Yes, I’m Doing A PhD. Here’s How I Got There, How My Attitudes Towards Academia Changed And What This Means For My Career
For those who read my previous blog post and/or are familiar with what I’m doing now, and/or know me well enough that you know I’m doing a PhD, this won’t be huge news to you right now. After all, I started back in February.
But for those of you who may remember me from 2020-2023 while I did my BSc at KCL and also remember me complaining way too much about academia, I know what you’re thinking: You? Doing a PhD? What, are you mad?
Well, yes. Even though I didn’t like doing my BSc that much, I decided that I wanted to do a PhD at some point during my third and final year as an undergraduate student. Now I’m actually doing a PhD, and I’m already enjoying it more than I ever enjoyed my BSc! It was a long process, so sit tight.
I joined KCL in 2020 to pursue a BSc in Computer Science. I initially applied for a 4-year-long course that would’ve involved me taking my third year in an industrial placement, where I basically would’ve done a paid full-time software development/engineering job for a year, in a course aptly titled “Computer Science with a Year in Industry” (imaginative name, I know; there’s also a similar course at KCL for Chemistry undergraduates). As those who have read my blog back in 2022 will know, that plan fell through real hard, so I transferred quickly onto the final year of a degree that ultimately lasted just 3 years.
Standard career trajectory for Computer Science students like myself is that you do a Bachelors and/or Masters (maybe you do a Computer Science GCSE and/or A-level before that if you’re British, or similar things elsewhere, such as IBacs), then you get a graduate job working at some company, and then more jobs that pay more will eventually follow as you accrue more experience in working with software development teams. That, of course, is what I initially went into my degree for, and I went into it with the “I’m getting a degree so that I can get a job” mindset.
That, naturally, meant having expectations from KCL, lecturers, module contents and even other students that weren’t met, and at first I was just as confused as any other fresher having to start a first degree that will set them for life. I kept thinking “How will this be useful to me at all? What exactly am I learning here that will be of use to me in my career?” Furthermore, students will complain about the delivery of certain lecture contents, as students do, and I won’t go into any specifics (more on that later on) but the quality of some lectures and my (mis)understanding of certain topics as a result, combined with the fact that everything was online when I joined because the COVID-19 pandemic was still ongoing at the time (we had some in-person small group lessons early on, before the Delta variant took over and everything was moved online), meant that I found it hard to appreciate what all of us were shelling out more than £9000 a year for. Even my parents thought that was too much, and I let them know what I was getting for that much money!
I got out of first year feeling quite cynical about this whole “degree” thing. One great thing that has happened in recent years is that the barrier of entry to a career in software development is much lower, with many companies looking for developers eschewing mandatory requirements of degrees in favour of programming knowledge and experience obtained in other ways (in many cases self-learnt). Though that is unequivocally a good thing and I am not arguing against it, it did have an unintended knock-on effect of me comparing myself to those lucky good folks quite often, and that left me feeling a bit upset that I was studying hard for a degree I didn’t like and was barely going anywhere, especially when I and others were saying (sometimes in jest, sometimes not) that we didn’t really need the degree we were studying in order to obtain a programming job. It just turned out I hadn’t mastered the art of the hiring process and tech interviews yet, but that’s a whole different conversation entirely!
I also didn’t like the way I came across to my colleagues as a result of my cynicism, towards everything from life to our education to them, which at the time I had no problem openly showing them (I obviously feel different about it now); Although I was in a somewhat better place socially (I found it really hard to talk to others before then), I had only just got used to online communication. This is another whole different conversation entirely, and I don’t want to go into it in depth here.
All of this (my attitudes towards my degree, my studies and the people around me) eventually got to the point where I very strongly considered dropping out of my degree during my first year, and after I finished that year’s exams, I kept telling myself I was almost certain I’d drop out and that I was not cut out for any of this. Then one thing led to another and before I knew it, after a long summer break (I remember it being really long, 4+ months), I was back on campus. Honestly, that break went on for so long that by the time second year began, I just dropped myself into it. I almost appreciated it at the time. Almost.
Second and third year didn’t get any easier. I got better at managing myself and being myself around others, which is always a plus, especially when you’re autistic (as I am). I did a group project in second year as part of the Software Engineering Group Project module, as part of a group of 10 (groups of 10 aren’t very common in SEG; usually these groups have 7-8 and in some cases 9 students working together), and that was a decent experience, albeit one filled with impostor syndrome for me (again, a different discussion to be had). I got 74 overall for second year at first, and that jumped to 76 after the group project got remarked. Then, after that, I waltzed into third year and got 72 for that year (I may write a separate article on my undergraduate dissertation).
I got 74 for my overall C-score. A First Class in the UK’s university grading system is a final C-score of 70 or above, and it’s the highest degree certification there is here (I’m aware that in other countries such as the US, things are very different). Many of my uni friends got the second-highest degree classification, a 2:1. To get a First Class is not easy. Well, barely anything is easy in academia. Like many other things, it’s not something you just blag your way into, and it definitely isn’t something you blag your way out of with success, much less with the highest degree classification there is, so for a highly stressful 3 years that almost wasn’t worth it (almost), I was happy, and so were my family. I hated studying for it, but I came out of it thinking “Yeah, I guess my degree wasn’t a complete waste, I suppose.”
Though, let’s be honest, such a prestigious degree from a world-class Russell Group university is, by itself, useless. If you don’t action it with something, it’s just a shiny status symbol to look at. If I am to get people to care about my degree, I have to either (1) use it to apply for graduate jobs by having hiring managers realise what I worked hard for or (2) climb up the academic ladder and turn it into something greater. I went into uni for option 1, not option 2. In software development, you can absolutely get a high-paying job with just a Bachelors, and that was what I went to KCL for. Option 2 wasn’t even on the table, and it didn’t join the table until at some point in third year. It wasn’t an immediate process, and there was a good chance at the time that, even if I really wanted to, I wouldn’t be doing a PhD at all. Jumping straight from BSc to PhD isn’t even the most common way to action option 2. People usually do Masters first before PhDs. I had my reasons for skipping the Masters. For now, though, I should probably mention how I eventually took option 2, so I’m doing that now.
28th October 2022, I got an email from the Informatics department. They were holding a session on November 9th that same year at Bush House, and I knew I would be on campus that day. The event was to do with PhD opportunities they have (or had during that period in time). Perhaps it was an effort to get final year students like me on their side, and it must’ve worked because I eventually decided to go there to see what the fuss was about. There, they discussed what PhDs were, what goes on during PhD studies and the benefits of doing so, higher pay in jobs after graduation being one of them. They also had several existing academics discuss their research areas during the presentation part, and some of them hung around to take questions afterwards.
Seeing them actually show off their research work to us was my first real glimpse into what academic staff do besides teaching, and it was a real eye-opener for me. “Oh, so that’s why they’re here!” I know it sounds incredibly stupid for me to say this, but I’m being serious when I say that, at the time, I genuinely did not realise this is what lecturers do when they’re not teaching us students. Truth be told, I didn’t even know what academics did when they weren’t teaching. I just assumed they were there, which I know now is a stupid assumption to make but I didn’t know better back then. I guess you could say it changed my perspective on them, and it made me value the contributions they made outside of teaching way more than I used to.
And seeing the kind of work they did as part of their research made me excited about my own future work. For the third and final year of my BSc, I had to complete my undergraduate thesis, and I was not sure about what I would end up doing (though I did know it wouldn’t be particularly novel). I did have an idea of my own at the time, but the vast majority of students doing their third year at KCL Informatics actually get assigned a project, usually one that a lecturer or other staff researcher at KCL devises for prospective students, but in the selection process there are options for some supervisors to supervise their own projects (you have to send them your project idea first)… and somehow I was allocated such a project (it was my second choice, FYI).
With a new attitude towards academic research, I went into my final year project with a newfound respect for how it’s carried out, and resigned acceptance quickly turned into excitement. I do want to write a separate article about my final year project, which basically constitutes my undergraduate thesis, but I had several changes in the project’s scope (my PRJ supervisor at the time helped me with properly handling said changes) that eventually got me to a project I was not only able to complete but was also satisfied with, even though I didn’t get the best mark in it. That was the first time I ever conducted academic research of any kind, and there were many things I did right and wrong, but I still found the experience quite rewarding. It also helped open my eyes to the weird and wonderful world of academic research.
My new attitude towards academic research also changed my attitudes towards my lecturers, as I made a more conscious effort to look into their research areas and ask them
NEXT UP: Vim.