The problem with having experience is that it’s easy to forget you once lacked it, and thus, many supervisors take for granted the perspective they have gained, forgetting that their students’ limited bubble of perception is the naïvete whence knowledge began. Some supervisors enjoy helping to expand that bubble, some do not. “The Unwritten Rules of PhD Research” by Gordon Rugg and Marian Petre is written for students in that latter camp; putting into plain and blunt language everything their supervisor instinctively knows but forgot to tell them. It is, in essence, a guide on how to ‘grow up’ as a PhD student.

Covering some 250-pages of collated advice with both soft-skill ‘mentorship’-style pointers and hard-skill how-to specifics, this — of my readings so far — is the PhD compendium. While the two decades that have passed since its 2004 publication render some of the hard-skills instructions on navigating library catalogues and posting manuscripts through the mail somewhat obsolete, my pages-on-pages of highlights, notes, and annotations attest to the feel of pressing relevance in the non-technical sections. For me personally, ‘Unwritten Rules’ was the supportive but stern hand-on-the-shoulder of an older mentor that my impatient, reformist, youthfully outraged, and iconoclastic self very much needed to receive — reminding me of my humble place within the broader structure of academia and re-directing my energy to a much more productive place. This could not have come at a more beneficial time.

This book is clearly a labour of great love and that love — of academia, and of mentoring — shines through in every tongue-in-cheek page, making it a pleasure to read. The authors here speak best in their own words, and thus my ‘review’ is actually just a structured selection of quotes with brief contextualisations and some personal interpretations. I highly recommend that all students seek out this text and create a personalised quotes list for themselves.

On PhD as an Apprenticeship

One of the more interesting discussions I have been witness to was my two supervisors disagreeing about what constitutes PhD-level research. One recommended that ambitious students should aim for grand contributions that will lead to Nature publications, while the other said that happy students retain their mental stability through pursuing multiple, smaller, within-grasp papers. This book quite solidly prefers this latter stance.

In ‘Unwritten Rules’, the PhD is conceptualised as academia’s apprenticeship in which the student (paralleling any other apprenticeship in more practical matters such as carpentry) spends some 3 to 4 years learning about how to sand wood, craft joins, and not chop their fingers off. A PhD is therefore complete when the student can demonstrate “competence and professionalism, rather than greatness” (3). This metaphor of carpentry is regularly returned to throughout the chapters, at all times reminding us that all a PhD student needs to achieve is their own learning.

[A] PhD is less like hacking through the jungle with a machete, and more like crawling around on the ground with a magnifying glass – less major discovery of new lands, more painstakingly detailed investigation of familiar ones. ~2

[A PhD is] a ‘master piece’, not in the sense of an‘ultimate work’, but in the sense of a piece that qualifies an apprentice to be called a master through its demonstration of techniques, skills, form and function. ~12

[T]he day of your successful [thesis acceptance] is the first day of the rest of your life. ~33

Don’t try to do everything at once; one good work leads to another. ~38

Students rarely do research so damaging or dreadful that it is spoken about as a tale of nameless horror. The more common form of academic suicide is doing something so boring or pointless – and so badly constructed – that the examiners can find no merit in it. ~109

A life’s work takes a lifetime, but it’s achieved one step at a time. ~112

On Attitude

Thus far in my experience, the difference between happy and unhappy PhD students rests largely in the mindset with which they approach their work. Rugg and Petre do not overlook this, spending considerable time commenting on the emotional and attitude swings that anyone will naturally encounter in any multi-year endeavour, and helping us build frameworks to healthily, calmly, and professionally get through those inevitable bad weeks.

PhDs are messy, personal and ill-specified. They involve putting your ideas on the line in a way that … many students perceive that it’s not just their ideas that are being judged, but their intellect and by implication their worth. … As a result, perfectly capable and accomplished students experience stress, behave emotionally and often irrationally, and take things personally. Many develop destructive habits and thereby become their own worst enemy. ~216

Instrumental behaviour is behaviour which moves you toward your goals. Expressive behaviour is behaviour intended to demonstrate to others what sort of person you are. A student sitting in the library wading through the six key texts for their area of research is engaging in instrumental behaviour. The student sitting at the next table reading the same page of an irrelevant paper over and over again in a state of nervous collapse is going for expressive behaviour (‘Look how hard I’m working! Please have mercy . . .’). ~217

Expressive behaviour is not always bad, however, and there is also an inverse context where the signalling of expressive behaviour is instrumental in itself. While I didn’t select a single quote to exemplify this, early on in the book the authors discuss how being a researcher is a type of membership to a university, and being a good academic therefore involves some active signalling of membership to this club. For example, partaking in university antics (no matter how unnecessary they might seem) respectfully and promptly shows you are a good team player. This is expanded on in sections about administration.

Again, I don’t have a single quote for this idea, but I collated a list of noted attitude mistakes:

Finally, this following quote was the first time I had heard this idea stated. While this was always perfectly obvious, it was never actually directly and explicitly perceived by me before (sorry). Particularly as a card-carrying Gen Z of the me!-me!-me! generation, it is always good to sprinkle this reminder in when I find myself having too much unfettered fun… I am having the time of my life, but I am also a staff member supported by a massive organisation - to whom I owe so much.

Strangely enough, your PhD is not just ‘about you’; it’s also about your supervisor, your department, your university. It’s not all take – you have to give, too. ~ 46

On Supervision

The PhD is a non-standardised undertaking at the best of times, and the role of the supervisor appears to be one of the most inconsistent of them all. I have known supervisors who disappear for half a year at a time but want to micro-edit every manuscript submission, meanwhile I have social lunch with my supervisor daily but he grants me total freedom in my work! Seeing my supervisor as a respected colleague with whom I’m collaborating and sharing, rather than as a boss or parent who ‘owes’ me time and attention was one of the most empowering and freeing realisations of the past year.

The purpose of the PhD is to demonstrate that you can operate as an independent researcher and uncover new knowledge; if you expect your supervisor to know more than you about every aspect of your PhD, then you have missed the whole point. ~45

PhD students take up time, which is the supervisor’s scarcest resource, and are in that sense a liability. A sensible student will reduce their liability rating; a good student will find ways of being a positive asset. ~47

Whereas you’ll be growing and changing significantly during your studies (at a rate comparable to that at which children develop), your supervisor will be growing and changing more subtly (at a rate comparable to that at which parents develop) – and will be less focused on their development than you are on yours. ~222

On Administration

Both the continual recurrence of commentary on the necessity and immutability of the administrative academic machinery, as well as the fact that I highlighted so many of these sections, speaks for itself. Of the entire book, these collected quotes are potentially the most influential for me personally and I paste them in my mind for regular retrieval. The minutes per week I previously spent bemoaning my seemingly self-filling inbox has now been replaced by actually clearing it.

Forms are a sort of tax you pay for belonging to (and being supported by) an organization … come to terms with forms as an easy way to show goodwill, and learn to deal with them with dispatch. ~12

Academia is what it is, and that is bureaucratic. Processes and procedures are what they are, and that is persistent – they’ll still be around when you’re not. The result is that you will probably have to go through procedures that, however well-intentioned and important they might be, appear cumbersome and pointless to you. Our advice is to cooperate with them, however much or little sense they seem to make. If they don’t seem to make much sense, cooperate with them all the same and save your energy for other battles. ~27

On Research

The latter sections of the book focused much more on the mechanics of research. While the advice was valuable and extensive, my personal note-taking is highly biased to the points most relevant to myself. Specifically, I have noticed in myself a bad habit for becoming overly attached to my hypothesis and benefited a lot from the frank phrasing of Rugg and Petre snapping me out of this.

Probably the most thought-intensive step in study design is deciding what the question is. The second step is deciding what sort of evidence will satisfy you in addressing the question (if not answering it). ~97

People tend to seek confirmatory evidence, to prioritize evidence consistent with what they believe to be true. But often insight lies in the ‘surprises’, the unexpected, the contradictions. Considering the nature of counter-examples, contradictions, exceptions and other forms of counter-evidence can be a way of reflecting on the question (and of exposing inadequacies in the way you’ve been thinking about the question and formulating it). ~97

[S]tarting by asking ‘How can I design an experiment in order to prove X?’ suggests that the researcher doesn’t understand the role of experiments; they’re seeking proof, when experiments can only disprove ~98

Good research is about asking good questions, not about gambling on what the answers might be. ~100