How to conquer your PhD in record time
Not so long ago during the dinosaur age, a PhD usually took around 5 years+. Want to finish between 24-36 months?
1) Strategic Planning
a] Stage 1 (month 1): Imagine planning your 42 km proposal and thesis marathon.
b] What physical and mental resources do you need?
c] Use project planning software like Monday.com or ClickUp to create a roadmap (Term Plan or Prospectus) with clear milestones and deadlines.
d] For example, complete Chapter 1: Introduction by month 2, brief literature review by month 4, methodology by month six.
e] Allow at least 2 months to address all the revision comments from your most loving supervisor to gain faculty approval (see g below) then submit.
f] Stage 2 (month 8): Revisit each of the three chapters, with specific focus on expanding your literature review from just seminal author studies and cast your net wide and deep (see numerous LI posts about this and other chapters) (month 14).
g] Allow a minimum of 33% of time taken for draft to fix supervisor comments (3:1 ratio).
h] Primary research (data collection) (month 18).
i] Chapter 4: Results (month 21).
j] Chapter 5: Findings/Discussion (month 24).
k] Chapter 6: Conclusion & Recommendations (month 27).
l] Final draft reviews (30 months).
m] Optimistic? Yes, it is, but still very doable… In 2023, 4 of my PhD students hit 30 months to doctorate (2 in US, 1 in UK, 1 in UNISA).
2) Art of Guessing
a] Like a weather forecaster you’ll never always be right but at least you’re on target.
b] Be generous with draft timelines in case you fall in love, win a SpaceX internship to Mars, suffer an untimely death (hopefully not yours), or forced to marry your supervisor, + 1g (above).
c] Write at least two pages a day (drafts).
d] Kick off each day with low-hanging fruit, then build momentum.
3) Learn from PhDs
a] The following is one my best tips I have ever written…
b] Imagine you’re going on holiday… your destination is 100 kms away… and all you have to do get into a convoy and simply follow the car in front? How hard is that?
c] Imagine someone gave you a 80,000-word example of a doctorate thesis similar to what you’re going to write.
d] Imagine someone gave you 50-100 of these doctorate theses similar to what you’re going to write?
e] Imagine someone gave you 50-100 of these doctorate theses from your university similar to what you’re going to write?
f] Learn to paraphrase, and if you use Chatnaughty AI a bit, download an AI detector…
g] Become a detective, collect clues, ideas, insights, tools, methods, best practices, formatting, styles, etc., all from 100s of PhD theses waiting patiently on your university website… truly a gift from above. Here’s the kicker, each one of these theses was written by someone like you. If they did it, why not you?
In my humble opinion, in all the years I have been publishing posts about how to complete your PhD, this (3 above) is by far the most powerful tip…
rod_pallister@yahoo.co.uk
An inchoate Geoscientist/Researcher/Environmental Sustainability Enthusiast/Writer.
1moI'm so honored Thank you SEG for everything