Advanced degrees can render career opportunities that you may have not otherwise thought of. Even though, it won’t be smooth or direct and can be laden with numerous challenges, sacrifices and other academic hurdles along the way, at the end of the day it will be a journey you won’t regret.


It’s a fact that advanced degrees can enable you to have lucrative career opportunities that you may have not been able to get otherwise, accompanied of course by the financial benefits that they bring with them.

It is a budding reality that, each PhD is different compared to others of the same discipline.

The Research Leap:

No matter which stage of a career you are on right now, it can be said with certainty that if you are planning to pursue a PHD, you will have completed your masters by now. You must have enjoyed doing the postgraduate work, making you want to take the giant research leap – the PhD!

Even though there isn’t a sure fire to go about it, you should be cognizant of a few components that you are likely to encounter during your PhD, and areundergone by humanities students or students of social sciences, to be able to efficiently manage the transition between a masters and PHD work. How these components impact your work may vary, but they remain to be of prime importance for most PhDs.

Here is an overview of some of those:

• Be mentally prepared to handle the workload:

While a master’s thesis is around 20,000 words, a PhD can be anywhere from between 80,000 to 100,000 words. Therefore, it can be greatly overwhelming to begin a PhD. It seems as though there are so many words to write, so many ways to explore the research subject, too many thesis points but way less time. However, it ca be made a lot less overwhelming by the formulation of short term goals and then striving to achieve them.

• Don’t allow the scale of the research to bring you down!

A very basic first step in any PhD is literature review, generally. It is specific sometimes, but can be vague too. It has the power put you in a headlock and bring you down in the very beginning of your PhD. Most people get so disheartened, they quit early. Getting it through can seem very arduous, but if you focus on a specific area or theme at a time, you can make it through.

• Networking with other candidates:

Once you begin working on your PhD, you must interact with the other candidates or those in advance stages of their PhDs. This will help you develop efficient research strategies and problem solving techniques. You may even come across the winning formula of your peers and try to emulate it to your advantage.

• Up grading to PhD:

This will require you to submit some of the content you have been able to come up with so far. This can be a synopsis of your overall argument. The basic objective of this whole exercise is confirming that your project has what it takes to potentially qualify for PhD.

It is quite rare for this initial process to fail. Generally, there are high chances that you will be able to gain this upgrade. However, if you are unable to do so, it is pertinent that you recognize that there is something extremely wrong with your dissertation or thesis even.

Defending the PhD:

PhD’s are not just pieces of work that are certified as such. Contrary to the master’s, here the dissertation needs to be submitted for a viva – oral examination.

This stands to be a highly formal process, requiring you to ‘defend’ your thesis to examiners that have been appointed for this purpose. Each of these people will have already reviewed your dissertation and analyzed it thoroughly in advance.

A PhD will be examined by two academics, one of whom is the internal examiner. He is appointed from your faculty or department. The other one is an external examiner – a well-known/recognized expert in the area of research.

Some of the other questions may involve gauging of your general subject knowledge or investigating the methodology that has been used. They may also want to know, how you have conducted the research and some of the decisions you made along the way.

In case the examiners find weak points in your thesis or there are poorly explained elements in your dissertation, they will be challenged by the examiners, requiring you to defend them.

However, it is not a process to be taken too seriously or to be intimidated with. Generally, it will be a discussion pertaining to your research with intrigued experts of the same field.

Outcomes of the defense:

There can be five possible outcomes of the PhD viva, depending upon your performance at the viva and the number of issues as elucidated by the examiners.

You can either pass with no corrections, minor corrections, and major corrections or fail outright! The fifth one is that your thesis gets recommended for an MPhil. This happens if the quality of your work is insufficient to justify a PhD or if the examiners judge that your original contribution is not significant enough to warrant a PhD. This is however, a very rare outcome that occurs only when there are major weaknesses within your thesis that cannot be corrected with major corrections.

Change in Outlook:

Advanced education such as the PhD does not just broaden your horizons but also changes the way you look at and view the world. While pursuing it, you come across people from different backgrounds, many of whom happen to be more knowledgeable or experienced than you, smarter even! You gain self-confidence, develop essential inter personal skills, critical thinking and broaden your network to a great extent.

The two R’s – Reflect and Respond:

Use your PhD experience as a kind of a stepping stone between the specificity of the master’s and the comparative independence in PhD which has much autonomy to broaden the scope. You can reflect regularly through a diary or something of that sort to pen down the progress you have made in your first year. This will lead towards analyzing exactly how far your project has developed.

Finally, you must be very responsive towards the suggestions given by your supervisor and other academic peers, be it the ones belonging to your own institution or elsewhere. Keeping the lines of communication open towards different feedback, matters more for a successful PhD than it may have done for the Masters.

Never Too Late!

Doctoral study can prove to be a great strength not just professionally but personally too, so long as you begin with a clear understanding of the road ahead and are well equipped to face the challenges it brings with it.

It’s never too late to take this next great leap towards the advancement of your career. There are professionals – professors, lecturers, researchers who have achieved this feat at ages that could be construed, otherwise as too late. But they did it nevertheless. A PhD can greatly help you develop the credentials that could be expected of a professional even if you occupy a senior position.