. dissertation was a principled calculation meant to estimate Avogadro's number. He got it wrong. By a factor of 3.

He still got a Ph.D.

A Ph.D. is a small but significant contribution to human knowledge.

Impact is something students should aim for over a lifetime of research.

Making a big impact with a Ph.D. is about as likely as hitting a bullseye the very first time you've fired a gun.

Once you know how to shoot, you can keep shooting until you hit it.

Plus, with a Ph.D., you get a lifetime supply of ammo.

Some advisors can give you a list of potential research topics. If they can, pick the topic that's easiest to do but which still retains your interest.

It does not matter at all what you get your Ph.D. in.

All that matters is that you get one.

It's the training that counts--not the topic.

Miss the real milestones

Most schools require coursework, qualifiers, thesis proposal, thesis defense and dissertation. These are the requirements on paper.

In practice, the real milestones are three good publications connected by a (perhaps loosely) unified theme.

Coursework and qualifiers are meant to undo admissions mistakes. A student that has published by the time she takes her qualifiers is not a mistake.

Once a student has two good publications, if she convinces her committee that she can extrapolate a third, she has a thesis proposal.

Once a student has three publications, she has defended, with reasonable confidence, that she can repeatedly conduct research of sufficient quality to meet the standards of peer review. If she draws a unifying theme, she has a thesis, and if she staples her publications together, she has a dissertation.

I fantasize about buying an industrial-grade stapler capable of punching through three journal papers and calling it The Dissertator .

Of course, three publications is nowhere near enough to get a professorship--even at a crappy school. But, it's about enough to get a Ph.D.

Related posts

• Recommended reading for grad students .
• The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.
• How to get into grad school .
• Advice for thesis proposals .
• Productivity tips for academics .
• Academic job hunt advice .
• Successful Ph.D. students: Perseverance, tenacity and cogency .
• The CRAPL: An open source license for academics .

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Dissertating Like a Distance Runner: Ten Tips for Finishing Your PhD

The above photo is of Sir Mo Farah running past Buckingham Palace into the home stretch of the London Marathon. I took the photo two days after my viva, in which I defended my PhD dissertation. Farah become a British hero when he and his training partner, Galen Rupp, won the gold and silver medals in the 10k at the London Olympic Games.

I had the honor of racing against Rupp at Nike’s Boarder Clash meet between the fastest high school distance runners in my home state of Washington and Rupp’s home state of Oregon. I’m happy to provide a link to the results and photos of our teenage selves since I beat Galen and Washington won the meet. (Note: In the results, ‘Owen’ is misspelled with the commonly added s , which I, as a fan of Jesse Owens, feel is an honor.) By the time we were running in college—Rupp for the University of Oregon and myself for the University of Washington—he was on an entirely different level. I never achieved anything close to the kind of running success Rupp has had. Yet, for most of us mortals, the real value in athletics is the character traits and principles that sports instill in us, and how those principles carry over to other aspects of life. Here I want to share ten principles that the sport of distance running teaches, which I found to be quite transferrable to writing my doctoral dissertation.

To provide some personal context, I began as a doctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham in 2014. At that time my grandparents, who helped my single father raise my sister and me, continued their ongoing struggle with my Grandfather’s Alzheimer’s. It was becoming increasingly apparent that they would benefit from having my wife and I nearby. So, in 2015 we moved to my hometown of Yakima, Washington. That fall I began a 2/2 teaching load at a small university on the Yakama Nation Reservation as I continued to write my dissertation. Since finishing my PhD four years ago, in 2018, I have published one book , five research articles , and two edited volume chapters related in various ways to my dissertation. As someone living in rural Eastern Washington, who is a first-gen college grad, I had to find ways to stay self-motivated and to keep chipping away at my academic work. I found the following principles that I learned through distance running very helpful.

(1) Establish community . There are various explanations, some of which border on superstitious, for why Kenyan distance runners have been so dominant. Yet one factor is certainly the running community great Kenyan distance runners benefit from at their elite training camps, as discussed in Train Hard, Win Easy: The Kenyan Way . Having a community that values distance running can compel each member of the community to pursue athletic excellence over a long period of time. The same can be said for academic work. Many doctoral researchers have built-in community in their university departments, but for various reasons this is not true for everyone. Thankfully, alternative ways to establish community have never been easier, predominantly due to technology.

Since my dissertation applied Aristotelian causation and neo-Thomistic hylomorphism to mental causation and neural correlates of consciousness, I found it immensely helpful to meet consistently with neuroscientist, Christof Koch, and philosopher of mind, Mihretu Guta. Mihretu does work on the philosophy of consciousness and Christof propelled the dawn of the neurobiology of consciousness with Francis Crick . Though Mihretu lives in Southern California, we met monthly through Skype, and I would drive over the Cascade Mountains once a month to meet with Christof in Seattle. As my dissertation examiner, Anna Marmodoro, once reminded me: the world is small—it’s easier than ever before to connect with other researchers.

It can also be helpful to keep in mind that your community can be large or small. As some athletes train in large camps consisting of many runners, others have small training groups, such as the three Ingebrigtsen brothers . Likewise, your community could be a whole philosophy department or several close friends. You can also mix it up. As an introvert, I enjoyed my relatively small consistent community, but I also benefitted from attending annual regional philosophy conferences where I could see the same folks each year. And I especially enjoyed developing relationships with other international researchers interested in Aristotelian philosophy of mind at a summer school hosted by the University of Oxford in Naples, which Marmodoro directed. For a brief period, we all stayed in a small villa and talked about hylomorphism all day, each day, while enjoying delicious Italian food.

Whatever your community looks like, whatever shape it takes, what matters is that you’re encouraged toward accomplishing your academic goal.

(2) Know your goal. Like writing a dissertation, becoming a good distance runner requires a lot of tedious and monotonous work. If you don’t have a clear goal of what you want to achieve, you won’t get up early, lace up your running shoes, and enter the frosty morning air as you take the first of many steps in your morning run. There are, after all, more enticing and perhaps even more pressing things to do. Similarly, if you don’t have a clear goal of when you want to finish your dissertation, it is easy to put off your daily writing for another day, which can easily become more distant into the future.

(3) Be realistic about your goal . While it is important to have a clear goal as a distance runner and as a doctoral researcher, it is important for your goal to be realistic. This means your goal should take into account the fact that you are human and therefore have both particular strengths and limitations. Everyone enters the sport of distance running with different strengths and weaknesses. When Diddy ran the city it would have been unrealistic for him to try to break the two-hour barrier in the marathon, as Eliud Kipchoge did . If Diddy made that his goal, he probably would have lost all hope in the first mile of the marathon and never finished. Because he set a more realistic goal of breaking four hours, not two hours, he paced himself accordingly and actually finished.

The parent of two young children who is teaching part-time can certainly finish a dissertation. But the parent will have a greater likelihood of doing so with a reasonable goal that fits that individual’s strengths and limitations. If the parent expects to finish on the same timescale as someone who is single with no children nor teaching responsibilities, this will likely lead to disappointment and less motivation in the middle of the process. Motivation will remain higher, and correspondingly so will productivity that is fueled by motivation, if one’s goal is realistic and achievable.

Another element of having a realistic goal is being willing to adapt the goal as your circumstances change. Sometimes a runner might enter a race expecting to place in the top five and midway through the race realize that she has a great chance of winning (consider, for example, Des Linden’s victory at the Boston Marathon ). At that point, it would be wise to revise one’s goal to be ‘win the race’ rather than simply placing in the top five. At other times, a runner might expect to win the race or be on the podium and midway realize that is no longer possible. Yet, if she is nevertheless within striking distance of placing in the top five, then she can make that her new goal, which is realistic given her current situation and will therefore sustain her motivation to the finish line. Sara Hall, who could have and wanted to crack the top three, held on for fifth at the World Championships marathon because she adjusted her goal midrace.

The PhD candidate who initially plans to finish her dissertation in three years but then finds herself in the midst of a pandemic or dealing with a medical issue or a family crisis may not need to give up on her goal of finishing her dissertation. Perhaps, she only needs to revise her goal so that it allows more time, so she finishes in five years rather than three. A PhD finished in five years is certainly more valuable than no PhD.

(4) Know why you want to achieve your goal . My high school cross-country coach, Mr. Steiner, once gave me a book about distance running entitled “Motivation is the Name of the Game.” It is one of those books you don’t really need to read because the main takeaway is in the title. Distance running requires much-delayed gratification—you must do many things that are not intrinsically enjoyable (such as running itself, ice baths, going to bed early, etc.) in order to achieve success. If you don’t have a solid reason for why you want to achieve your running goal, you won’t do the numerous things you do not want to do but must do to achieve your goal. The same is true for finishing a PhD. Therefore, it is important to know the reason(s) why you want to finish your dissertation and why you want a PhD.

As a side note, it can also be immensely helpful to choose a dissertation topic that you are personally very interested in, rather than a topic that will simply make you more employable. Of course, being employable is something many of us must consider. Yet, if you pick a topic that is so boring to you that you have significant difficulty finding the motivation to finish your dissertation, then picking an “employable dissertation topic” will be anything but employable.

(5) Prioritize your goal . “Be selfish” were the words of exhortation my college cross-country team heard from our coaches before we returned home for Christmas break. As someone who teaches ethics courses, I feel compelled to clarify that “be selfish” is not typically good advice. However, to be fair to my coaches, the realistic point they were trying to convey was that at home we would be surrounded by family and friends who may not fully understand our running goals and what it takes to accomplish them. For example, during my first Christmas break home from college, I was trying to run eighty miles per week. Because I was trying to fit these miles into my social schedule without much compromise, many of these miles were run in freezing temps, in the dark, on concrete sidewalks with streetlights, rather than dirt trails. After returning to campus following the holidays, I raced my first indoor track race with a terribly sore groin, which an MRI scan soon revealed was due to a stress fracture in my femur. I learned the hard way that I have limits to what I can do, which entails I must say “no thanks” to some invitations, even though that may appear selfish to some.

A PhD researcher writing a dissertation has a substantial goal before her. Yet, many people writing a dissertation have additional responsibilities, such as teaching, being a loving spouse, a faithful friend, or a present parent. As I was teaching while writing my dissertation, I often heard the mantra “put students first.” Yet, I knew if I prioritized my current students over and above finishing my dissertation, I would, like many, never finish my dissertation. However, I knew it would be best for my future students to be taught by an expert who has earned a PhD. So, I put my future students first by prioritizing finishing my PhD . This meant that I had to limit the teaching responsibilities I took on. Now, my current students are benefitting from my decision, as they are taught by an expert in my field.

While prioritizing your dissertation can mean putting it above some things in life, it also means putting it below other things. A friend once told me he would fail in a lot of areas in life before he fails as a father, which is often what it means to practically prioritize one goal above another. Prioritizing family and close friendships need not mean that you say ‘yes’ to every request, but that you intentionally build consistent time into your schedule to foster relationships with the people closest to you. For me, this practically meant not working past 6:00pm on weekdays and taking weekends off to hang out with family and friends. This relieved pressure, because I knew that if something went eschew with my plan to finish my PhD, I would still have the people in my life who I care most about. I could then work toward my goal without undue anxiety about the possibility of failing and the loss that would entail. I was positively motivated by the likely prospect that I would, in time, finish my PhD, and be able to celebrate it with others who supported me along the way.

(6) Just start writing . Yesterday morning, it was five degrees below freezing when I did my morning run. I wanted to skip my run and go straight to my heated office. So, I employed a veteran distance running trick to successfully finish my run. I went out the door and just started running. That is the hardest part, and once I do it, 99.9% of the time I finish my run.

You may not know what exactly you think about a specific topic in the chapter you need to write, nor what you are going to write each day. But perhaps the most simple and helpful dissertation advice I ever received was from David Horner, who earned his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford. He told me: “just start writing.” Sometimes PhD researchers think they must have all their ideas solidified in their mind before they start writing their dissertation. In fact, writing your dissertation can actually help clarify what you think. So “just start writing” is not only simple but also sage advice.

(7) Never write a dissertation . No great marathoner focuses on running 26.2 miles. Great distance runners are masters of breaking up major goals into smaller goals and then focusing on accomplishing one small goal at a time, until they have achieved the major goal. Philosophers can understand this easily, as we take small, calculated steps through minor premises that support major premises to arrive at an overall conclusion in an argument.

Contained within each chapter of a dissertation is a premise(s) in an overall argument and individual sections can contain sub-premises supporting the major premise of each chapter. When you first start out as a doctoral researcher working on your dissertation, you have to construct an outline of your dissertation that maps out the various chapters and how they will relate to your overall conclusion. Once you have that outline in place, keep it in the back of your mind. But do not focus on writing the whole, which would be overwhelming and discouraging. Rather, focus on writing whichever chapter you are working on. The fastest American marathoner, Ryan Hall, wrote a book that sums up the only way to run long distances in the title Run the Mile You’re In . And Galen Rupp discusses in this interview how he mentally breaks up a marathon into segments and focuses on just finishing one segment at a time. Whatever chapter you’re writing, make it your goal to write that chapter. Once you’ve accomplished that goal, set a new goal: write the next chapter. Repeat that process several times and you will be halfway through your dissertation. Repeat the process a few more times, and you will be done.

By the time you have finished a master’s degree, you have written many chapter-length papers. To finish a dissertation, you essentially write about eight interconnected papers, one at a time, just as you have done many times before. If you just write the chapter (which you could call a “paper” if that feels like a lighter load) you’re writing, before you know it, you will have written a dissertation.

(8) Harness the power of habits . Becoming a great distance runner requires running an inordinate number of miles, which no one has the willpower to do. The best marathoners in the world regularly run well over one hundred miles a week, in addition to stretching, lifting weights, taking ice baths, and eating healthy. Not even the most tough-minded distance runner has the gumption to make all the individual decisions that would be required in order to get out the door for every run and climb into every ice bath apart from the development of habits. The most reliable way around each distance runner’s weakness of will, or akrasia , is developing and employing habits. The same can be true for writing.

If you simply try to write a little bit each weekday around the same time, you will develop a habit of writing at that time each day. Once you have that habit, the decision to write each weekday at that time will require less and less willpower over time. Eventually, it will take some willpower to not write at that time. I have found it helpful to develop the routine of freewriting for a few minutes just before starting my daily writing session of thirty minutes during which I write new content, before working on editing or revising existing content for about thirty minutes. My routine helped me develop the daily habit of writing, which removes the daily decision to write, as I “just do it” (to use Nike’s famous line) each day.

I have also found it helpful to divide my days up according to routines. As a morning person, I do well writing and researching in the morning, doing teaching prep and teaching during the middle of the day, and then doing mundane tasks such as email at the end of the day.

(9) Write for today and for tomorrow . Successful distance runners train for two reasons. One reason—to win upcoming races—is obvious. However, in addition to training for upcoming races, the successful distance runner trains today for the training that they want to be capable of months and years ahead. You cannot simply jump into running eighty, ninety, or one-hundred-mile weeks. It takes time to condition your body to sustain the stress of running high mileage weeks. A runner must have a long-term perspective and plan ahead as she works toward her immediate goals on the way to achieving her long-term goals. Similarly, for the PhD researcher, writing a dissertation lays the groundwork for future success.

For one, if the PhD candidate develops healthy, sustainable, productive habits while writing a dissertation, these habits can be continued once they land an academic job. It is no secret that the initial years on the job market, or in a new academic position, can be just as (or more) challenging than finishing a PhD. Effective habits developed while writing a dissertation can be invaluable during such seasons, allowing one to continue researching and writing even with more responsibilities and less time.

It is also worth noting that there is a sense in which research writing becomes easier, as one becomes accustomed to the work. A distance runner who has been running for decades, logging thousands of miles throughout their career, can run relatively fast without much effort. For example, my college roommate, Travis Boyd, decided to set the world record for running a half marathon pushing a baby stroller nearly a decade after we ran for the University of Washington. His training was no longer what it once was during our collegiate days. Nevertheless, his past training made it much easier for him to set the record, even though his focus had shifted to his full-time business career and being a present husband and father of two. I once asked my doctoral supervisors, Nikk Effingham and Jussi Suikkanen, how they were able to publish so much. They basically said it gets easier, as the work you have done in the past contributes to your future publications. Granted, not everyone is going to finish their PhD and then become a research super human like Liz Jackson , who finished her PhD in 2019, and published four articles that same year, three the next, and six the following year. Nevertheless, writing and publishing does become easier as you gain years of experience.

(10) Go running . As Cal Newport discusses in Deep Work , having solid boundaries around the time we work is conducive for highly effective academic work. And there is nothing more refreshing while dissertating than an athletic hobby with cognitive benefits . So, perhaps the best way to dissertate like a distance runner is to stop writing and go for a run.

Acknowledgments : Thanks are due to Aryn Owen and Jaden Anderson for their constructive feedback on a prior draft of this post.

• Matthew Owen

Matthew Owen (PhD, University of Birmingham) is a faculty member in the philosophy department at Yakima Valley College in Washington State. He is also an affiliate faculty member at the Center for Consciousness Science, University of Michigan. Matthew’s latest book is Measuring the Immeasurable Mind: Where Contemporary Neuroscience Meets the Aristotelian Tradition .

• Dissertating
• Finishing your PhD
• graduate students
• Sabrina D. MisirHiralall

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Dissertation Genius

The Six Laws of PhD Failure

September 9, 2019 by Dissertation Genius

To give you a dose of reality, the attrition rate at any PhD school is very high. Anywhere from a third to half of those that enroll at a PhD university will not end up graduating and finishing their dissertation. In fact, the figure of 40%-50% of failing PhD students has been fairly stable over the past three decades. In 1990, Baird reported that PhD completion rates in most disciplines hover around 50% and are even lower in the arts and humanities. In 2003, Elgar conducted a detailed study of North American PhD students and found that “only about half of all students who enter PhD programs…actually complete” (p. iii). The Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) for England also reported similar numbers in 2007.

Based on my two decades experience in PhD dissertation consulting, this 50% failure rate is a real number; and the attrition rate for PhD and dissertation students has always been extremely high especially when compared to undergrad and master’s programs. The reason has to do with many factors but, in this article, I’d like to focus on the negative factors that will prevent you from PhD graduation. Towards this end, I’ve inserted what I think are the six most relevant factors correlated to failing PhD students.

1st Law of PhD Failure – Choosing the wrong dissertation adviser

Choosing your dissertation adviser is one of the most important decisions of your academic career and one recipe for disaster is to choose a dissertation adviser because you ‘like’ him or her or because you find this person ‘cool’ meaning charismatic, well-published, and has similar research interests as yourself. While these characteristics are admirable, in the end, they won’t help you in completing a quality dissertation and acquiring your PhD.

Lunenberg and Irby (2008) completed a masterly work about successful dissertation writing and, in chapter two of this work, they mention the key factors in choosing a dissertation adviser. The most important two factors they mention are:

• Accessibility
• Feedback turnaround times

Too many doctoral students fail to take these factors into account when choosing their dissertation adviser even though these two things are the most common source of complaints regarding dissertation advisers.

You must make sure your potential dissertation adviser satisfies these two criteria and that you are clear about whether your potential candidate will satisfy your expectations in these areas. You should also ask colleagues about the dependability of the candidate in the aforementioned areas to make sure you are choosing a suitable candidate that will give a realistic amount of his or her time to hear you out and attend to your dissertation needs (to the extent appropriate for a doctoral student). 

2nd Law of PhD Failure – Expecting Dissertation Hand-holding from your Peers

Too many new doctoral students hold mistaken expectations of what they will find in postgraduate school and among these mistaken assumptions is expecting lots of help and hand-holding. As a doctoral student, you should clearly understand that you must take charge of your own doctoral program.

Although you should get help from your dissertation supervisor, chair, and committee members at certain times, you are the person that will make it happen. For example, there will be no one to remind you of certain courses you should enroll in, or particular forms you need to complete by a certain deadline. Only you are responsible for engraving your intellectual path. And under no circumstances should you ever expect your dissertation supervisor, or anyone else for that matter, in holding your hand and telling you which literature to read, which journals to subscribe to, which peer groups and seminars to attend, or which grants and funding to apply for.

While you should seek help and guidance, you should not expect this help to come, and you must develop an independent and persevering mindset in doctoral school, or else you risk a huge disappointment.

3rd Law of PhD Failure – Choosing too Broad a Dissertation Topic

Doctoral students should understand that when it comes to doctoral school and acquiring that PhD, the dissertation is everything. Because most doctoral students understand this, they unfortunately bring with them the mistaken impression that their dissertation should include everything, cover everything, and attack the topic from every conceivable angle using a variety of different research methodologies.

This mindset and mistaken assumption is absolutely wrong. You must narrow down your research topic and zone in on a particular area. Too many doctoral students end up having a broad research topic and realize too late that they have bit off way more than they could chew and taken on much more than they have anticipated.

Here, make sure you work closely with your dissertation adviser and chairperson and keep working on narrowing down your topic appropriately. You may have always dreamt of your dissertation being all-inclusive and having an immediate impact on your field but you must realize that this is near impossible with the normal resources a typical doctoral student has at his or her disposal. Therefore, make your mark by working with the resources you have and beware of defining a research topic that is too broad.

4th Law of PhD Failure – Procrastination

I am not talking about lazy students since this law doesn’t apply to them (laziness is not usually a personality trait for those enrolling in doctoral school). In fact, this particular law applies to the typical doctoral student who is usually a perfectionist that sets very high standards.

“Understand: obsessive perfectionists, aka doctoral students, tend to be procrastinators!”

In general, PhD and doctoral students got to where they are by being obsessive perfectionists (to a certain extent), setting the standard extremely high and working to get near-perfect grades and submissions. This is fine in high doses up to the point of getting into doctoral school, where your dissertation (not your gpa) defines your success. And a doctoral dissertation reflects more the realities of life where you will stumble several times and find yourself doubting your abilities at many points, no matter how smart you think you are . Therefore, many doctoral students are not used to facing massive obstacles and perplexing problems in their academic life. And when finally facing them, most doctoral students tend to turn inward and face away, rather than confronting, these problems. They simply tend to procrastinate as a method of coping with something they are not used to.

To eliminate this idea, understand that life, real life, is not like school. It is filled with perplexing problems, challenges, and many obstacles. To succeed in anything you do, you must face down these problems and simply start by not running away or putting things off because you subconsciously find it easier on your ego to do so.

5th Law of PhD Failure – Ignoring your Dissertation Committee

Yes, you did not read this wrong. Many PhD students nowadays seem to forget that their committee must sign off and approve of their dissertation in order to graduate. Many doctoral students tend to forget the importance of the dissertation committee and forget to maintain contact with committee members, especially in the latter stages of a dissertation. It’s also very easy for doctoral students to forget particular pieces of advice that a committee member has given since the presence of a committee member is not as dominating as that of a dissertation adviser. On the flip side of this, committee members rarely forget the dissertation advice they give to students.

Hopefully it doesn’t happen to you, but many dissertation committee members give advice during the proposal stage of a student’s dissertation only to have this advice ignored or forgotten by the students. Once it comes time for the thesis defense, the committee members will bring up the unfollowed advice and, many times, it becomes a problem for doctoral students who have to postpone their PhD graduation by a semester (if one is lucky) or more. Don’t let this happen to you and make sure you are in periodic contact with your dissertation committee members and also make sure you record, and follow , any advice given by them.

6th Law of PhD Failure – Getting Romantically Involved with Faculty Members

Although this issue is rarely discussed in online dissertation consulting and writing forums, doctoral students and academic faculty members may become romantically involved. Keep in mind I am not talking about sexual harassment or assault, but rather about completely consensual relationships. Although one may be tempted to think a relationship between two fully-grown adults is not anyone’s business, the reality is that the power dynamics involved in such a relationship are not usually conducive in the long run since the faculty member usually has much more formal and informal power over the doctoral student. Thus, even in seemingly consensual relationships, moral questions of how much the student’s free will was actually involved do arise (e.g. how free was the student to actually decline the relationship). The problem is even more serious if it involves a dissertation adviser or committee member sleeping with a student. Although there are cases of successful long-term faculty-member and student relationships, in my experience these are few and far between. Moreover, what may look like a serious caring relationship could actually be a pattern on the part of the faculty member in ‘cycling’ through impressionable or vulnerable students.

Regardless of the situation, you should simply keep in mind to be careful and keep your guard up. Finally, understand that if things go wrong in the relationship, it could become a serious impediment to success. Moreover, even with successful relationships, your academic success may be hindered by reports of gossip and peers linking any progress of your work to the relationship itself rather than to your own hard work. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Baird, L.L. (1990). Disciplines and doctorates: The relationship between program characteristics and the duration of doctoral study. Research in Higher Education, 31, 369-385.

Elgar, F. J. (2003). Phd completion in Canadian universities: Final report . Retrieved from Graduate Student’s Association of Canada website: http://careerchem.com/CAREER-INFO-ACADEMIC/Frank-Elgar.pdf

HEFCE. (2007). Phd research degrees: Update . Retrieved from Higher Education Funding Council for England website: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20100202100434/http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2007/07_28/07_28.pdf

Lunenburg, F. C., & Irby, B. J. (2008). Writing a successful thesis or

dissertation: Tips and strategies for students in the social and behavioral sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

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PhDepression: Examining How Graduate Research and Teaching Affect Depression in Life Sciences PhD Students

Logan e. gin.

† Research for Inclusive STEM Education Center, School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281

Nicholas J. Wiesenthal

§ Department of Biology, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL 32816

Katelyn M. Cooper

Graduate students are more than six times as likely to experience depression compared with the general population. However, few studies have examined how graduate school specifically affects depression. In this qualitative interview study of 50 life sciences PhD students from 28 institutions, we examined how research and teaching affect depression in PhD students and how depression in turn affects students’ experiences teaching and researching. Using inductive coding, we identified factors that either positively or negatively affected student depression. Graduate students more commonly mentioned factors related to research that negatively affected their depression and factors related to teaching that positively affected their depression. We identified four overarching aspects of graduate school that influenced student depression: the amount of structure in teaching and research, positive and negative reinforcement, success and failure, and social support and isolation. Graduate students reported that depression had an exclusively negative effect on their research, primarily hindering their motivation and self-confidence, but that it helped them to be more compassionate teachers. This work pinpoints specific aspects of graduate school that PhD programs can target to improve mental health among life sciences graduate students.

INTRODUCTION

In 2018, researchers found that graduate students were more than six times as likely to report experiencing depression and anxiety compared with the general population and subsequently declared a “graduate student mental health crisis” ( Evans et al. , 2018 ; Flaherty, 2018 ). Calls to identify which factors exacerbate graduate student mental health problems followed (“The Mental Health of PhD Researchers,” 2019; Woolston, 2019a ). However, few studies have taken an inductive approach to identifying what aspects of graduate school in particular affect student mental health. More commonly, large quantitative studies propose a limited number of factors that may affect student mental health that participants select from, few of which directly relate to graduate research or teaching ( Peluso et al. , 2011 ; Levecque et al. , 2017 ; Evans et al. , 2018 ; Liu et al. , 2019 ). In this interview study, we focus on depression in life sciences PhD students and examine which specific aspects of research and teaching graduate students report as affecting their depression. We also explore how depression affects students’ experiences in graduate school.

The American Psychiatric Association defines depression as a common and serious medical illness that negatively affects how one feels, the way one thinks, and how one acts ( American Psychiatric Association, 2020 ). Depression is characterized by nine symptoms: depressed mood; markedly diminished interest or pleasure in activities; reduced ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness; feelings of worthlessness, or excessive or inappropriate guilt; recurrent thoughts of death or suicidal ideation, or suicide attempts or plans; insomnia or hypersomnia; significant change in appetite or weight; psychomotor agitation or retardation; and fatigue or loss of energy ( American Psychiatric Association, 2013 ; Schmidt and Tolentino, 2018 ). For depression to be diagnosed, the presence of at least five of the symptoms is required most of the day, nearly every day, for at least 2 weeks in addition to the occurrence of either depressed mood or diminished interest or pleasure ( American Psychiatric Association, 2013 ). In the general U.S. population, depression affects approximately 6.7% of individuals and is estimated to affect 16.6% of individuals at some point in their lifetime.

Graduate students are far more likely to report experiencing depression compared with the general population ( Evans et al. , 2018 ; Barreira et al. , 2020 ). Specifically, a recent study of master’s and PhD students in programs across the world, spanning a variety of disciplines, found that 39% of graduate students reported having moderate to severe depression ( Evans et al. , 2018 ). Similar studies have demonstrated high rates of depression in graduate students in specific disciplines such as economics ( Barreira et al. , 2020 ), biochemistry ( Helmers et al. , 1997 ), pharmacology ( Helmers et al. , 1997 ), and physiology ( Helmers et al. , 1997 ). Depression rates have surged in recent years among graduate students ( American College Health Association, 2014 , 2019 ). Talking about depression has become more socially acceptable, particularly among younger adults ( Anxiety and Depression Association of America, 2015 ; Lipson et al. , 2019 ), which may have contributed to the number of students willing to reveal that they are struggling with mental health. Additionally, depression is highly related to burnout, defined as a work-related chronic stress syndrome involving emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment ( Maslach et al. , 2001 ; Bianchi et al. , 2014 ). Graduate work environments appear to be increasingly characterized as stressful and demanding ( American College Health Association, 2014 , 2019 ; Woolston, 2017 ), which may also be contributing to the increase in graduate depression rates.

Increasingly, scientists, psychologists, and education researchers are recognizing graduate student mental health as a concern and calling for further investigation of graduate student mental health in hopes of identifying interventions to improve graduate student quality of life (“The Mental Health of PhD Researchers,” 2019; Woolston, 2019a , b ). For example, in 2019, Nature added a question to its annual survey of PhD students asking students from around the world whether they had sought help for anxiety or depression, and more than one-third (36%) confirmed they had ( Woolston, 2019b ). Additionally, notable publication outlets such as Nature (“The Mental Health of PhD Researchers,” 2019), Scientific American ( Puri, 2019 ), and Science ( Pain, 2018 ) have published blogs or editorials spotlighting the need to improve graduate student mental health.

Some recent studies have sought to uncover the factors affecting depression in graduate students. Primarily, survey studies with predetermined factors that researchers hypothesized impact student mental health have identified poor mentor–mentee relationships ( Peluso et al. , 2011 ; Evans et al. , 2018 ; Hish et al. , 2019 ; Liu et al. , 2019 ; Charles et al. , 2021 ), financial stress ( Hish et al. , 2019 ; Jones-White et al. , 2020 ; Charles et al. , 2021 ), and lack of work–life balance ( Evans et al. , 2018 ; Liu et al. , 2019 ) to be associated with depression or depressive symptoms among graduate students in various disciplines. Other variables shown to be predictive of depression include low research self-efficacy, defined as low confidence in one’s ability to do research ( Liu et al. , 2019 ), difficulty publishing papers ( Liu et al. , 2019 ), hours worked per week ( Peluso et al. , 2011 ), and perceived institutional discrimination ( Charles et al. , 2021 ). Factors that appear to be protective of depressive symptoms include social support ( Charles et al. , 2021 ), mastery, defined as the extent to which individuals perceive themselves to be in control of the forces that impact their lives ( Hish et al. , 2019 ), positive departmental social climate ( Charles et al. , 2021 ), optimism about career prospects ( Charles et al. , 2021 ), and sense of belonging to one’s graduate program ( Jones-White et al. , 2020 ). While these studies have identified some depression-related factors associated with graduate school broadly and emphasize the importance of positive mentor–mentee relationships, few studies have explored factors specifically associated with research and teaching, the two activities that graduate students engage in most frequently during their time in a program. Additionally, the extant literature has primarily focused on surface causes of graduate student depression, yet understanding the underlying causes may be key to developing meaningful interventions. For example, while it is well established that student perception of poor mentorship is related to student depression ( Evans et al. , 2018 ; Hish et al. , 2019 ; Liu et al. , 2019 ; Charles et al. , 2021 ), it is less well understood what specific behaviors mentors exhibit and how such behaviors negatively affect the cognitive and behavioral underpinnings of graduate student depression. Without this knowledge, it is difficult to develop strategies to help mentors be more inclusive of students.

Theories of depression seek to explain the causes of depression. No theoretical model is widely accepted as an overarching framework for depression within the psychological and psychiatric communities ( Mcleod, 2015 ; Ramnerö et al. , 2016 ); instead, there are a number of models addressing how different aspects of depression are associated with the disorder. Arguably, the three most prominent models are cognitive ( Beck et al. , 1979 ), behavioral ( Martell et al. , 2001 ), and psychodynamic ( Busch et al. , 2016 ). In brief, cognitive theories focus on an individual’s beliefs and propose that changes in thinking precede depressive symptoms; for example, negative views of oneself, the world, and the future are thought to be common for individuals with depression ( Beck et al. , 1979 ; Leahy, 2002 ). Behavioral theories emphasize that depression is a result of one’s interaction with the environment; depressive symptoms are thought to be the result of decreased reward, lack of positive reinforcement, encouragement of depressive or passive behaviors, and discouragement of healthy behaviors ( Lewinsohn, 1974 ; Martell et al. , 2001 ; Carvalho et al. , 2011 ). Psychodynamic theories of depression consider the role of feelings and behaviors in the etiology and persistence of depressive symptoms; these theories often focus on 1) one’s biology and temperamental vulnerabilities, 2) earliest attachment relationships, and 3) childhood experiences associated with frustration, helplessness, loss, guilty, or loneliness ( Busch et al. , 2016 ). While each group of theories has been critiqued and no one theory fully explains one’s experience with depression ( Mcleod, 2015 ; Ramnerö et al. , 2016 ), we propose that each may be helpful in understanding how aspects of graduate school may affect depression among PhD students.

The thoughts and behaviors associated with depression may in turn affect students’ experiences in graduate school, particularly their experiences with research and teaching. While no studies have examined how depression explicitly affects graduate students’ research experiences, studies have identified ways in which depression can affect students’ experiences in undergraduate research ( Cooper et al. , 2020a , b ). Undergraduate researchers report that their depression negatively affected their motivation, ability to concentrate and remember, intellectual engagement, and creativity in research ( Cooper et al. , 2020b ). Undergraduates described that their depression also caused them to be overly self-critical, less social, and ultimately negatively affected their research productivity. Additionally, undergraduates have been reluctant to share their depression with others in the lab, because they fear that they will be judged ( Cooper et al. , 2020b ). While these studies provide some insight into how depression may affect graduate students’ experience in research, there is much less information about how depression may affect graduate teaching.

In this study, we interviewed 50 PhD students in the life sciences who self-identified with having depression with the intent of answering two research questions that address gaps in the literature: 1) What specific aspects of graduate research and teaching affect PhD student depression? 2) How does PhD students’ depression affect their experience in research and teaching?

Student Interviews

This study was done under an approved Arizona State University Institutional Review Board protocol (no. 00011040).

In Fall 2019, we surveyed graduate students by sending an email out to program administrators of all life sciences graduate programs in the United States that are listed in U.S. News & World Report (2019) . Of the 259 graduate programs that we contacted, 75 (29.0%) program administrators agreed to forward our survey to students enrolled in their graduate programs. Of the 840 graduate students who participated in the survey, 459 (54.6%) self-identified as having depression based on general demographic questions on the survey. Of the 459 students who identified as having depression, 327 (71.2%) agreed to be contacted for a follow-up interview. In Summer 2020, we sent a recruitment email out to the 327 students who identified as having depression, asking to interview them about their experiences with depression in a PhD program. We specifically did not require that students be diagnosed with depression in order to participate in the interview study. We did not want to bias our sample, as mental health care is disproportionately unavailable to Black and Latinx individuals, as well as to those who come from low socioeconomic backgrounds ( Howell and McFeeters, 2008 ; Kataoka et al. , 2002 ; Santiago et al. , 2013 ). Of the students who were contacted, 50 PhD students (15.3%) enrolled across 28 life sciences PhD programs completed an interview.

The interview script was based on a previous interview script that we had developed, which successfully elicited what aspects of research affect depression in undergraduates and how depression affects their research ( Cooper et al. , 2020a ). Our previous work has shown that research experiences do not exclusively worsen depression, but that aspects of research can also help students manage their depression ( Cooper et al. , 2020a ). As such, our interview questions explored what aspects of research helped students manage their depression (positively affecting depression), and what aspects worsened students’ depression (negatively affecting depression). Additionally, we hypothesized that other prominent aspects of graduate school, such as teaching, would also affect PhD student depression and revised the interview script to include questions focused on examining the relationship between depression and teaching. We asked students what aspects of graduate research and teaching made their depression worse and what aspects helped them manage their depression. Participants were invited to come up with as many aspects as possible. We also asked how students perceived their depression affected their research and teaching. With the knowledge that we would be conducting interviews during summer of 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that the pandemic had likely exacerbated graduate student depression ( Chirikov et al. , 2020 ), we directed students to not reference aspects of research and teaching that were uniquely related to the pandemic (e.g., teaching remotely or halted research) when discussing the relationship between research, teaching, and depression. We were specifically interested in aspects of teaching and research that affected student depression before the pandemic and would presumably affect student depression afterward. We conducted think-aloud interviews with four graduate students who identified as having depression to ensure that our questions would not offend anyone with depression and to establish cognitive validity of the interview script by ensuring that each student understood what each question was asking. The interview script was iteratively revised after each think-aloud interview ( Trenor et al. , 2011 ). A final copy of the interview script can be found in the Supplemental Material.

All interviews were conducted using Zoom by one of two researchers (L.E.G. or K.M.C.). The average interview time was about 45 minutes. After the interview, all participants were sent a short survey to collect their demographics and additional information about their depression (a copy of the survey can be found in the Supplemental Material). Participants were provided a small monetary gift card in exchange for their time. All interviews were deidentified and transcribed before analysis.

Interview Analysis

Three researchers (L.E.G., N.J.W., and K.M.C.) independently reviewed 12 of the same randomly selected interviews to explore each idea that a participant expressed and to identify recurring themes ( Charmaz, 2006 ). Each researcher took detailed analytic notes during the review. After, the three researchers met to discuss their notes and to identify an initial set of recurring themes that occurred throughout the interviews ( Saldaña, 2015 ). The authors created an initial codebook outlining each theme and the related description. Together, the authors then reviewed the same set of five additional interviews to validate the themes outlined in the codebook and to identify any themes that may have been missed during the initial review. The researchers used constant comparison methods to compare quotes from the interviews to each theme and to establish whether any quotes were different enough from a particular theme to warrant an additional code ( Glesne and Peshkin, 1992 ). Together, the three researchers revised the codebook until they were confident that it captured the most common themes and that no new themes were emerging. A final copy of the codebook can be found in the Supplemental Material. Two authors (L.E.G. and N.J.W.) used the final codebook to code five randomly selected interviews (10% of all interviews) and their Cohen’s κ interrater score was at an acceptable level (κ = 0.94; Landis and Koch, 1977 ). Then, one researcher (N.J.W.) coded the remaining 45 interviews. In the text, we present themes mentioned by at least 10% of interviewees and use quotes to highlight themes. Some quotes were lightly edited for clarity.

Author Positionality

Some of the authors identify as having depression and some do not. One author had completed a PhD program (K.M.C.), one author was in the process of completing a PhD program (L.E.G.), and two authors were undergraduates (N.J.W. and I.F.) at the time when the interviews and analyses took place.

Interview Participants

Fifty PhD students agreed to participate in the study. Students were primarily women (58%), white (74%), and continuing-generation college students (78%). Twelve percent of students were international students, and the average age of the participants was 28 years old. While 20% of students were unsure of their career goals, 32% of students planned to pursue a career in academia, and 24% were planning to pursue a career in industry. Students reported how severe they perceived their depression to be, on average, during the time they had spent in their PhD programs. Most students reported their depression as either moderate (50%) or severe (28%). Eighty percent of students reported being diagnosed with depression, and 74% reported receiving treatment for depression. Participants were at different stages in their PhD programs ranging from first year to sixth year or more. Three students had graduated between the time they completed the initial survey and when they participated in the interview in Summer 2020. Students self-reported their main research areas and represented a broad range, with ecology and evolutionary biology (26%), animal science (14%), molecular biology (14%), and neurobiology (10%) being the most common. Eighty-six percent of students had experience teaching undergraduates, primarily as teaching assistants (TAs), at the time of the interviews. All student demographics are summarized in Table 1 .

Participant demographics

The Effect of Research on Graduate Student Depression

Students more commonly identified ways that research negatively affected their depression than ways research positively affected their depression. Considering all factors that students listed and not just those that were most common, students on average listed two ways in which an aspect of research negatively affected their depression and one way in which an aspect of research positively affected their depression.

The most commonly reported aspect of research that worsened students’ depression was experiencing failures, obstacles, or setbacks in research. Specifically, students cited that failed experiments, failed research projects, and the rejection of manuscripts and grants was particularly difficult for their depression. Conversely, students highlighted that their depression was positively affected when they were able to make substantial progress on their research projects; for example, if they wrote part of a manuscript or if an experiment worked. Students also explained that accomplishing smaller or mundane research tasks was helpful for their depression, both because they felt as though they were checking off a box and also because it allowed them to focus on something other than the negative thoughts often associated with depression.

Students also highlighted that the unstructured nature of graduate research worsened their depression. Specifically, students described that, in graduate research, there are often no clear directions, sets of guidelines, or deadlines to help structure their day-to-day activities. Without this structure, students need to rely on their own motivation to outline goals, accomplish tasks, or seek help, which participants described can be difficult when one is experiencing a depressive episode. However, students also felt as though the unstructured nature of research benefited their depression, because it allowed for flexibility. Those who did not have frequent deadlines or strict schedules were able to not conduct research on days when they needed to recover from a depressive episode or schedule research around therapy or other activities that had a positive impact on their depression. Finally, students highlighted that their passion for their research was protective against depression. Their love for the subject of their research or thinking about how their work may have a positive impact on others could positively affect their motivation or mood.

Students described that their relationships with others in the lab also affected their depression. Specifically, if their mentors or others in their lab had unreasonable or overwhelming expectations of them, it could make them feel as though they would never be able to meet such expectations. Research also provides an environment for students to constantly compare themselves with others, both those in supervisory roles as well as peers. Notably, when students mentioned comparing themselves with others, this comparison never made them feel good about themselves, but was exclusively detrimental to their depression; they felt as though they would never be able to accomplish what others had already accomplished. Students’ relationships with their mentors also seemed to have a notable impact on their depression. Having a positive relationship with their mentors or a mentor who provided psychosocial support positively affected their depression, whereas perceiving a negative relationship with their mentors, particularly a mentor who provided consistently harsh or negative feedback, was detrimental. Students who had absent mentors or mentors who provided infrequent technical support and guidance also felt as though this situation worsened their depression, because it prevented or prolonged their success in research. Finally, students highlighted that conducting graduate research can be isolating, because you are often working on something different from those in the lab or because those outside graduate school cannot relate to the stress and struggles associated with research. However, in instances in which students were able to collaborate with others, this could be protective against depression, because it gave students a sense of comradery or validated their feelings about specific aspects of research. The most common research-related factors that students reported negatively and positively affected their depression and example student quotes of each factor are reported in Tables 2 and ​ and3, 3 , respectively.

Research-related factors that PhD students reported negatively affected their depression

Research-related factors that PhD students reported positively affected their depression

The Effect of Teaching on Graduate Student Depression

We asked all graduate students who had teaching experience ( n = 43) how teaching affected their depression. Graduate students more commonly identified ways that teaching positively affected their depression than ways teaching negatively affected their depression. On average, considering all factors that graduate students listed and not just those that were most common, participants listed two ways in which teaching positively affected their depression and one way in which teaching negatively affected their depression.

Graduate students most commonly highlighted that teaching provided positive reinforcement from undergraduates, which helped them manage their depression. This positive reinforcement came in multiple forms ranging from formal teaching evaluations to positive verbal comments from undergraduates about how good a graduate student was at teaching to watching undergraduates accomplish academic goals or grasp complex concepts. A subset of graduate students highlighted that teaching was good for their depression, because it was something they were passionate about or that they genuinely enjoyed. As such, it was a source of happiness, as was being able to collaborate and form friendships with other TAs or instructors. Some graduate students also acknowledged that they felt confident teaching, often because they had mastered content that undergraduates had not. However, this was not always the case; some graduate students highlighted that a lack of teaching training and preparation negatively affected their self-efficacy as instructors, which in turn exacerbated their depression. This was further exacerbated by the pressure that graduate students put on themselves to perform well as instructors. The potential to have a negative impact on undergraduates and their learning experiences could worsen students’ depression by increasing the stress surrounding their performance as a teacher. Additionally, some graduate students received negative reinforcement from undergraduates, in the form of negative comments on formal teaching evaluations or disrespectful behavior from undergraduates such as groans or eye rolls, which graduate students explained negatively affected their self-efficacy, further worsening their depression.

Students also highlighted that teaching could negatively affect their depression because it interfered with the time they felt they needed to be spending on research or added to the large number of responsibilities they had as graduate students. However, some students welcomed time away from research; teaching sometimes served as a distraction from research-related stressors. Students also highlighted that teaching is structured, which positively affected their depression. That is, there are concrete tasks, such as grading, that need to be accomplished or places that the graduate student needs to be during a specific time. This structure helped motivate them to accomplish teaching goals, even if they were feeling a lack of motivation because of their depression. The most common teaching-related factors that graduate students reported negatively and positively affected their depression and example student quotes for each factor are reported in Tables 4 and ​ and5, 5 , respectively.

Teaching-related factors that PhD students reported negatively affected their depression

a Forty-three out of the 50 students who participated in the study had experience teaching undergraduates either as a TA or as an instructor of record. We only considered the responses from the TAs with teaching experiences when calculating the percent of students who reported each factor.

Teaching-related factors that PhD students reported positively affected their depression

The Effect of Depression on Graduate Research

In the interviews, we asked graduate students how their depression affected their graduate research, if at all. They identified three primary ways in which depression could affect research, all of which were negative. The most common way depression affected research was interfering with students’ motivation, which in turn affected their productivity. Students described that their productivity was affected immediately, for example, struggling to execute daily tasks like collecting or analyzing data. However, graduate students described that their lack of motivation ultimately resulted in larger consequences, such as delays in getting papers submitted and published. In fact, some graduate students explicitly stated that they felt as though they would have been able to graduate earlier if they had not had depression. The second way in which depression affected graduate students’ research is that it interfered with their ability to focus or concentrate. Students primarily explained that the lack of focus did not delay their research but caused their research to be less enjoyable or made them frustrated because they had to expend additional mental energy to execute tasks. Depression also caused students to be less confident or overly critical of themselves. Specifically, if an experiment did not go right or they experienced rejection of a manuscript, they tended to internalize it and blame themselves. This lack of confidence often inhibited students’ abilities to make decisions about research or take risks in research. They described frequently second-guessing themselves, which made decisions and taking risks in research more difficult. The most common ways students reported that their depression affected their research and example student quotes are reported in Table 6 .

Self-reported ways that depression affected PhD students’ research or the student as a researcher

The Effect of Depression on Teaching

Graduate students described one positive way and two negative ways that depression affected their teaching. Students explained that, because they had experienced depression, they were more compassionate and empathetic toward the undergraduates in their courses. Specifically, they felt they could better understand some of the struggles that undergraduates experience and were sometimes more likely to be flexible or lenient about course requirements and deadlines if an undergraduate was struggling. However, graduate students reported that depression also negatively affected their teaching. Specifically, depression could cause graduate students to feel disconnected or disengaged from undergraduates. It could also cause graduate students to feel as though they had a lack of energy or felt down when teaching. The common self-reported ways that depression affected PhD students’ teaching and example quotes are reported in Table 7 .

Self-reported ways that depression affected PhD students’ teaching or the graduate student as an instructor

a Forty-three out of the 50 students who participated in the study had experience teaching undergraduates either as a TA or as an instructor of record. We only considered the responses from the TAs with teaching experiences when calculating the percent of students who reported each theme.

Despite the increasing concern about graduate student mental health among those in the scientific community ( Pain, 2018 ; “The Mental Health of PhD Researchers,” 2019; Puri, 2019 ), there is a lack of information about how specific aspects of science PhD programs affect students with depression. This is the first study to explicitly investigate which particular aspects of research and teaching affect depression among life sciences PhD students and how depression, in turn, affects graduate students’ experiences in research and teaching. Overall, graduate students highlighted factors related to teaching and research that both alleviated and exacerbated their symptoms of depression. Graduate students more commonly brought up ways that research negatively affected their depression, than ways that it positively affected their depression. Conversely, graduate students more commonly mentioned ways that teaching had a positive effect on their depression compared with a negative effect. The requirement and opportunity to teach differs among life sciences graduate programs ( Schussler et al. , 2015 ; Shortlidge and Eddy, 2018 ). As such, future research should investigate whether the amount of teaching one engages in during graduate school is related to levels of graduate student depression. Despite differences in how teaching and research affect student depression, this study unveiled factors that protect against or worsen depressive symptoms. Specifically, four overarching factors affecting graduate student depression emerged from the interviews: 1) Structure; 2) Positive and Negative Reinforcement; 3) Failure and Success; 4) Social Support and Isolation. We discuss here how each of these factors may positively and negatively affect graduate student depression.

One stark contrast between research and teaching is the amount of structure in each activity. That is, students expressed that research goals are often amorphous, that there are not concrete instructions for what needs to be accomplished, and that there is often no set schedule for when particular tasks need to be accomplished. Conversely, with teaching, graduate students often knew what the goals were (e.g., to help students learn), exactly what they needed to accomplish each week (e.g., what to grade, what to teach), and when and where they needed to show up to teach (e.g., a class meets at a particular time). Graduate students highlighted that a lack of structure, particularly in research, was detrimental for their depression. Their depression often made it difficult for them to feel motivated when there was not a concrete task to accomplish. Major depression can interfere with executive function and cognition, making goal setting and goal achievement particularly difficult ( Elliott, 1998 ; Watkins and Brown, 2002 ). In fact, research has documented that individuals with depression generate less specific goals and less specific explanations for approaching a goal than individuals who do not have depression ( Dickson and Moberly, 2013 ). As such, it may be particularly helpful for students with depression when an activity is structured, relieving the student from the need to articulate specific goals and steps to achieve goals. Students noted that the lack of structure or the flexibility in research was helpful for their depression in one way: It allowed them to better treat their depression. Specifically, students highlighted that they were able to take time to go to therapy or to not go into the lab or to avoid stressful tasks, which may be important for successful recovery from a depressive episode ( Judd et al. , 2000 ).

Compared with conducting research, many participants reported that the concrete tasks associated with teaching undergraduates were helpful for their depression. This is supported by literature that illustrates that concrete thinking, as opposed to abstract thinking, can reduce difficulty making decisions in individuals with depression ( Dey et al. , 2018 ), presuming that teaching often requires more concrete thinking compared with research, which can be more abstract. Additionally, cognitive-behavioral treatments for depression have demonstrated that developing concrete goals for completing tasks is helpful for individuals with depression ( Detweiler-Bedell and Whisman, 2005 ), which aligns with graduate students’ perceptions that having concrete goals for completing teaching tasks was particularly helpful for their depression.

Positive and Negative Reinforcement

Graduate students reported that the negative reinforcement experienced in research and teaching had a significant negative effect on their depression, while the positive reinforcement students experienced only in teaching had a positive effect. Notably, students did not mention how positive reinforcement affected their depression in the context of research. Based on student interviews, we predict that this is not because they were unaffected by positive reinforcement in research, but because they experienced it so infrequently. Drawing from behavioral theories of depression, the concept of response-contingent positive reinforcement (RCPR; Lewinsohn, 1974 ; Kanter et al. , 2004 ) helps explain this finding. As summarized by Kanter and colleagues (2004) , RCPR describes someone seeking a response and being positively reinforced; for example, graduate students seeking feedback on their research are told that what they have accomplished is impressive. Infrequent RCPR may lead to cognitive symptoms of depression, such as low self-esteem or guilt, resulting in somatic symptoms of depression, such as fatigue and dysphoria ( Lewinsohn, 1974 ; Martell et al. , 2001 ; Manos et al. , 2010 ). RCPR is determined by three factors. 1) How many potential events may be positively reinforcing to an individual. For example, some people may find an undergraduate scoring highly on an exam in a class they are teaching to be reinforcing and others may find that they only feel reinforced when an undergraduate explicitly compliments their teaching. 2) The availability of reinforcing events in the environment. If graduate students’ mentors have the ability to provide them with RCPR but are never able to meet with them, these reinforcing events are unavailable to them. 3) The instrumental behavior of an individual. Does the individual exhibit the behavior required to obtain RCPR? If graduate students do not accomplish their research-related tasks on time, they may not receive RCPR from their mentor. If individuals are not positively reinforced for a particular behavior, they may stop exhibiting it, further exacerbating the depressive cycle ( Manos et al. , 2010 ). Therefore, the lack of positive reinforcement in research may be particularly damaging to graduate students, because it may discourage them from completing tasks, leading to additional depressive symptoms. Conversely, teaching presents many opportunities for positive reinforcement. Every time graduate students teach, they have the opportunity to receive positive reinforcement from their students or to witness a student’s academic accomplishment, such as an undergraduate expressing excitement when they understand a concept. As such, it is not surprising that positive reinforcement was the primary teaching-related factor that graduate students reported helped with their depression. Despite the positive reinforcement of teaching for graduate students with depression, we are not suggesting that graduate students should take on additional teaching loads or that teaching should be viewed as the sole respite for graduate students with depression. Overwhelming students with increased responsibilities may counteract any positive impact that teaching could have on students’ depression.

Failure and Success

Failure and success affected student depression, but only in the context of research; contrary to research, students rarely mentioned concrete metrics for success and failure in teaching. While graduate students highlighted receiving positive or negative reinforcement from undergraduates, they did not relate this to being a “successful” instructor. It is unsurprising that graduate students did not mention failing or succeeding at teaching, given that experts in teaching agree that it is difficult to objectively evaluate quality teaching ( d’Apollonia and Abrami, 1997 ; Kember et al. , 2002 ; Gormally et al. , 2014 ). In fact, the lack of teacher training and knowledge about how to teach effectively negatively affected student depression, because it could cause students to feel unprepared as an instructor. Integrating teacher training into graduate programs has been championed for decades ( Torvi, 1994 ; Tanner and Allen, 2006 ; Schussler et al. , 2015 ); however, the potential for such training to bolster graduate student mental health is new and should be considered in future research. With regard to graduate students’ research, the concept of success and failure was far more concrete; students mentioned failing in terms of failed experiments, research projects, and rejected manuscripts and grant proposals. Successes included accepted manuscripts, funded grant proposals, and concrete progress on significant tasks, such as writing or conducting an experiment that yielded usable data. Failure has been shown to negatively affect depression among undergraduate researchers ( Cooper et al. , 2020a ), who are hypothesized to be inadequately prepared to experience failure in science ( Henry et al. , 2019 ). However, it is less clear how well prepared graduate students are to experience failure ( Simpson and Maltese, 2017 ). Drawing from cognitive theories of depression, depression is associated with dysfunctional cognitive schemas or dysfunctional thinking that can lead individuals with depression to have negative thoughts about the world, themselves, and the future and to interpret information more negatively than is actually the case (called negative information-processing biases; Beck, 1967 ; Beck et al. , 1979 ; Gotlib and Krasnoperova, 1998 ; Maj et al. , 2020 ). Related to failure, individuals with dysfunctional cognitive schemas may harbor beliefs such as if something fails at work (or in graduate research), they are a failure as a person or that a small failure can be as detrimental as a larger failure ( Weissman, 1979 ; Miranda and Persons, 1988 ). As such, setbacks in research may be particularly difficult for PhD students with depression. Graduate students in our study also mentioned how failing in research was often out of their control, particularly failure related to experiments and research projects. The extent to which one feels they can control their environment is important for mental health, and lower estimates of control have been hypothesized to be an important factor for depression ( Grahek et al. , 2019 ). Therefore, this feeling of being unable to control success in research may further exacerbate student depression, but this would need to be tested. Importantly, these findings do not imply that individuals with depression are unable to cope with failure; they only suggest that individuals perceive that failure in science can exacerbate their depression.

Social Support and Isolation

Graduate students reported that feelings of isolation in research could worsen their depression. Specifically, they highlighted that it can be difficult for their mental health when their friends outside graduate school cannot relate to their struggles in research and when others in their research group are not working on similar projects. One study of more than 1400 graduate students at a single university found that feeling isolated from fellow graduate students and faculty positively predicted imposter phenomenon ( Cohen and McConnell, 2019 ), defined as the worry that they were fooling others about their abilities and that their fraudulence would be exposed ( Clance and Imes, 1978 ), which is positively correlated with depression among college students ( McGregor et al. , 2008 ). Developing a positive lab environment, where undergraduates, graduate students, and postgraduates develop positive relationships, has been shown to positively affect undergraduates ( Cooper et al. , 2019 ) and may also positively affect graduate students who experience such feelings of isolation. Graduate students in this study described that both teaching and research had the potential to be a source for relationship development and social support. Students who described positive collaborative relationships in research and teaching felt this had a positive impact on their depression, which aligns with a review of studies in psychiatry concluding that being connected to a large number of people and having individuals who are able to provide emotional support by listening or giving advice is protective against depression ( Santini et al. , 2015 ), as well as a study that found that social support is protective against depression, specifically among the graduate population ( Charles et al. , 2021 ).

These four factors provide clear targets for graduate programs looking to improve the experiences of students with depression. For example, increasing structure in research could be particularly helpful for graduate students with depression. Ensuring that students have concrete plans to accomplish each week may not only positively impact depression by increasing structure, but ultimately by increasing a student’s success in research. Research mentors can also emphasize the role of failure in science, helping students realize that failure is more common than they may perceive. Increasing opportunities for positive reinforcement in teaching and research may be another avenue to improving student mental health. Providing students with appropriate teacher training is a first step to enhancing their teaching skills and potential for positive reinforcement from undergraduate students ( Schussler et al. , 2015 ). Additionally, teaching evaluations, a common form of both positive and negative reinforcement, are known to be biased and disadvantage women, People of Color, and those with non–English speaking backgrounds ( Fan et al. , 2019 ; Chávez and Mitchell, 2020 ) and arguably should not be used to assess teaching. In research, mentors can make an effort to provide positive feedback or praise in meetings in addition to critiques. Finally, to provide social support to graduate students with depression, graduate programs could consider creating specific initiatives that are related to supporting the mental health of graduate students in their departments, such as a support group for students to meet and discuss their experiences in graduate school and how those experience pertain to their mental health.

Limitations and Directions for Future Research

In this study, we chose to only interview students with the identity of interest (depression), as is common with exploratory studies of individuals with underserved, underrepresented, or marginalized identities (e.g. Carlone and Johnson, 2007 ; Cooper and Brownell, 2016 ; Barnes et al. , 2017 , 2021 ; Downing et al. , 2020 ; Gin et al. , 2021 ; Pfeifer et al. , 2021 ). However, in future studies, it would be beneficial to also examine the experiences of individuals who do not have depression. This would provide information about the extent to which specific aspects of graduate research and teaching are disproportionately beneficial or challenging for students with depression. In this study, we did not explicitly examine whether there was a relationship between students’ identities and depression because of the small number of students in particular demographic groups. However, a theme that occurred rather infrequently (but is included in the Supplemental Material) is that discrimination or prejudice in the lab or academia could affect depression, which was reported exclusively by women and People of Color. As such, disaggregating whether gender and race/ethnicity predicts unique factors that exacerbate student depression is an important next step in understanding how to create more equitable and inclusive research and teaching environments for graduate students. Moreover, our sample included a significant number of students from ecology and evolutionary biology PhD programs, which may limit the generalizability of some findings. It is important to acknowledge potential subdisciplinary differences when considering how research may affect depression. Additionally, some of the factors that affect student depression, such as lack of teaching training and confidence in teaching, may be correlated with time spent in a graduate program. Future quantitative studies would benefit from examining whether the factors that affect student depression depend on the student’s subdiscipline and time spent in the graduate program. The primary focus of this study was the relationship between depression and graduate teaching/research. Many of the factors that emerged from the interviews are also associated with burnout ( Bianchi et al. , 2014 ; Maslach et al. , 2001 ). Burnout and depression are known to be highly related and often difficult to disaggregate ( Bianchi et al. , 2014 ). It was beyond the scope and design of this study to disaggregate which factors relate exclusively to the condition of burnout. Additionally, the interviews in this study were collected at a single time point. Thus, we are unable to differentiate between students who had depression before starting graduate school and students who experienced depression after starting graduate school. Future longitudinal studies could explore the effects of students’ experiences in research and teaching on their depression over time as well as on long-term outcomes such as persistence in graduate programs, length of time for degree completion, and career trajectory. This study identified a number of factors that graduate programs can address to benefit graduate student mental health, and we hope that future studies design and test interventions designed to improve the experiences of graduate students in teaching and research.

In this interview study of 50 life sciences PhD students with depression, we examined how graduate research and teaching affect students’ depressive symptoms. We also explored how depression affected graduate students’ teaching and research. We found that graduate students more commonly highlighted ways that research negatively affected their depression and ways that teaching positively affected their depression. Four overarching factors, three of which were related to both teaching and research, were commonly associated with student depression, including the amount of structure provided in research and teaching, failure and success, positive and negative reinforcement, and social connections and isolation. Additionally, graduate students identified depression as having an exclusively negative effect on their research, often hindering motivation, concentration, and self-esteem. However, they did note that depression made them more compassionate teachers, but also could cause them to have low energy or feel disconnected when teaching. This study provides concrete factors that graduate programs can target in hopes of improving the experiences of life sciences PhD students with depression.

Important Note

There are resources available if you or someone you know is experiencing depression and want help. Colleges and universities often have crisis hotlines and counseling services designed to provide students, staff, and faculty with treatment for depression. These can often be found by searching the university website. Additionally, there are free 24/7 services such as Crisis Text Line, which allows you to text a trained live crisis counselor (text “CONNECT” to 741741; Text Depression Hotline, 2019 ), and phone hotlines such as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). If you would like to learn more about depression or depression help and resources near you, visit the Anxiety and Depression Association of American website: https://adaa.org ( Anxiety and Depression Association of America, 2019 ) and the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance: http://dbsalliance.org ( Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, 2019 ).

Acknowledgments

We are incredibly grateful to the 50 graduate students who were willing to share their personal experiences with us. We thank Sara Brownell, Tasneem Mohammed, Carly Busch, Maddie Ostwald, Lauren Neel, and Rachel Scott for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this work. L.E.G. was supported by an NSF Graduate Fellowship (DGE-1311230). Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.

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Harvard University Theses, Dissertations, and Prize Papers

The Harvard University Archives ’ collection of theses, dissertations, and prize papers document the wide range of academic research undertaken by Harvard students over the course of the University’s history.

Beyond their value as pieces of original research, these collections document the history of American higher education, chronicling both the growth of Harvard as a major research institution as well as the development of numerous academic fields. They are also an important source of biographical information, offering insight into the academic careers of the authors.

Spanning from the ‘theses and quaestiones’ of the 17th and 18th centuries to the current yearly output of student research, they include both the first Harvard Ph.D. dissertation (by William Byerly, Ph.D . 1873) and the dissertation of the first woman to earn a doctorate from Harvard ( Lorna Myrtle Hodgkinson , Ed.D. 1922).

Other highlights include:

• The collection of Mathematical theses, 1782-1839
• The 1895 Ph.D. dissertation of W.E.B. Du Bois, The suppression of the African slave trade in the United States, 1638-1871
• Ph.D. dissertations of astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (Ph.D. 1925) and physicist John Hasbrouck Van Vleck (Ph.D. 1922)
• Undergraduate honors theses of novelist John Updike (A.B. 1954), filmmaker Terrence Malick (A.B. 1966),  and U.S. poet laureate Tracy Smith (A.B. 1994)
• Undergraduate prize papers and dissertations of philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson (A.B. 1821), George Santayana (Ph.D. 1889), and W.V. Quine (Ph.D. 1932)
• Undergraduate honors theses of U.S. President John F. Kennedy (A.B. 1940) and Chief Justice John Roberts (A.B. 1976)

What does a prize-winning thesis look like?

If you're a Harvard undergraduate writing your own thesis, it can be helpful to review recent prize-winning theses. The Harvard University Archives has made available for digital lending all of the Thomas Hoopes Prize winners from the 2019-2021 academic years.

Accessing These Materials

How to access materials at the Harvard University Archives

How to find and request dissertations, in person or virtually

How to find and request undergraduate honors theses

How to find and request Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize papers

How to find and request Bowdoin Prize papers

• email: Email
• Phone number 617-495-2461

Related Collections

Harvard faculty personal and professional archives, harvard student life collections: arts, sports, politics and social life, access materials at the harvard university archives.

Three Minute Thesis Competition

The Three Minute Thesis Competition (3MT) is an exciting, fast-paced event showcasing the research of graduate students across campus. Each scholar is given three minutes to present their research displayed to the audience and judging panel in a single presentation slide. The competition boasts cash prizes for winners in each category.

You'll be amazed at what these scholars can fit into a three-minute presentation. You don't want to miss this competition!

Our graduate students have had an impressive showing at the regional 3MT competition at the Western Association of Graduate Schools annual conference. In 2023, Jennifer Heppner won third place and in 2024, Kendra Isable won second place. 

The 2024 competition will be hosted in the Spring semester with two preliminary rounds in early March and the finals in April.

Learn more about our competition

Join our competition, preliminary round.

The top four contestants from groups A1, B1, A2 and B2 will be awarded $300 and will compete in the final round. Submit your presentation using the appropriate Group description link below.

Liberal Arts/Social Sciences/Education/Business

Wednesday, March 6, 2024, at 6 p.m. in the Wells Fargo Auditorium (MIKC 124)

• Group A1: Doctoral Dissertation Students
• Group B1: Master's Thesis Students

Sciences/Engineering/Mathematics/Health Sciences

Thursday, March 7, 2024, at 6 p.m. in the Wells Fargo Auditorium (MIKC 124)

• Group A2: Doctoral Dissertation Students
• Group B2: Master's Thesis Students

Final round

Thursday, April 11, 2024, at 7 p.m. in the Wells Fargo Auditorium (MIKC 124)

In the final round you'll compete against the eight finalists at your degree level:

• Group A — Doctoral Students (Four students from A1 and four students from A2)
• Group B — Master's Students (Four students from B1 and four students from B2)

Award amounts

Winners from each group of the final round will be awarded as follows:

• First Place: $1,000
• Second Place: $600
• Third Place: $400
• Peoples' Choice: $500

Deadline and application form

Applications are due February 29 by 11:59 p.m.

Preliminary submission form

Competition rules and terms

Presentation:.

• A single, static PowerPoint slide in 16x9 format is required (pdfs not allowed).
• Include your presentation title, full name, and graduate program on the slide.
• First-place winners from the last year's 3MT competition are ineligible to compete, however, last year's second- and third-place winners are eligible to compete.
• No slide transitions, animations or on-screen movement of any description are allowed.
• The slide is to be presented from the beginning of the oration.
• No additional electronic media (e.g. sound and video files) are permitted.
• No additional props (e.g. costumes, musical instruments, laboratory equipment) are permitted.
• Presentations are limited to three minutes maximum; competitors exceeding three minutes are disqualified.
• Presentations are to be spoken word (e.g. no poems, raps or songs).
• Presentations are to commence from the stage.
• Presentations are considered to have commenced when a presenter starts their presentation through either movement or speech.
• The decision of the adjudicating panel is final.
• All monetary awards for both preliminary and final rounds are pre-tax amounts.
• Abstracts are limited to 250 words.
• Students must be graduate students to enter the competition.
• While advancement to candidacy is not required, students must have made significant progress towards completion of their dissertation, thesis, or professional project in order to enter the competition.
• Winners will be announced approximately one week after the competition.
• You will be asked to sign a photo-video release at the event to allow the University of Nevada, Reno to use your likeness in photos/videos of the competition.

Judging criteria

Comprehension & content.

• Did the presentation provide an understanding of the background to the research question being addressed and its significance?
• Did the presentation clearly describe the key results of the research including conclusions and outcomes?
• Did the presentation follow a clear and logical sequence?
• Was the thesis topic, key results and research significance and outcomes communicated in language appropriate to a non-specialist audience?
• Did the speaker avoid scientific jargon, explain terminology and provide adequate background information to illustrate points?
• Did the presenter spend adequate time on each element of their presentation - or did they elaborate for too long on one aspect or was the presentation rushed?

Engagement & Communication

• Did the oration make the audience want to know more?
• Was the presenter careful not to trivialize or generalize their research?
• Did the presenter convey enthusiasm for their research?
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View past Three Minute Thesis winners

View the winners of each year since 2014!

View past winners

2022-2023 Finalists and winners

Doctoral category

First place: cody cris.

• Graduate program:  Cell and Molecular Biology
• Title:  Lighting the way: Tools to prepare for future pandemics
• Faculty advisor:  Subhash Verma

SECOND PLACE: Anithakrithi Balaji

• Graduate program: Biomedical Engineering
• Title: Electrifying the fight-or-flight response: Nanosecond electric pulses for neuromodulation
• Faculty advisor: Jihwan Yoon

THIRD PLACE: Noah Nieman

• Graduate program:  Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Title:  Accelerating bridge construction connections behavior during near fault motions
• Faculty advisor: Floriana Petrone

2024 Finalists:

Francisco calderon abullarade.

• Graduate program: Ph.D. History
• Title: Creating the Enemy: The origins of the inter-american cold war in the 1940s
• Faculty advisor: Renata Keller

Anithakrithi Balaji

• Graduate program: Ph.D. Biomedical Engineering
• Title: Electrifying the fight-or-flight response: Nanosecond electric pulses for neuromodulation 

Monika Bharti

• Graduate program: Ph.D. Education - Literacy Studies
• Title: P re-service teachers experiences teaching K-8 Multilingual Students' (MLS) writing
• Faculty advisor: Rachel Salas and Fares Karam

Cossette Canovas

• Graduate program: Ph.D. Clinical Psychology
• Title: Identifying predictors of racial trauma to inform treatment development 
• Faculty advisor: Lorraine Benuto
• Graduate program: Ph.D. Cell and Molecular Biology
• Title:   Lighting the way: Tools to prepare for future pandemics 
• Faculty advisor: Subhash Verma

Kaashifah 

• Graduate program: Ph.D. Education - Equity, Diversity and Language
• Title: Bridging  the gaps: Evaluating the intervention programs to overcome academic disparities 
• Faculty advisor: Donald Easton-Brooks

Noah Nieman

• Graduate program: Ph.D. Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Title: Accelerating bridge construction connections behavior during near fault motions 

Sanjeevan Pradhan

• Graduate program: Ph.D. Political Science
• Title: Tough sell: Rising powers, domestic legitimation and costly international initiatives 
• Faculty advisor: Xiaoyu Pu

Patricia Berninsone People's Choice Award

Abdulwarith kassim.

• Graduate program: Chemistry
• Title: Chemically recyclable dithioacetal polymers
• Faculty advisor:  Ying Yang

Master's category

First place: abdulwarith kassim.

• Faculty advisor: Ying Yang

SECOND PLACE (TIE): 

• Name:  Elizabeth Everest
• Graduate program: Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology
• Title: Sustaining the beating heart of Cambodia: Fisheries management in southeast Asia's largest lake
• Faculty advisors: Zeb Hogan, Sudeep Chandra, Ken Nussear
• Name:  Cathy Silliman
• Title: Winterfat restoration in a changing climate
• Faculty advisor: Elizabeth Leger 

Samantha DeTiberiis

• Graduate program: M.A. Criminal Justice 
• Title: What do our phones teach us about incarceration? A social media content analysis 
• Faculty advisor: Jennifer Lanterman

Elizabeth Everest 

• Graduate program: M.S. Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology 
• Title:   Sustaining the beating heart of Cambodia: Fisheries management in southeast Asia's largest lake 
• Faculty advisor: Zeb Hogan, Sudeep Chandra, Ken Nussear

Carolynn Fedarko 

• Title: Zeroing in on gun violence
• Faculty advisor: Weston Morrow

Shipra Goswami

• Graduate program: M.S. Biochemistry
• Title: May the pericytes be with you: Transport engineers you never knew existed!
• Faculty advisor: Albert Gonzales
• Graduate program: M.S. Chemistry 

Anthony Michell

• Graduate program: M.A. History
• Title: Pushed to the limit: How the 1998 China floods revolutionized the relationship between China and the natural world
• Faculty advisor: Hugh Shapiro

Elizabeth Morgan

• Graduate program: M.S. Teaching History (M.A.T.H.)
• Title: Dust in the wind dude: The Owens Valley everywhere except, in the Owens Valley
• Faculty advisor: Edward Schoolman

Cathy Silliman

• Graduate program: M.S. Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology
• Faculty advisor: Elizabeth Leger

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Understanding the importance of symptom recognition in self-management of heart failure

Seckin, Muzeyyen (2024) Understanding the importance of symptom recognition in self-management of heart failure. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Background: Heart failure is a clinical syndrome characterised by key symptoms that can be distressing to the affected individual and those caring them. These symptoms are associated with poor quality of life and a high rate of repeated hospital admission in people with heart failure. Thus, the rapid detection and management of symptoms linked to heart failure is important for people and their families. Current evidence related to heart failure is dominated by those of young age, a reduced ejection fraction, and male sex. To support more inclusive and equal symptom assessment and management in heart failure for the entire population, studies that include individuals with all forms of heart failure are essential.

Aim: This thesis investigated the full spectrum of symptoms and associated factors in people living with and dying from all forms of heart failure. Methods: A sequential, multiple studies design including three studies was adopted, underpinned by critical realism and the Situation-Specific Theory of Heart Failure Self-care. Study 1 was a mixed-methods systematic review and narrative synthesis of existing literature to explore the full spectrum of symptoms experienced by people living with heart failure, and to compare these to those outlined within the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Guidelines for the management of the syndrome. Study 2 was a secondary analysis of data derived from a randomised control trial of disease management conducted in Australia that included people of varying ages. The analysis investigated sex-stratified differences in symptoms and symptoms change over one year across the full range of heart failure subtypes. Study 3 was a descriptive qualitative study exploring the full spectrum of symptoms, and heart failure-associated breathlessness in the Turkish socio-cultural-behavioural context.

Results: Study 1 indicated that people with heart failure experienced many symptoms, and these symptoms can be very diverse and affected by multiple factors. As well as typical and less typical symptoms identified from the current European Society of Cardiology Guidelines, 37 other symptoms were identified. This includes a dry mouth, numbness in hands/feed, feeling drowsy, difficulty sleeping, and feeling anxious/nervous. Age (younger versus older) and setting (hospital versus community) were associated with various European Society of Cardiology Guidelines’ symptoms. There was a paucity of data on women’s symptoms in the current literature. Study 2: Sex-stratified differences were detected in the secondary analysis of the symptomatic status of the trial cohort at baseline and at one-year follow-up. Different factors were associated with worsening symptom trajectory on a sex-specific basis; for men, this included a history of hypertension and non-English-speaking background; and for women, a history of coronary artery disease and presenting with acute pulmonary oedema. Women with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction had worse symptomatic profiles over one year than women with reduced or mildly reduced ejection fraction. Study 3: Among 20 Turkish individuals with self-reported heart failure, 31 physical and 7 psycho-socio-behavioural symptoms were reported. Based on a reflexive thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews, knowledge and awareness of heart failure and breathlessness were poor among Turkish individuals. The socio-cultural-behavioural context affected their breathlessness and self-management strategies. They expressed a need for adequate education, psychological support, and long-term management strategies.

Conclusion and Implications: This PhD found a more diverse range of symptoms among the heart failure population than have previously been described. Symptoms such as difficulty sleeping, drowsiness, dry mouth, and feelings of anxiety and nervousness—though less typical—require attention to improve their management in heart failure. Additionally, socio-demographic and clinical profiles affect individual experiences of different symptoms. In routine clinical practice, identification of this more diverse range of symptoms can be achieved by applying a more individualised person-centred symptom assessment protocol. Consequently, health care providers can then support self-management strategies to enable appropriate person-centred symptom assessment.

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Doctoral Thesis Completion Award Application

Doctoral Thesis Completion Award Application (PDF)

Use this form to:

• apply for a doctoral thesis completion award

A limited number of awards are available each academic term to support doctoral students who are within the last two terms of program completion (term of award plus one additional term). The intention is to assist highly qualified, full-time doctoral students to complete their thesis writing and defence. 

Priority will be given to applicants who identify as Indigenous*

*For the purpose of this award, an Indigenous person is one who is a citizen or member of a First Nations community (Status/Non-Status), Métis, or Inuit as defined in the Canadian Constitution Act 1982. To protect the integrity of Indigenous graduate students eligible for specific funding, those identifying as Indigenous must be verified by the Office of Indigenous Relations at the University of Waterloo through the  Indigenous verification process .  

Value: Varies

Eligibility and Requirements:

Applicants must:

• be registered full time in a PhD program
• be in good academic standing with a realistic plan of completing their degree within 1-2 terms of receiving the award (term of award plus one additional term)
• not have previously received this award

Preference will be given to doctoral students who are no longer receiving minimum funding and/or have experienced research interruptions that were beyond their control.

A change of enrolment status to part-time, inactive, withdrawal or degree completion during the term in which the award is paid will require repayment of all or part of the award. Repayment amounts are recalculated based on the University of Waterloo tuition refund policy . Any inquiries regarding OSAP/provincial student loans should be directed to the Student Awards and Financial Aid Office . 

Departmental deadlines:

Fall term – july 15     , winter term – november 15  , spring term – march 15    .

Where the advertised deadline falls on a Saturday or Sunday, the deadline date will be the following Monday.

Application process, notification, and payments:

• Applicants will submit their complete application to their department co-ordinator.
• Departments review and submit the applications to their Faculty.
• The Faculty sends forward their top four applications to Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs (GSPA) and notifies those that were not selected for Faculty endorsement.
• GSPA ranks, makes final selections, and notifies applicants of the results.
• Awards will be applied to the student's Quest account at the beginning of each term.

APOL 988 Dissertation Writing in Applied Apologetics II

• Course Description

In this course, the doctoral candidate will compose the middle chapters of a dissertation based on the candidate’s research and organization of content.

For information regarding prerequisites for this course, please refer to the  Academic Course Catalog .

Course Guide

View this course’s outcomes, policies, schedule, and more.*

*The information contained in our Course Guides is provided as a sample. Specific course curriculum and requirements for each course are provided by individual instructors each semester. Students should not use Course Guides to find and complete assignments, class prerequisites, or order books.

This course is the first course dedicated primarily to the writing of the dissertation for the PhD in Applied Apologetics. All assignments in this course are devoted to completing compelling drafts of both the introductory sections (introduction/statement of thesis/literature review) and first major portions of the body of the argument of the dissertation. Completion of this course should allow students to complete a major percentage of their dissertation project and prepare them for matriculation into the next phase of their dissertation writing.

Course Assignment

No details available.

After reading the Syllabus and  Student Expectations , the student will complete the related checklist found in the Course Overview.

These assignments require the student to submit progressive portions of his/her dissertation for review and evaluation. 

These assignments ask the student to interface with mentor feedback and interpret any necessary improvements/changes that need to be applied to his/her dissertation. Each assignment will be 4-6 pages in length.

This quiz seeks to evaluate the student’s readiness as he/she embarks on the dissertation writing process. This quiz will be open-book/open-notes, contain 4 true/false, short-answer questions, and will have a 15-minute time limit.

These quizzes verify that the student is having regular meaningful discussions with his/her dissertation mentor. Each quiz will be open-book/open-notes, contain 4 true/false, short-answer questions, and will have a 15-minute time limit.

These quizzes will evaluate what elements of the dissertation are being submitted at different intervals of the dissertation-writing process. Each quiz will be open-book/open-notes, contain 2 essay questions, and will have a 30-minute time limit.

This quiz evaluates the student’s readiness for an additional reader to be assigned to the dissertation project. This quiz will be open-book/open-notes, contain 5 true/false questions, and will have a 15-minute time limit.

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