Why would you want to do a PhD?

This week I thought I'd talk about deciding to do a PhD, as I'm sure that quite a few people will be currently deciding whether to do one or not. As a health warning this post is based on my experience and is focussed on science/engineering PhDs as they're what I'm familiar with.

So, I why you might want to do a PhD? It’s one of those questions which has many answers for many different people. You could probably guess some reasons pretty easily, others are probably less well known outside the academic community. In my experience some of the most common reasons are:

• I love my subject and want to keep learning about it after my degree.

• I want to be a lecturer one day so I kind of need one. (Not 100% true by the way.) 

• I want to be a professional scientist so a PhD would be a really great way to kick start my career.

• I want to explore science and give research in something new a try.

• I love being at uni! I don't want to leave! I should do a PhD!

• Oh my God! What do I do now. SOMEONE HELP ME! Oh, you'll pay me to keep doing my final year research project... That doesn't seem so bad. 

Some of these are really good reasons, some not so much. However, at the end of the day who am I to judge people on what influences their decision making process. Your motivation doesn't really matter as long as you turn up and do what is expected of you. So if you want to do a PhD just because you want to stay at uni, I'm not going to tell you not to.

Having said that in an ideal world if you're choosing to do a PhD you should hopefully be pretty sure that you enjoy research and can handle the highly independent study that you're about to undertake. But how do you find out these things? From my experience your final year research project will help, but you can also find out by doing a summer/holiday research project, which I would thoroughly recommend to all undergraduates. Not only will it give you a bit of income over the summer, it's a great thing to have on your CV whether you want to do a PhD or not. Basically you sign up to work on a specific project for somewhere between 6 weeks and 3 months and see how it goes. Some require you just to turn up and do your work, others will want reports at the end and some will want you to do a presentation on your experiences. Lots of universities offer research placements for their students that are really easy to apply for (physics at Leeds takes 36 people into their research groups every summer). In addition there are opportunities to get research placements outside of your own university. These can be accessible through looking at career's service postings, the big nationwide sites like prospects.ac.uk, through organisations like the Odgen Trust or by going direct to a research group and securing your own funding from places like the BBSRC, Royal Society of Chemistry and the Nuffield Foundation (for keen scientists doing AS levels).

When I was an undergraduate I did two summer research placements after the first and second years of my degree and I had two very, very different experiences. My first placement was within my university's physics department and involved me hitting a keyboard for 6 weeks as I desperately tried to model the interaction of light with atoms by creating a program using specialised add-ons in C++. This just wasn't for me. Basically I spent my time trying to make something, anything work and I eventually wrote a basic user manual on the how to code models in the language. After that it was safe to say I was not a fan of research and I had no intention of doing a PhD. The next summer I found myself a new research placement in a Medical Physics department with idea of it boosting my CV ready for a clinical science career. In the end I got so much more out of the placement than just pure CV building. Once again I was hitting a keyboard (this time for 3 months), but I felt I was doing something worthwhile and really interesting. I was basically pulling numerical data out of simulated medical images and finding a set of equations which mimic the way a person sees a tumour in those images. It was great! I loved the research activity, I learnt how to use the programming language Matlab, how to write a paper and I got an insight into the careers of the people around me which was very useful. This gave me two clear ideas. Firstly, I liked research where I used my maths and physics skills to do something that I felt had a clear application and secondly, it might not be so bad to do a PhD after all and I should be able to handle it.

So, why did I decide to do a PhD in the end? My personal decision was based on a combination of 'I want to be a scientist', 'I want to explore science' and 'oh God, oh God what do I do now?' Which seemed like a good enough motivation at the time and has served me pretty well so far. What would my advice be after my journey towards doing a PhD and signing on the dotted line? Get experience, but don't judge a whole world of opportunities on one placement or project. Now I'm doing my PhD, I know that even my second placement didn't give me a full picture of what I wanted out of a research project and it didn't give me all the tools I needed to succeed. If you are leaning towards doing a PhD but aren't 100% sure, why not apply? You can always change your mind over the months it takes to get from application to contract. You can always come back and do one later in life too, but it might not be as easy to do as when you're fresh out of your first degree!

If you're a current or budding PhD student why are you aiming to get your doctorate? 
What experiences of summer research placements have you had? 
Let us know in the comments below!