Our contribution is part of a forum on “Dead-Ends, Disasters, Delays? Reflecting on Research Failure in International Studies and Ways to Avoid It” in ‘International Studies Perspectives’ and you can find it here.

In the article, we reflect on our own academic journeys and the pivotal role that failure and derailment have played in getting us to where we are today. For Andrew, he at some point made the difficult decision to move countries, and leave the UK for France despite his permanent position there, and for me, well most of you know my story of how long-term illness forced me to pause my PhD for a very long time.

You can read our reflections in the journal, but I thought I’d summarise the article in a shorter advice format here. Here are 8 key lessons we learnt from navigating failure in academia:

1. Academia is not the meritocracy it claims to be. Don’t buy into the ‘myth of failure’ and internalise the belief that derailment or failure reflects on your capability or worth.
2. Research failure is normal and par for the course — don’t take it personally. (Easier said than done!!)
3. Academia tends not to be great at supporting its people. Incentive structures are often at odds with your wellbeing. Take care of yourself! It can be rough out there.
4. Understand the academic landscape. Questions to ask: what is valued, what isn’t, and how do I allocate my energy wisely? What do I need to say no to?
5. Academic networks are vital. Invest in building connections in your field.
6. Mentorship is crucial, especially early on. Sadly, mentorship is currently often not sufficiently supported and valued. Again, it’s not personal, but it has real consequences.
7. Failure and success are distributed unequally: intersectionality matters and survivorship bias is real.
8. And finally: you will need to draw on your creativity to navigate success and failure. (You can do this! I believe in you!)

To our credit we also managed to include a reference to the 1990s cult classic: Sliding Doors. We’re 90s kids what can I say?

If you’re struggling with any of the above know you’re not alone. If you need some support in all of this, I am available for 1:1 coaching and I would be delighted to work with you.

Pick the right supervisor.

It is THE power relationship that matters when you are writing a PhD, and its impact not only on your work and career, but also on your wellbeing should not be underestimated. If you are looking for a PhD position, don’t just start with the university, the reputation of the department or the field. People matter, and academia is built on personal networks. Being part of the right ecosystem so to speak, is everything.

I’ll tell you a story to illustrate.

I thought I had all this supervision business covered when I applied for my PhD position. I researched the person who would likely become (and in fact did become) my first supervisor ahead of time. He had worked very closely with a professor I knew well at my home university, a professor who had been a mentor figure for me and who I trusted. I had read the papers they had co-authored and they seemed interesting enough. My thought process was as follows: well, they seem to like each other, so he is probably a decent person, and they have written some interesting stuff together, so all will be good.

Not so.

Turns out he was a bully.

During our first ever group supervision meeting, he decided to put me down in front of my peers by saying: “I doubt you’re capable of producing one single coherent and rationally sound argument,” when I stumbled trying to answer one of his questions, after he had already made clear my PhD proposal did not fit into his idea of what political science was about.

Rather ironically, these group supervision meetings were an initiative to try to create a more supportive, collective supervision culture.

It worked in a way, I suppose: later that week at the bar (and after a couple of drinks) one of my colleagues remarked: “he is a pig to everyone, you know.”

I switched supervisors soon after and this man left no mark on my self-worth or the rest of my PhD trajectory. In a way him being so extreme made it easier to see the problem was entirely him. But I don’t even want to think about what it might have been like to have to complete a PhD under his ‘guidance’. As some of my colleagues would have to suffer through.

So, how to prevent supervision mishaps and disasters?

My advice would be to get in touch with a prospective supervisor’s current or past supervisees for a coffee and an informal chat and see what they have to say. Don’t be afraid to ask: this information is key! If you hear multiple negative stories, it’s an easy decision: don’t do it. Just don’t. There will be other, better opportunities for you, trust me here.

I may have a skewed perspective because I hear all the stories where things have not gone well, but my conclusion is that if you have ambitions in academia a supportive supervision relationship is one of the most important pieces to get right. (Support may mean different things to different people, but that’s a post all to its own.)

What are your thoughts on supervision? Any stories to share?

Academia is a challenging environment to perform and feel well in, most of the time. It can be a relief to realise that it is not some character flaw on your part that is causing you to feel like you may be stuck (or whatever other not so pleasant feelings you may be feeling): the odds are stacked against you in this environment. Once you realise how some of these mechanisms work it becomes easier to shrug your shoulders: it is not about you personally anymore. And at that point it also becomes easier to find ways of addressing your particular hurdle.

I received an email from a PhD who is taking my course, who mentioned it was so helpful to see it spelled out: to see exactly why academia may be making you feel stressed, overwhelmed and why you feel you might be underperforming: “My colleagues and I often tell ourselves it is not us and that it’s ’the system’, but it was really helpful to read in detail about why the academic set-up may be having such a negative effect on people.”

Oh academia, most confusing workplace of all, what do you do to us? Why and how do you make people feeling so stressed and miserable “doing what they love”?

In the course I tell a true story of how a number of promising economists selected by an elite US university — starting out bright-eyed, eager and ambitious, and ready to do “whatever it takes” — ended up underperforming to the point of it being a real challenge getting papers written at all, let alone published. The PhD finish line became increasingly out of reach. When I first heard the story it didn’t make sense…but it is a repeating theme I have seen (and experienced myself): very smart people starting to seriously struggle.

I won’t go into too much detail, as I want to keep things relatively short and snappy here, but I will say this: the current academic set-up is not designed to help you perform well (however you want to measure it…but that’s another story) or feel well. The human factor seems to be not factored in in the academic work process (rather a shame when you think of it!). Some of these features are intrinsic to writing a PhD/ doing academic work, but the stress factor has multiplied due to increased competition and wonky incentives in the system as a whole.

I started to understand this phenomenon when I started looking at it from a chronic stress perspective. In a nut-shell (summarising a whole field of study in three sentences), people get stressed when their efforts are not met with sufficient rewards. Additionally, people get stressed when they feel they are not in control of outcomes. Also: perfectionist tendencies (prerequisite for joining the academic tribe) intensify these stress levels. Being stressed out of your mind isn’t great for anyone.

Once you start counting the ways in which the ratio of effort and reward is skewed in academia, you will laugh or cry! Think of four years or more of work to finish a PhD. Think of how papers are received: the model is criticism (not always of the constructive kind). Think of how little mentoring and support there tends to be along the way, a trend intensified by the work pressure senior academics have to deal with. Think of the individualised culture. ‘Feeling valued’ is the best way to prevent stress and help people perform well, and academia isn’t that into it. (On the whole, structurally. Of course there are many wonderful people, supervisors, colleagues and so on who do support each other… I believe choosing the right supervisor and department is the absolute best advice anyone can give you when choosing to embark on a PhD.)

There will be more laughter and/or tears when you look at the control ratio. The PhD process is long and it isn’t linear, even though it is often conceptualised as such. By its very nature you are trying to do something new. It will not work out the way you thought it would (part of the process), and you will have to adapt along the way, repeatedly. There is nothing wrong with this: your research in all its twists and turns can be exciting, but stress and excitement are close cousins. Where I feel this goes wrong is once the process becomes arbitrary, and I would say that in the current set-up it has done so. In the hyper-competitive grant/ publication/ job market you have little control over outcomes.

The wonky control dynamic may also show up in a supervision context: your supervisor may not ‘get’ what you are trying to do, and give you unhelpful feedback (even though she or he is trying her best (or not…)). Being so dependent on one person isn’t a great model, stress-wise. Same as above: choosing the right supervisor goes a long way, but isn’t always feasible.

I could go on, but you get the idea… In sum: academia is a stressful environment. And although a burst of acute stress will help you finish that paper, chronic stress which we are talking about here is detrimental to academic performance and wellbeing. That’s what’s happening, and it’s why you may be feeling down or panicked or overwhelmed. It is both good and bad news. Good, because it’s not you (there is nothing wrong with you)! Bad, because it’s not you (you cannot fix the system as if by magic).

Once you know all of this it becomes possible to think out how you might address working in a less-than-ideal environment. You can find resources on this blog, in my free courses and, if you want to really dive in, in my online course. You can do this! First step, always remember: It is not you!

The passage in Bolker’s book goes as follows:

“There’s another kind of hitting the wall that sometimes happens to thesis writers: you feel an impossible barrier between you and the finish line, the bottom falls out of your hopefulness and ambition, and your spirits border on despair and collapse. I’ve more than once heard someone with less than five percent of her thesis left to write say, ‘I’ve decided not to go on with this project.’ This is a time when the demons can catch up with you, when every one of the internal creatures who got in your way all along decides to gang up on you just this side of the finish, to remind you of all the good reasons why you shouldn’t finish your degree.”

Bolker then goes on to advise to accelerate past this resistance and just get on with it, get it done! Sound advice.

But what if the internal demons gang up on you if you are only say a year or perhaps two in? And what if they turn out not to be bad ugly demons, but friendly ones, with your best interest at heart? What if they are insistently whispering that what you are doing… is not the right thing to be working on, not the right project to spend these years of your life on? What if they are right?

The researcher I was talking to had ‘optimised’ her workday – as in she knew exactly when her best hours of the day were and worked on her PhD during those time slots, she had self-care routines firmly in place – and she was still very much into her research topic. Yet…it wasn’t happening, her chapters weren’t getting written, it was all at a stand-still. And perhaps…that was because she was finding out she didn’t enjoy academic work that much. Maybe there were better things for her to do…

Committing to a PhD is a big decision, but dropping a project halfway in is an even bigger one. Especially because of the connotation of failure. Quitting is failing, isn’t it?

Well, no. It is not. It is a profoundly courageous thing to do. The ‘easy thing’ to do is to just keep plodding along mindlessly, no matter whether all of this is still a good idea.

It can be treacherous territory: there are ups and downs to the PhD process. There will slumps and blues along the way. It is par for the course, and it is best to not get all existential over them. At the same time: if all of it is slump then maybe it is time to reconsider. Sometimes you do have to ponder the big questions.

When you start the PhD there are so many unknowns, and along the way you find out about all sorts of things. Such as whether you are well suited to doing academic work (Do you enjoy the slow, profound, nuanced nature of academic research, does it light you up to get that footnote exactly right, after editing it a hundred times?), whether you enjoy working at your university (perhaps it is just you, quite isolated, working away?), whether the whole setting of the pressures of getting published is something you can work with or may even motivate you to write your papers, or whether you’d just rather not! The same goes for teaching if that’s part of your PhD programme: you cannot know until you try.

In my PhD programme you could quit after year one, with a Masters in Research. Clever idea, because it means that even if you quit the work had not been ‘for nothing’. In theory, that is. In practice it was still a hard decision to make. That ‘failure’ thing again…

There are all sorts of ways to assess whether you should get a PhD. Unless the PhD is a requirement for a next step you want to take (say the possibility of an academic career, or certain positions), I have found a good question to ask is this one: how would I feel if I could drop the entire project?

Disclaimer as above: PhD slumps are normal and natural, so perhaps not torture yourself with this question if you’re going through a difficult stretch. You can and will make it through if you want to. But that is the question: do you want to?

I remember the first time someone asked me why I was doing a PhD. I hadn’t started yet. It was an older lesbian woman in a shady bar wearing a leather jacket who I’d excitedly told I was going to do a PhD. She dropped the big question immediately. ‘Why? Why do you want to so this?’ I have to laugh because I remember my stupid answer. It was: ‘Because I want to show them I can do it.’ She looked at me, shook her head and told me it was the wrong answer. She was completely 100% right and I hang my head in shame. It had something to do with me quite belatedly figuring out I was good at this academic stuff. But yes, wrong reason! In any case, even with the wrong reason for starting I am now glad I did embark on the PhD, and did finish it. Although I sometimes wonder what might have happened if I had changed course mid-way…

As for the researcher I was talking to: she has decided it is time to take some time out to answer the big questions: ‘why, what for, do I really want to do this?’ I wonder what her decision is going to be…

Do you have doubts about your PhD? Would you like to quit? If you would like to talk things over with me check out my coaching page. If you decide to proceed (I am very much cheering you on!!!), the Stress-Free PhD Programme will get you over the finish line…

A few weeks ago I found myself walking through the park – the Amsterdam Vondelpark (far too touristy) – in tears. This was completely unexpected: I hadn’t thought about my own PhD for years. It is an awful story: my supervisor died in the last year of my PhD. He had a heart attack. And I was suddenly sad about it. Really, really sad. This hadn’t really happened before in this way, and it is 8 years ago that he died, so it completely took me by surprise. Perhaps these tears that had not been shed before needed to be shed.

Fast forward a week or so, and I get an email from someone who attended the EUI at the same time I did and asked to chat about supervision dynamics and its relation to finishing the PhD. So we chatted, and it was wonderful. And it made me reflect on so many of the subtle and not-so-subtle ways supervision dynamics can go awry. There are so many!

There are quite a few dynamics we discussed in our call. I have been talking to PhDs for years now and my jaw drops when I hear about the similarities when it comes to supervision. My mantra seems to be: ‘It’s not just you,’ when it comes to the more difficult aspects of the PhD: so many issues stem from the way academia is set up, and are not in any way personal.

Supervision is pretty low on the list of priorities for many an academic, and it is not because they don’t care about you or your work, but because their workload is ridiculous. Publications count, the rest…not so much. So to say the odds are stacked against PhDs in this regard is an understatement. (In my own case my supervisor had 12 or more PhDs. That’s not realistic in any way. How is he even supposed to read everyone’s work?) To add to this, there is a category of academics – and it is a large category – who would much rather be working on his own research than engaging with yours, incentives non-withstanding, and surprise surprise, the academic system rewards this attitude.

Now combine these features (structural and personality) with the vulnerabilities of the average PhD researcher. Especially in the first years of the PhD, the PhD tends to be a foggy pursuit for many, and questions may result: ‘Am I really capable? Perhaps I am not cut out for this.’ Self-doubt runs rampant, and may result in shrinking from seeking out feedback. Because you wouldn’t want your supervisor to know how out of your depths you feel…or compound your feelings of inadequateness (Sometimes you are well-advised to not share your struggles, depending on the supervisor in question and their supervision skills).

To round it all off, I have come to the conclusion that women are even more vulnerable to succumb to such dynamics, because their communication style tends to be different from their (male) supervisors. The hard-nosed male academic may not understand what they are asking or needing, which results in counter-productive remarks and dynamics. All of this can be quite unintentional, but destructive nonetheless.

Voila, this is the perfect mix for disaster.

To give a personal example: my supervisor used to remind me I had to ‘work hard’ every time I saw him. I took this to mean he thought I was not working hard enough. In retrospect his remarks probably didn’t mean much, perhaps they only meant seeing me was uncomfortable because it confronted him with the fact that he didn’t give me any substantial feedback to work with, so instead he deflected.

I once asked a male colleague about my supervisor’s remarks (because I couldn’t figure it out, and it was making me miserable), and he just shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘Oh, you shouldn’t listen to what he says.’ And that’s the part which is rather difficult when you are dependent on your supervisor, especially so when you do not know where you stand when it comes to the content of your work. From personal observation I think men are better at not internalising this stuff. (Though men struggle too.)

In my opinion supervisors should be trained to be better supervisors. I think it would save PhDs a world of grief and self-doubt, and far more theses would be finished and papers would be published. Until that time, some tips:

1. You are capable. Don’t doubt this: there is a reason you were admitted to the PhD programme. Whenever self-doubt crops up, know it is par for the course, and it isn’t personal (though it may feel that way).

2. Be assertive. Your supervisor likely has other priorities. Again, this is not personal. So make sure you are pro-active and arrange supervision meetings regularly. This should be one of your priorities.

3. Be pragmatic. What does your work need? What could your supervisor offer? Be as specific as possible. It will help the communication with your supervisor run more smoothly.

4. If there is a communication-style mismatch, acknowledge this, if only for yourself. This may be enough to ease your mind. If things are really bad, counselling may help reframe things. In the worst case scenario, you may need an extra reader or a different supervisor.

I am more than happy to chat about this, and help you out. You can book a coaching session here. Or, take the Stress-Free PhD Programme: it has an entire module on supervision with practical ways to get out of unproductive spirals, and improve your supervision relationship.

Today I want to talk about a fundamental component of the programme: ‘stress in academia’, which must be the absolute unsexiest topic on the planet! It is key, however, to writing a PhD with your self-confidence and joy intact. Today’s blog outlines how this might work. The course will help you implement these ideas, step by step, over the course of six weeks. In detail. It will get you out of the confidence slump you may be in right now. Sign up here.

Stress in academia: it’s not about you!

Let’s start with a depressing statistic (no pun intended!): studies are starting to show an alarming picture of PhDs’ mental health (see here, here, here and here). About a third up to half of PhD students might qualify as being ‘clinically depressed’. In some fields the figures are worse than in others, but across the board it looks like PhDs are a lot worse off mentally and emotionally compared with peer groups outside of academia. About two to three times worse…

Unfortunately many of us (including myself when I was working on my PhD) think we are the only ones grappling with feeling low and stressed. I don’t think my own struggles qualified as depression, but sometimes it was definitely depressing! Please know it isn’t a personal failure of any kind on your part. It is the result of how academia is set up (huge topic), yet these dynamics tend to go unacknowledged.

The first time I taught a workshop for PhDs one of the participants came up to me afterwards and said: “I am so glad to hear it is not just me.” It isn’t just you. It is almost everyone at some stage. It is just that it is often only afterwards, once the PhD is completed, that people will allow themselves to be vulnerable and talk about the more difficult stretches. In more competitive fields (where the problem is worse) this is all the more true.

What you can do

Handling PhD stress well, seen that stress is a given in this setting is essential. This is a massive topic, and for the purpose of the Stress-Free PhD programme I have chosen to take the pragmatic route: what are the practices that are proven (either scientifically, or anecdotally, as in n=1 tested by me) to have a positive effect on wellbeing and academic performance? Are there ways we can incorporate those practices into our days and weeks, to lower the burden of stress, and increase the odds of enjoying our academic work?

In the course we go into depth to find out what your personalised (that is enjoyable and doable in your circumstances) stress-busting routine might look like, and I will help you implement these practices step by step, over the course of six weeks. When we cannot fix the root of the problem in the short term (academia has problems in the stress department!!!) we have to work with what we’ve got, and be as supportive of ourselves as possible!

If I had to sum it up in three sentences:

– Academia currently is a really stressful environment, and up to half of PhDs develop stress-related (mental) health problems.
– This has nothing to do with your capability or suitability.
– Relaxation and other ways of stress-busting are essential, not only to look after yourself, but to ensure high academic productivity as well.

Find out all the details of the programme here. Join us! Live sessions start Monday November 12th. (PS I am giving away 2 free spots in class here).

Everybody ever who has written a PhD has been there. Those days where you doubt everything you have done, and everything you will ever do. Those days where it feels you should have done everything differently from the start, and now your work is too late to ‘save’. Those days where you know you will never finish your PhD on time, or even ever. Your PhD has become project doom.

It sounds dramatic because it feels dramatic, and that can be confusing it itself. Why/ when/ how has a project like your PhD become such a big deal??

Keeping things in perspective can be really difficult at times.

Five tips on how to handle such days:

1. Know this is par for the course

Perhaps you’ve noticed there is an entire genre of PhD ‘humour’ about PhD underconfidence and feeling like a complete failure. I am sure a psychologist/ sociologist/ anthropologist will at one point write a dissertation about what these jokes say about academic culture. It does point towards a simple truth about PhD life: it will probably make you feel bad at times, hopefully not too often.

It is absolutely crucial to realise that these feelings have nothing to do with your capability, or your work, or you personally. If you are feeling you are not performing as well as you should, take heart. Nothing personal about these feelings, simply academic work being difficult and impossibly slow, and the academic context making things even harder.

Simply having an awareness of this not being a personal issue (though it feels highly personal!) is the first step to these negative thoughts and feelings loosening their grip.

2. Know thyself

Apparently Socrates spoke these words, and who knows what exactly he meant?! In the context of PhD research one very handy way of knowing yourself involves identifying your stressful thought patterns. Not to banish or solve them, but to simply recognise them. These thoughts are often the same ones: ‘I am never going to finish on time’, ‘I can’t do this’, ‘I am a failure’, ‘everyone else is smarter than me’, ‘what if they find out I am not cut out for this’, ‘I should have done it all differently’…

Maybe you can’t identify the underlying negative thoughts (don’t worry, you don’t have to over-analyse this…), but you certainly realise you are feeling stressed or helpless or overwhelmed!

Once you notice these thoughts or feelings crop up, it is a sign not to take them all too seriously, in the sense of not completely buying into them. Perhaps they aren’t true! Quite likely they aren’t true!

You don’t have to convince yourself of this, or anything, but these thoughts and feelings can be an opening to ‘do something different’.

3. Break the stress loop

Next step: it helps to have strategies in place to break the stress loop negative thoughts and feelings put you in. There are so many ways to do this. One way is to do things that make you feel good. Not in a ‘I will do this to make these thoughts go away’- way, because that is probably not going to happen and that’s okay. More in a: ‘oh, I am stuck in this state, and it is a completely normal part of the PhD process, but it does mean it is probably a good time to keep an eye on the bigger picture’-way.

What do you enjoy doing? Can you fit some of these things into your day?

In the long run it also helps to have an exercise and/ or meditation practice in place. These activities help break the stress loop. Exercise metabolises stress hormones, meditation helps calm the nervous system. This isn’t a fix, but it can help.

4. Low hanging fruit

On these days, go for quick wins workwise. Are there simple tasks you could finish? Look for easy ways to get some things done, and be really pleased with yourself for getting them done! No accomplishment is too small. Every step counts. Do what comes easily. Do practical, tangible things. Finish stuff.

Think small steps, and give yourself a pat on the back.

If you feel you cannot get anything done at all, give yourself a break, and be kind with yourself.

5. This too shall pass

The final step is to realise that this too shall pass. You won’t always feel this way. And maybe it is alright to feel this way sometimes (though be alert if things get too bad, or this happens too frequently, of course: seek support if you need it. This isn’t an endorsement of feeling low all the time. Only a reminder that bad days are often simply that: bad days. It doesn’t have to be a big deal. Tomorrow is a new day. Give yourself a break.)

You can do this. And a couple of bad days doesn’t mean a thing, only that writing a PhD is hard… There will be better days and better weeks to come.

How do you handle bad days? Any tips or tricks you use? The Stress-Free PhD Programme will help you lower PhD stress, and keep PhD slumps to a minimum. Stay up to date with new blog posts (and get access to my free resources):