failed a phd

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• CAREER FEATURE
• 21 August 2023

Failed PhD: how scientists have bounced back from doctoral setbacks

• Carrie Arnold 0

Carrie Arnold is a science writer based near Richmond, Virginia.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Distraught and panicking, Jess McLaughlin logged into their Twitter account last October and wrote a desperate, late-night tweet .

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Nature 620 , 911-912 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02603-8

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Worst Nightmare Scenario: Failing Your PhD (and How Not To)

Failing your PhD. How does it happen? I have recently been a remote witness of a behind-the-scenes-drama: a PhD candidate who received a rejection from an external examiner. Her supervisors had approved the thesis, but a member of the committee rejected it, rightfully so as far as I can gather, judging from the report that spans over a thirty pages of why the thesis is lacking and needs at least a year’s more work. It is a tragic situation. I can’t think of many things worse, as far as PhDs go.

When I was writing my PhD I never thought I’d fail, but I did always worry about whether my work was ‘good enough’. And I did fear the scenario that perhaps one of the committee members would request a million modifications that would go against my ideas, or would be diametrically opposed to comments of the other professors. As is so often the case when you have a number of academics commenting on your work, especially when you are trying to tame a multi-disciplinary project. Yet failed PhDs (not counting the cases in which people actively quit) are extremely rare.

What I have learnt about PhDs going off the rails:

Universities do not want you to fail your PhD. Supervisors don’t want you to fail your PhD. Committee members don’t want you to fail your PhD.

It isn’t about you. It is about them. (Of course!) It reflects badly on them. It reflects badly on the university. It reflects badly on everyone involved. (Though naturally, they will put most of the burden for failing, if the project does need more work, on you if they can. So very classy!)

Also, it is a hell of a lot of work to prove the thesis isn’t where it should be, and committee members are hesitant to take this route… They have other priorities: their own research, most notably.

Take this to heart. It is not in their interest to make you fail.

“Don’t worry too much about your PhD. If you stick around long enough at one point they’ll give it to you.”

This is something a professor said to me, only half-jokingly, when I was in my second year and still very much wrestling with my subject, trying to wrangle it into submission. I was pretty shocked (I’m a perfectionist!), as well as amused, but over the years I have started to appreciate the truth of what he was saying.

When I returned to Florence for my PhD defence a professor complained to me about the people who received a PhD who absolutely definitely shouldn’t have passed. Yet these theses do tend to pass.

This may be a comforting idea: you will get your title. Your PhD will pass. Even if it isn’t absolutely electrifyingly brilliant from the first right through to the last paragraph. Even if there are obvious flaws (which there will be, there always are, and that is perfectly OK. But that’s a different blog post). Getting into the PhD programme is the bigger hurdle compared to finishing the thesis. You’ve already done the most difficult bit.

The disconcerting message though: your PhD may not be that much of a priority for other people. It may feel like your life work; to them, it is something they may simply want off their desk. Within deadlines, preferably. Without too much work or hassle.

Red flags everywhere!

Even if you are in a state where you just don’t care anymore and just want to finish, don’t sell yourself short. Supervisors should be invested in your work, at least to a degree! You need the dialogue, you need the feedback, you need the input, you need the debate. If you have absent supervisors who are not contributing as a mentor, and you are doing it all alone, you need to find others who will help you.

In one way my situation was similar to the one outlined above is I had no-one actively involved, due to circumstances (one of which was that one of my supervisors passed away, the other that I was finishing my PhD long-distance), and it was entirely disorienting. I didn’t know whether my work met certain standards. It did, but it would’ve been nice if someone would have been there to tell me! When I got appointed a new supervisor for the thesis defence specifically, it all turned around. I loved his comments (I really do believe love is the right word here. I was a bit intellectual-love-starved at the time) questions, and criticism, and although he wasn’t an expert in my field, the discussion helped me so much.

It also made me realise how much I had been missing out. If you don’t have much support and interaction, it has to change. Find your people. The people who will challenge and support you. They are out there. They want to hear from you. Go and find them, or let others help you find them.

The part you are responsible for, of course, is to engage with their criticism and work with their suggestions as appropriate. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this process, defining my own choices. Creating and defending my work. It’s the part you have to do, the intellectual part, and it is (hopefully) the satisfying part. (Especially once it’s done!!)

If you skip this, because you are lazy, fed up or out of time or money, and you have supervisors who are also lazy and busy, and don’t care so much, you may end up in a situation where the external examiner gives the thumbs down. That is if you are lucky/ unlucky enough (strike through as appropriate) for them to care enough to do so.

Do you have absent supervisors, and no idea where you stand? The HappyPhD course tackles the problem of how to re-engage, once you’re in a negative spiral of avoidance and neglect. It can be done! As always, if you enjoyed this post, could you share it? I appreciate it!

If you found this post helpful, share it? I appreciate it!

• 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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How to appeal if you fail your PhD

The results are in, but something’s wrong. What can you do if your classification is unfair, or there’s been a mistake?

I get four or five calls a week from panicked students who have failed their PhDs . After years of work, it can be a heartbreaking ordeal. But if you really feel your classification is unfair, or if there’s been a mistake, you could have grounds for appeal. It may seem like a gargantuan task at a difficult time, but it’s worth channelling your grievance into fighting back – rather than a regrettable email to university staff. Following these steps will help.

1 Determine whether you have a case

First, make sure that you do have a leg to stand on – will your appeal be justified? This includes looking at examiners’ reports, including the independent pre-viva reports, and correspondence between examiners and the university. It may require lodging a data protection act request (sometimes called a “subject access request”). You are entitled access to these documents by law, so don’t take no for an answer.

2 Seek assistanceGet help from the student union or a specialist lawyer. The student union is free, but its advisers may not be available at short notice (or during holidays) and they will rarely write the appeal statement for you. Specialist lawyers tend to be more highly qualified and can write persuasive statements – but they’ll cost you.

It’s best not to send any emails without seeking advice first. It may sound odd, but every email and discussion, however informal, can be used against you. I had a case recently where a student told his tutor, who appeared friendly and sympathetic, that he should have submitted extenuating circumstances earlier. The outcome letter read: “You conceded in a meeting with your tutor that you ought to have submitted an EC form earlier.” His case fell apart.

3 Know the rules of your institution

Unearthing all the relevant documents to your appeal takes some detective work. Examine these documents forensically and check the university has followed its own rules, policies, codes and guidance, and the rules of external bodies such as the Office of the Independent Adjudicator and the Quality Assurance Agency for higher education.

Do not give up just because a member of staff, however eminent or kind, discourages you from appealing. It’s always better to ask your adviser for his or her independent view on the merits or otherwise of your case.

4 Stick to the permissible grounds of appeal

Everything you write in your appeal form or statement must relate to the grounds of appeal. Look at the applicable appeals procedure, find the section about permissible grounds of appeal, and go through each one, asking yourself “does this apply to my case?”

5 Think ‘evidence, evidence, evidence’

Consider the ways you can provide evidence – beyond your own testimony – to support your contentions. This can be anything from medical evidence to CCTV footage, depending on the nature of the case. If you thought the examiner was biased, for example, how would you show this? If you thought the examiner was not a specialist in the field, how would you prove it?

6 Focus on your strongest arguments

Be scrupulously honest, of course, but ultimately your goal is to persuade the appeals panel that you have made out the grounds of appeal. Weak points dilute the strength of the stronger points and reflect poorly. My advice is to stick to your strongest points.

When writing the appeal statement, don’t be confined to the small box in the appeals form. Use a Word document (unless expressly forbidden) and write “Please see attached appeal statement” in the box. The structure I use is: introduction; background; rules, regulations and law; submissions; conclusion. The length will depend on the complexity of the case, but anything shorter than four pages (1.5 line spacing) or longer than 20 pages should raise eyebrows.

7 Be diplomatic

Keep your phrasing civil – you catch more bees with honey than with vinegar. Some good examples include:

• “With respect, this conclusion is misguided because…”;
• “Without wishing to impugn the integrity of Professor X, the choice of words in the report gives the distinct appearance of bias”;
• “On this occasion, the examiners erred in finding that I was guilty of academic misconduct.”

8 Prepare for your appeal hearing

Don’t attend the hearing on your own. Even if they’re not allowed to speak, the person accompanying you can provide moral support and can act as a witness in the event of any impropriety.

Make sure to have your oral submissions prepared in advance, including questions you may want to ask the department’s representative (if present), and anticipate the questions you may be asked; especially the difficult ones. Again, remember: it’s a persuasive exercise.

Keep up with the latest on Guardian Students: follow us on Twitter at @GdnStudents – and become a member to receive exclusive benefits and our weekly newsletter.

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10 steps to PhD failure

Kevin haggerty and aaron doyle offer tips on making postgraduate study even tougher (which students could also use to avoid pitfalls if they prefer).

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Given the stakes involved, one peculiar aspect of graduate school is the number of students who seem indifferent to its pitfalls. Year after year many run headlong, like lemmings, off the same cliffs as their predecessors. Yet a good share of these people ignore or are even hostile towards the advice that might help them avoid screwing up.

Having repeatedly witnessed this process, we have concluded that a small group of students actually want to screw up. We do not know why. Maybe they are masochists or fear success. Whatever the reason, our heart goes out to them. Indeed, we hope to help them – by setting down a course of action that will ensure that they blunder through graduate school in a spectacularly disastrous fashion.

1. Stay at the same university

It can be tempting to obtain all three of your degrees (undergraduate, master’s and PhD) at the same university: you have already established personal and professional friendships there, you know the routines of the university, you have a solid working relationship with the academics, and you even have lined up a potential PhD supervisor who will incorporate you into an existing research project. However, if you actually want to succeed, doing so is probably a mistake.

Friends and colleagues often tell students to obtain their degrees at different universities, but seldom explain why. One reason is that departments have different strengths. Going to a different university or country exposes you to different perspectives. If you complete both your undergraduate and your master’s at one location, some say that you have probably got everything you can from the kind of scholarship and research practised in that department. (Whether this is true is a different matter.)

Going somewhere else for your PhD shows that you have expanded your intellectual horizons. In contrast, others will view the fact that you did all your degrees at the same place as an indication that you lack scholarly breadth and independence, and that you were not wise or committed enough to follow this standard advice about studying elsewhere.

2. Do an unfunded PhD

If you receive an offer for admission to a PhD programme that does not include funding, you should walk away. If the funding arrangement is vague, you should clarify it as much as possible to make sure that it has substance. While many master’s students are unfunded, the normal practice is for PhD students to be supported through scholarships, teaching, a supervisor’s individual research grants, or a combination of those things. An offer of admission without a financial package can be interpreted in several different ways, but none is encouraging.

Most obviously, it signals that the department is not committed to you. It can also be a sign of problems or even crisis in your department, university or discipline. Beyond what the lack of funding might say about how the admissions committee views you, an unfunded PhD will require you to support yourself through your course, research and writing your thesis. This precarious financial situation is demanding and can severely delay your completion.

3. Choose the coolest supervisor

Several years ago, I pulled aside a graduate student and advised her to find a different PhD supervisor. I delicately, but clearly, pointed out that her current supervisor had a record of relating poorly to others and was seen as a source of extreme irritation by many departmental colleagues.

The student was torn – for her supervisor was also charismatic, had published in prominent outlets, and had research interests that were reasonably close to her own. So she rolled the dice and maintained the relationship.

Three years later, the student sat in my office completely distraught. Her supervisor would not respond to emails and phone calls and was taking forever to comment on drafts of her thesis chapters. In essence, her supervisor failed her as a mentor, her degree was in crisis, and she needed to find a new supervisor quickly.

Screwing up your choice of supervisor is one of the biggest missteps you can make in graduate school. It is also easy to do. If you choose a supervisor because of a single overriding factor – such as a desire for someone who is personable, or is not intimidating, or has a big name – you risk choosing poorly.

So choose carefully, and do not let any one factor sway your decision too much. Enquire about whether others recognise your potential supervisor as a solid choice. Do her students finish their degrees, and in a reasonable time? Does she publish work of high quality in prominent outlets? Does she have a record of getting her students published? Does she equitably co-author articles with her students? Is the supervisor too overwhelmed with other commitments to give you the attention you need? Has she secured research grants? What kinds of jobs did her previous students obtain? Is the supervisor immersed in her academic community?

Also consider the personality of a potential supervisor. Do colleagues find her easy to work with? You should consult widely.

The availability of an appropriate supervisor should definitely affect your decision about which PhD programme to attend. But if the person you have your sights set on is known as a good supervisor, there are likely to be other students seeking to work with her. If you are going to a university mainly to work with that person, make sure that she will actually work with you.

4. Expect people to hold your hand

As a postgraduate, you need to take charge of your own programme. While you should seek guidance from your supervisor and from the graduate chair or her assistant, you are the person who ultimately organises your degree. Nobody – and certainly not your supervisor – will pull you aside to remind you, for example, that you must take a certain course or complete a form by a specific date.

You are also personally responsible for developing your own intellectual path. Do not expect your supervisor, or anyone else, to hold your hand and tell you which books to read, journals to subscribe to, future research projects to pursue, research collaborations to explore, conferences to attend or grants to apply for.

Seek guidance about your degree programme and your scholarly development, but do not wait around expecting others to tell you what to do next.

5. Concentrate only on your thesis

It is easy to assume that at graduate school you will spend most of your time and energy on a thesis. This focus on completing your thesis (in reasonable time) can foster the mistaken belief that nothing else in graduate school matters. Such an attitude, paradoxically, can be a way to screw up.

While doing PhD study, you learn to become a researcher and an academic. Those roles involve considerably more than simply carrying out a large research project. Professors also teach, edit journals, attend conferences, review manuscripts, mentor students, organise workshops and administer different aspects of their department and university, among many other things. Graduate school slowly exposes you to the nuances of these tasks.

While your overriding priorities are to publish, to make progress on your thesis and otherwise to build up your CV, you typically still have enough hours in your day to get involved in other projects. Not doing so means that you are missing opportunities to become a well-rounded academic. And greater exposure to different activities helps you to distinguish yourself in the job market.

6. Expect friends and family to understand

I was over the moon when I won my doctoral scholarship. Eager to share the good news, I phoned my parents. My mum listened closely to the details and said: “That’s not enough money to live off of. Can you get two?” Deflated, I had to tell her no, that was not possible.

Her reaction was not atypical: most people outside your academic colleagues will have a hard time relating to your experiences.

To an outsider, a PhD student’s schedule looks tantalisingly open. It can contain huge slots where you appear to be doing nothing. Those people might encourage you to socialise more or to take on more household tasks to fill the time. Maintaining self-discipline is hard enough at the best of times without outside encouragement to postpone or forgo your scholarly labours. You will likely have to tell friends and family that although you might not have a formal workday, you are “on the clock” and have to use your time to complete a long list of tasks.

But be sure to cultivate a group of sympathetic academic friends and colleagues with whom you can share and discuss your exploits.

7. Cover everything

Students eager to screw up should remember that their thesis is their defining personal and professional achievement. The thesis is everything. Therefore, it should contain everything. Approach your topic from every conceivable angle. Use a diverse set of methodologies. Explore the topic from every theoretical framework conceivable. Aim to produce an analysis that spans the full sweep of human history. This will ensure that in 30 years you will be asking whether you are eligible for pension benefits as a graduate student.

While working on my master’s degree, I bumped into one of my professors and summarised my thesis topic for him. I was doing research on the sex trade, so I detailed how I expected to conduct a feminist analysis of prostitution in Toronto. It would address economic issues and incorporate recent theoretical work on ethnicity and identity. My methodology involved an ambitious plan for a lengthy period of first-hand observation in the field, combined with dozens of interviews with female street prostitutes, police officers, politicians and local activists. When I stopped talking, he smiled wryly and said, “Well, you certainly have your work cut out for you.”

As we parted, I thought to myself: “He’s right. This is insane. I will never be able to do all of this.” The project was massive, unfocused, and had to be radically reduced in scope and ambition or I would never finish. I slept horribly that night, but my fear motivated me to transform my thesis into something more feasible. Master’s and PhD students tend to set overly ambitious parameters for their research, mistakenly thinking that their thesis has to be a monumental contribution to knowledge.

The jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie famously said that it took his whole life to learn what not to play. The same is true for designing and writing academic works. You need to identify what not to cover in your research, and you must remove tangents peripheral to your analysis or argument. You might have to cut major sections or even chapters. This will hurt. I cut many pages of material in the final stages of writing my master’s thesis, including a number of chunks that I loved but which did not quite fit with my final structure and arguments. A thesis, like any written work, is always stronger when you omit unnecessary sections. Simply place those parts in a separate file and work them up later for a submission to a journal.

8. Abuse your audience

“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” – Flannery O’Connor

You are a budding academic, so you need to write like an academic. This means that you need to produce long, convoluted sentences written in the passive voice, riddled with discipline-specific jargon and exotic words. Writing like that will certainly demonstrate your academic pedigree, yes? Actually, it will not. It will alienate your audience, turn off editors and annoy your supervisor. When postgraduate students aim to “write like an academic”, it too often translates into producing turgid, tortured prose.

One secret of graduate school is that strong writers can do extremely well even if they are not the brightest people in the room. If you cannot write clearly and persuasively, everything about PhD study becomes harder.

So vow that you will not write like a traditional academic: eliminate jargon, strive for clear and concise assertions, compose in the active voice, and be kind to your readers. Above all, continually strive to improve your writing. Writing is like playing guitar; it can improve only through consistent, concerted effort.

9. Have a thin skin

My student Tom was in a funk. After I asked him several times what was wrong, he confided that he was upset by the reviews that he had received of an article that he had submitted to a journal for publication consideration. The reviews were harsh, the paper was rejected, and Tom doubted whether he was cut out to be an academic.

He then handed me a copy of the response that he had written to the journal’s editor. Thank goodness he had not yet sent it off. Tom’s reply came across as both hurt and angry. He essentially accused the reviewers of being know-nothings who were not up on the recent literature and had missed the point of his paper. He then questioned the editor’s competence for choosing such inept reviewers. After reading his letter, I explained to Tom why he needed to develop a thick skin about his professional work. Then I shredded his response to the editor.

You are likely a high achiever who has accumulated a lifetime’s worth of academic success. You are accustomed to being among the best students and to being praised. The feedback you have received from high school and university teachers may have tended to emphasise the positive, sometimes to the point of sugar-coating. Things are different in the more elevated levels of academia. Standards are higher, and failure is common.

You will be competing with other high-calibre students for scholarships and fellowships, the majority of which you will not win. You will also need to publish. A great deal of work will go into developing articles only to have many of them rejected. Once you enter the job market, you will put together lengthy job applications to apply for positions for which there may be dozens of applicants.

A key part of being an academic involves learning to persevere in the face of uncertainty, failure and rejection. Everyone is in the same boat.

10. Get romantically involved with faculty

Although it is rarely discussed frankly, postgraduates and academics sometimes become romantically involved. Here I am not talking about harassment or sexual assault, but rather about consensual couplings. As these are adults, one might be tempted to see this situation as something the participants should work out for themselves. Be that as it may, these consenting adults should be attuned to the dangers of faculty-graduate student relationships.

The most fundamental problem inherent in all such relationships is that academics have more formal and informal power than students. Even in seemingly consensual situations, questions arise about how free the student was to decline the relationship. This differential power is acute if it involves a supervisor sleeping with a student.

What might look like a caring relationship could, in fact, be part of a pattern in which a faculty member cycles through impressionable students.

If a romantic relationship continues, the student’s relationships with all sorts of department members may change. Her accomplishments might become tainted or be dismissed. People may suggest that she published an important article or secured a lucrative grant because her relationship gave her an unfair advantage. If the relationship ends badly, she can become a target of gossip and informal recriminations, sometimes for years to come.

Without condoning such situations, I should point out that I know of several instances where a fling between a student and an academic ended amicably, and in some cases evolved into a long-term relationship. But more often, students end up feeling betrayed, exploited and abandoned. These are risky situations, and unfortunately the graduate student bears almost all the risk. So find your emotional connections outside the faculty ranks.

Graduate school can be an enjoyable experience that sets you on the path for a rewarding career. These 10 tips will be invaluable if you are determined to screw up that prospect. Hopefully, our advice will also help those students eager to avoid missteps.

The authors have chosen to write in the first person singular to protect the privacy of the individuals whose experiences are discussed.

Kevin D. Haggerty is a Killam research laureate and professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Alberta . Aaron Doyle is associate professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at Carleton University .

This article is based on extracts from 57 Ways to Screw up in Grad School: Perverse Professional Lessons for Graduate Students  (University of Chicago Press),  a book that sets out further ways to screw up, moving from the earliest stages of planning to go to graduate school all the way through to the finish line. 57 Ways is published this week in the US and on 14 September 2015 in the UK.

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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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Peter Bawuah: Young Ghanaian Man Who Failed WASSCE Acquires Master's Degree In Canada

• A young Ghanaian man has inspired many people online after he shared a story of how he was able to secure funding for his first and second degrees after failing his WASSCE
• Peter Bawuah, in a TikTok video, said after woefully failing his WASSCE he became the mockery of his mate, but he channelled his frustration to resitting the exam, which he passed
• This resulted in him securing scholarships in Ghana, the US and Canada for undergraduate and postgraduate studies.

PAY ATTENTION: Follow YEN's WhatsApp channel for a daily dose of breaking news on the go!

A young Ghanaian, who failed his West African Secondary School Certificate Examination (WASSCE), has turned his misfortune into an incredible grass-to-grass story.

The young man, known as Peter Bawuah on social media, said after failing his WASSCE, despite being the best student in his class, he became the mockery of his peers but that did not deter him from dusting himself up to make amends.

Meet Daniel Tworfile, the KNUST student who sells pure water to support his education

After many months of burning the midnight candle to study for his resit, he finally passed the WASSCE , scoring 5As, which landed him a scholarship to study at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).

In a long caption accompanying a video sighted by YEN.com.gh on his TikTok page (@ peterbawuah ), Peter said God was graceful enough to bless him with yet another scholarship to pursue further studies in the US and Canada.

PAY ATTENTION: All celebrity news in one place! Follow YEN's Facebook Broadcast channel and read on the go.

Peter Bawuah expressed his profound gratitude to God for the many favours bestowed upon him, in the post announcing completion of his master's programme in Canada.

"Today, I am done with my master's. Life always favours the struggler. You're capable of achieving your goals. Sometimes, God delays Us so that he can prepare us well for greatness," he said.

Cheddar confuses Bola Ray as he fumbles over motto of Accra Academy, video causes stir

Peter further encouraged his followers and anyone facing difficulties not to despair but to focus on changing their story.

Akosua Kwartemaa commented:

"I wrote WASSCE 2 time plus one Novdec and went to nursing to do midwifery I failed my license exam 2 times I pass the third time after I stayed home from 2 years but am in the Uk now."

Nana_Ama also said:

"Hmmmm sometimes I asked my self thus question, do we have different God anaaa.You’ve been hearing people testimony so can’t he do some for me."

Nana Ama sweet replied:

"My dear we don't have different God. He's just preparing you to be able to handle what ever blessings he's bringing your way. Your time will come."