The difficult moment in every PhD

Someone recently asked me: “If a researcher gets a difficult moment during their PhD, how can they remain motivated?”.

And, before answering the second part of the question, I want to clarify there is no “if”.

Every PhD trajectory will get a difficult moment, at some point. Every single one. The depth of difficulty and the source of difficult depend, but there seems to be always a difficult moment.

The source of difficulty can be the research itself (not finding a way forward), the supervision relationship, feeling the time pressure, overwhelm from the amount of tasks (or even: potential tasks), being away from home and loved ones – or a different reason, or a combination of reasons.

So, even the PhDs that seems like they were all smooth sailing, will have had some difficult moment in there. As supervisors, we should acknowledge the existence of these difficulties, and be looking for the signals that our students need a bit more support. As researchers, we should not feel bad about hitting a rough spot – it is part of the process.

In a next post, I will address the topic of staying motivated when hitting a difficult time.