It’s surprisingly hard to find candid and comprehensive guides to what doing a PhD entails. So I created one.
I’ve mentored and chaired PhD students for over 15 years. And over that time I’ve encountered so many different questions about the process, misconceptions about what a PhD is and what it entails, and problems with navigating everything from financial insecurity, imposter syndrome, depression and anxiety, and gnarly committees (and chairs), that I have a pretty good sense of how to either survive a PhD and even thrive while doing it, or knowing when to quit — or not start in the first place.
But most of this is in my head and not written dwn anywhere.
And so I sat down to develop a comprehensive resource for current students, would-be students, and the friends and family of both. But to make things more interesting in an age when more and more people are turning to AI rather than just reading stuff, I developed this as a resource that is primarily designed to be read by an AI-interlocutor.
The resulting resource can be found at soyouwantaphd.wtf.
The landing page includes a prompt that you can copy and paste into the AI of your choice, and then ask it anything you like about any aspect of doing a PhD — with the knowledge that the LLM will always take you seriously, will never make you feel small or inadequate, and will provide you with insights that are hard to get elsewhere.
But there are a couple of additioanl ways of using the resource:
The first is to forgoe AI entirely and just read the contents. There’s a Table of Contents at https://soyouwantaphd.wtf/contents.html that gives you direct access to 26 pages that cover everything from what a PhD is to what can go wrong — and what to do about this.
The there’s a collection of all the materal in a single file that yo can simply point Google’s NotebookLM at, and ask it to act as your guide. This route to working with the material is particularly interesting as you can ask NotebookLM to summarize and explore content through multiple modalities, including podcasts, infographics, slide decks, and more.
If you take this route, the file to point NotebookLM at is https://soyouwantaphd.wtf/llms-full.txt