What to expect in the first 6 months of a PhD

This was written from my experience of doing a PhD in a Psychology context. Please note, this experience is always going to be different depending on the subject so whilst I would encourage you to read my experience, I can't guarantee that this is exactly what you will go through if you are not doing a PhD in Psychology.

So you have started a PhD – this is the most important decision you have made. 

To start. Well done! 

(Try to remember why you made this decision and remind yourself of it throughout your PhD as you will question this at least 10 times a week until you finish it).

I found the first 6 months of the PhD the most difficult to adjust to. Not only because I was pregnant, but because the pace of it was so different to what I had been used to. The emphasis was definitely on me, as an academic, developing a research question rather than just “doing a research study”.

I think if you go through academic life without a break, this transition to a PhD is probably less difficult to move to. You know what to expect. For me, I had a 3 year break between my MSc and the PhD, (an almost 10 year break between PhD and BSc! #maturenotold). The MSc was largely a taught module so this was also completely different to the research based PhD.

I applied for a PhD that had a set research question. In my very first supervisory meeting, through discussion, this set question changed and i was told to "make it my own".

I then had 3 months where I was constantly told to “go and read”. It was bizarre. Sitting in an office and just reading. Was this really it? Is this all PhD students do all day?! Recruitment, research, data analysis; I can do. I am generally a “do-er”. But this process of reading and thinking, reflecting and critiquing, was something that hadn’t really been required of me much before.

At times it felt like the reading was ineffective and at times it felt like there was no end to the avenues I could take with the research down. It felt that from every research paper came another question. Then after 5 hours of reading, I found myself reading something completely off topic. Then I would feel the guilt that I had been completely unproductive because I couldn’t remember what I had read, who had said what, or why I was reading that paper.

At this time, I can’t recommend referencing software enough. Mendeley is particularly helpful because you can group papers in to topics, make notes on the pdfs, and even search for a sentence that you remember but can’t remember who said it or where you say it.

By the end of 6 months, I was ready to pop in terms of baby and I was ready to pop intellectually. But before I left for maternity, I had a well-developed research question, the start of a systematic review and the beginning of an ethics application. All that reading definitely paid off and made it easier for decisions further along the line easier to make.

Returning from maternity leave was difficult. Getting back in to the swing of the research was challenging; particularly whilst looking after a child who had a particular hatred of sleep.

In your first 6 months of a PhD, don’t expect to start any sort of "active" research activity. Expect to question your intellectual ability and perhaps even cry at least once a week. Expect to read a lot and develop your critical thinking skills. I can’t emphasize how important this was for my PhD as it really laid the foundation for my key decisions and in the viva, I was able to defend these decisions much more readily than if I hadn’t spent the first 6 months doing this.  

You've started, so you can finish.

Mum, PhD.