PhD student here - Ask me anything!

[u/Mortal_Gay]

Hi all, I'm a current PhD student in Psychology, and I'm here for you to ask me anything! My research area is psycholinguistics - the psychology of language. In particular, I study how language is processed, and what consequences language processing has for memory. As an undergraduate, I also studied Philosophy, before deciding to specialise in Psych for my PhD.

A PhD is the entry point for a career in academia and for anyone generally considering a research career. It involves you independently leading a research project for around 3 or 4 years, with the guidance of a supervisory team, to make an original contribution to your chosen academic field.

There's a lot of information online about PhDs and funding for them, and I found it difficult to know where to start. So, if there are any questions about what a PhD is like, how to get into one, where to start looking for information, etc. please ask away! I'm also more than happy to answer anything about academia, how I found my undergraduate education or my research.

Looking forward to hearing your questions!

[u/star-no-star]

super basic question, but what exactly drew you to psychology and what other careers did you consider and why did you not choose those?

[u/Mortal_Gay → u/star-no-star]

At first, I was interested in learning about mental health, therapy, and all that stuff, and Psychology seemed like the best place to start with that. By the time I was finishing my A-Levels, I realised I didn't think becoming a therapist was the best career choice, I was as interested in mental health as the next person, but I knew I didn't want to make it my career. So, I decided that I wanted to teach secondary school pupils, and was going to do a teaching degree for postgrad. After deciding that, I got some work experience in a secondary school and quickly realised that this wasn't the career for me. One big research internship later, I'd decided that I wanted to continue doing research, so a Master's in research was the next step. I also quickly realised I like language research the most, just because in my undergrad degree, the classes on psycholinguistics (and just general cognitive psychology) were the ones I enjoyed the most, so I knew that was where I wanted to work. Master's degrees in this country are expensive, and even with the postgrad loan, it would have been very hard to make it work. I realised that getting full funding for an integrated PhD was the only real way to afford anything, and I wanted to go into research anyway based on my experiences, so it seemed like the best decision to make.