Highlighting the positive aspects of being a PhD student

Abstract

Articles about doing a PhD tend to focus on the difficulties faced by research students. Here we argue that the scientific community should also highlight the positive elements of the PhD experience.

Keywords: doctorate; early-career researchers; ecology; graduate school; none; research culture; well-being.

Figure 1.. Sentiment analysis of tweets about the PhD experience.

We retrieved all tweets posted in the English language during 12 consecutive weeks, from September to December 2021, that contained any of the following six hashtags: #phdlife, #phdspeaks, #phdvoice, #phdchat, #phdtips, #phdstudent. We then measured the sentiment (positive, negative or neutral) associated with each original tweet (excluding retweets). Of the 91 229 tweets we retrieved, 43,941 were positive, 12,298 were negative, and 34,990 were neutral. Mann-Whitney U tests were performed to compare the average number of likes and retweets of positive versus negative tweets. Negative tweets received significantly more likes than positive tweets (14.5 vs 12.3; P<0.001); negative tweets were also retweeted more than positive tweets but the difference was not significant (1.7 vs 1.5; P=0.383). The Twitter API and the “rtweet” R package (cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rtweet/vignettes/intro.html) were used to retrieve the tweets; the “syuzhet” R package (rdrr.io/cran/syuzhet/) and the Bing lexicon (Liu, 2012) were used for the sentiment analysis; all analyses were performed with R software (R Development Core Team, 2021).

Figure 2.. The positive aspects of doing a PhD.

The three primary benefits of doing a PhD are acquiring expertise (pink circle), learning to work in a collaborative environment (blue), and developing communication skills for sharing knowledge (yellow). For each benefit, general aspects that apply to almost all doctoral students are shown in bold type in the small circle, and specific aspects that depend on, for example, the student’s supervisor or field of research are shown in plain type in the large circle. The large grey area contains more abstract and subjective ideas that are not discussed in the main text. It should be noted that this figure is conceptual, and that the aspects and ideas in it could be grouped in other, equally valid, ways.