How hard is a PhD?

 How hard is a PhD?

Would you like a brutally honest answer? If yes, then read on.

Getting a PhD is here on the scale of increasing hardships:

newborn

preschool

kindergarden

primary school

high school

undergraduate uni

Masters degree

Professional Degree (JD, MD)

PhD  ⟵ (here)

postdoc

associate lecturer

lecturer

associate professor

professor

bigshot professor

university leader

and possibly further up the ladder.

Getting a PhD is harder than most people feel comfortable with. It is comparable to becoming a professional and successful artist, sports person, or musician. Only few have the talent and tenacity to get a PhD, and you have to commit yourself to it: it is your life, not just your study or your career.

And yet it is not nearly as hard as most postdoc positions, let alone the further stages of an academic career. You could think of it as getting a black belt in your chosen area of study: to most people, a black belt sounds like the pinnacle of success in sport - but it’s actually only the very basic beginning of your expert training, and there are many, much harder, levels to follow.

At each level, you get more work, harder work, less time and less life. But, luckily, you get stronger and more resilient too, so it might not feel as tough, subjectively. What makes a PhD hard is the huge and crushing uncertainties about your next positions and about your career and about your suitability as researcher. Full professors might work ten times more and harder than you but they don’t have to face that crushing uncertainty.

So, yeah: completing a PhD is really hard, but not as hard as later stages of academia.

Or life, for that matter. Raising a kid for their first 3–5 years, for instance, is far, far harder than completing a PhD degree over 3–5 years. And yet most people get and raise kids, and don’t get fancy letters to prefix (or post-fix) their names by.

In other words, life is tough, and a PhD is not nearly as tough as it gets in most lives, including mine and (probably) yours. The good news here is that, if you really want to do a PhD, then go for it and don’t be scared. In the end, it’s only 3–5 hard years of your life spent on this, which is very little of your life invested in order to gain the expertise and experience required to learn how to become a meaningfully contributing researcher, teacher, and leader.