How to PhD- the essential guide for all University students! – Details, episodes & analysis

Get ready for the best season yet! Season 3 is almost here, and we’re taking your PhD journey to new heights. From building a standout PhD narrative to navigating tricky co-worker dynamics, this season is packed with insights that will help you create impactful research and get the recognition you deserve. Stay tuned for expert tips on balancing work and study, mastering the art of media attention, and much more. Launching late September/early October— we'll see you soon!

This week, hosts Arun and Julia share personal experiences and practical guidance on handling criticism effectively. They emphasize the universality of criticism and the need to recognize its emotional impact, advising listeners to step away and regain perspective when it stings. The episode provides insights on embracing feedback by considering the reviewer's perspective, depersonalizing criticism, and maintaining professionalism in responses. Additionally, Arun and Julia stress the importance of seeking feedback from trusted sources who have their best interests at heart, equipping listeners with valuable strategies for transforming criticism into a tool for personal and professional growth.

A very brief update on the show and when we'll return! Thank you to the entire How to PhD community for continuing to listen to the show! It means so much to us and we can't wait to come back!

Often we think of knowledge gaps as the key thing to aim for in a PhD, but actually there are many more types of gaps that can be just as powerful and useful! Tune in to learn about the many types of research gaps and a very simple tool to help you identify which ones you'd like to pursue!

Balancing spending time on journal papers vs writing your thesis chapters is a tricky one. This week, we have everything you need to know on how to find that balance between the two and what you need to prioritise during your PhD!

Never get replies to emails? Find that your supervisors don't actually answer your questions? A lot of these problems can be traced back to how you write your emails. 

This week, we're going to be talking about some super simple things you can start doing straight away to optimise your email writing and hopefully get much more responses!

Public involvement and engagement are two really powerful techniques to help justify your work. Think about times you couldn't find the literature to justify what you're doing... or if you feel you're not sure what your work is going to do for the world... these techniques can help solve those! 

Tune in to find out exactly why you should run them and how!

We're back again, this time with Julia's PhD story. It's different in many ways and so many things to takeaway from the experience- tune in to find out!

This week we're going into each year of our PhD journeys to show you the reality of what a PhD is. Often, all we see is that final success from people on Twitter, but actually, most PhD candidates face the same problems and challenges. We'll be talking in depth about all the challenges Arun faced AND crucially, how to overcome them!

We're back with part 2. In this second half of our collaborative episode with Prof. Sebastian Kernbach, we talk about identify the things in your life that give you energy, how to achieve a resilient mindset, managing perfectionism and how to utilise positive psychology! It's a packed episode- we hope you enjoy it!