Its kind of common for youtubers to start of videos that might be a little bit spicy
by saying things like, ' this video is so hard to make' and I guess that is a little
bit true here in the fact that I am a little bit worried about making this video because
I am afraid of being judged or of letting anyone down.
But I also feel pretty confident in what i'm doing so i'd just like to explain my situation
to you.
Maybe sometimes people follow a path something like this from student to professor.
I've got professor up there because it is like the pinnacle of the academic pathway.
But sometimes maybe a path looks more like this between those same destinations.
I have always throughout my life been going on this path, this straight trajectory.
I've always done things that I feel were quite obviously seen as going forwards in the right
direction towards some goal.
Although right now I feel i'm on here and I think maybe i'm going off somewhere like
this.
So I have withdrawn from my PhD program and I don't even know if i'm going on a path to
professor which used to be the old destination or if i'm going to end up somewhere completely
different and maybe i'm ok with that.
Coming to this decision to withdraw from my PhD program was actually pretty difficult
and I think the main emotional strain that I felt was that for the first time in my life
I was unsure of what I wanted to do.
I mean this in terms of career because i'd always been going to the same destination
which maybe was wanting to be a professor or teaching at a university level.
However I started to not enjoy my PhD that much and I also felt a little bit disillusioned
with the academic system as a whole.
I guess what I felt was for the first time this unsure feeling of where I wanted to be
and it was almost overwhelming because it meant that I could do anything I wanted to
do.
If I stopped aiming for this one thing then I could pick any other random thing to aim
for and that was almost overwhelming in a way.
In a good way like that there were so many possibilities that I could do.
I only officially withdrew from the PhD program in january even though i've known for a while
that it's what I wanted to do.
And I didn't want to make a video about it before it was official incase anyone involved
saw the video and got a bit surprised.
In terms of where I was in the program, I was about a year into the research component
of doing a PhD.
I, to finish the PhD, probably would have had to stay doing that for another 2 plus
years, maybe 2 or 3 maximum.
I didn't need to do anymore coursework or exams it was only research and writing the
thesis that I needed to do to get the PhD.
And so it kind of seems like oh you were so close why didn't you just stay, but the reasons
why I wanted to leave, I guess there are lots of reasons and i'm just going to keep talking
until I feel like most of them have come out, I just felt like it was the best decision
for me to leave.
Even though in the grand scheme of things i was kind of close to finishing.
I kind of toyed with the idea of leaving in my mind for a little while but I didnt think
I would actually be brave enough to do that because it seemed a bit extreme but i kind
of remember one day just cycling to uni and i don't know it would like like 20 minutes,
15 minutes and I felt like my bike would just get heavier and heavier the closer I got.
In a way that I just felt unmotivated to arrive.
And it was sort of this general feeling that I would go to uni and be there for a while
but really I just wanted to go home and work on things that I actually really enjoyed.
So YouTube is one of them but I mean there were sort of a lot of little side projects
I enjoyed doing and I felt like I was torn and I was separating my time between working
on my PhD and working on the things I actually liked.
Where it got to the point where it kind of felt unsustainable and kind of inauthentic
to try to work on both at the same time.
So ultimately I decided to get rid of the thing that I didn't enjoy doing and just to
do the things that I do enjoy.
Sure I could have just kept going and just stuck at it and in fact a lot of sort of more
senior PhD students maybe they're in their third or even fourth year of research, i'd
spoken to them a bit and there was this general sentiment, almost every one of them said 'oh
those feelings are normal for a PhD student, wait till you get to third or fourth year,
then you will really feel like you don't want to be here'.
But i thought ok sure like a lot of people have said that, you get to a point where you
feel a bit disillusioned with everything and almost everyone apparently wants to pull out
at some point during the PhD but why should that be normal?
And I thought well if im feeling like this already one year in well how am I going to
be feeling three years in?
I don't want to be three years in feeling this because then I dont really have the option
to leave and just leave it all behind but at my current point I feel like the sooner
the better in the sense that I could just leave and I wouldnt lose too much effort and
investment into this thing.
I would hate to be leaving further into the PhD so yeah if I was dragging my feet to sort
of get to uni each day then I think that it was good to just actually do something that
I was excited about.
I also did a bit of reflecting during this time and I came to the conclusion that everything
in my life that ive done that ive been quite proud of came as the result of doing something
brave.
So really stepping out of my comfort zone or just making a decision that wasn't the
easy one.
Doing things like that had got me to the point that I was at and actually i felt like it
had been a while since i'd done anything brave or not taken the easy road.
Maybe starting the PhD in the first place was taking the easy road for me.
I know it sort of sounds strange to say that about pursuing a PhD but after i'd finished
my undergrad and things it was kind of the most readily available thing and I had a scholarship
to do it, it was actually the path of least resistance to just keep going in academia.
So when i think about this decision it is quite brave for me to leave academia and try
to do some other things for a while.
A totally separate reason was kind of highlighted for me in the form of a youtube comment left
on one of my videos, now im going to read it out and this was posted on my fortnite
video and I kind of owe this guy a reply so i'm gonna do that here in this video.
So Basketball guy commented on my video "This is fairly off topic for this video, but based
on your earlier videos it seems like you got interested in physics because you got interested
in as you said those big questions like 'what is our place in the universe?'
Do you feel like you are still pursuing the answers to those questions by studying plant
cell physiology?
I would have thought you would end up in theoretical physics trying to understand the standard
model or trying to quantize gravity or study GR or doing something like experimental quantum
mechanics." and I replied to this guy and I just said this comment hits too close to
home and he said i'd love to here the full story.
So maybe this is a little bit of the full story in maybe I did start to feel like maybe
the topic of my PhD which was experimental biophysics was maybe deviating a bit from
where I saw my greatest passion in physics.
Maybe i started to feel like it wasn't really truly me.
And I don't know how much that is true because I did actually quite enjoy that project.
I do enjoy asking those big questions like you know what is out there in the universe
and what is our place in it and physics offers some answers to those questions but you're
probably never going to answer questions like that in the scope of a PhD.
That's sort of a romantic idea of a PhD student, what their life would be like and what they're
working on.
Often students are working on you know quite obscure little elements of physics, maybe
they fit into this bigger picture of what physics is.
I liked that I was using physics and applying it to biology and looking at these tiny little
structures and i guess try and find out the secrets of how they're working.
I did enjoy that but i guess that comment is right.
I guess when I think about my future in physics and how i got into it i kind of do like the
idea of working in theoretical physics or quantum mechanics or stuff like that.
So whilst maybe i agree that every PhD student wants to leave at some point and loses motivation,
maybe the ones that stay it's because they have that really fundamental motivation in
what they're doing and it really is exactly what they picture themselves doing and theyre
moving towards answering these big questions in their own mind and that allows them to
have the motivation to stay even when it's really tough.
I think my problem is also just that I am interested in so many things.
I think there is so many different projects I could do for a PhD that picking one of them
you will always be unsatisfied that you didn't pick any number of the other ones.
Because it is just really hard to decide what you want to work on when the scope is so large.
In terms of my academic future I wouldn't rule out returning to a PhD program at some
point, just not right now.
I think right now for me there are other opportunities, one of them is Youtube but it's not the only
one, that have a lot more momentum for me than the PhD.
So yeah I can kind of see myself finishing a PhD in the future but what the topic will
be on really I have no idea.
People who were critical of my decision said to me that you know you should just get the
PhD because that qualification will last forever and YouTube might not be around forever and
I fully agree with that I dont think YouTube will be around forever, I actually am not
that optimistic it will be around in the same way that it is for very long at all.
Like even a few years into the future I find it very hard t predict you know how people
will be learning and what people will be using.
Maybe it will still be YouTube but maybe it will be something else entirely.
And that's actually kind of the point, is that I fell like the universities and the
PhD system is going to be around a lot longer than YouTube is so I should jump on doing
YouTube now while I have the opportunity and I can go back to the PhD later because it
is still going to be there.
So really right now I just want to make videos full-time for YouTube I think that I've seen
so much power in education on YouTube.
It's how i learnt it's how I taught myself things and I think it's how people are learning
these days.
Not just learning but also gaining inspiration and new ideas and connecting with other people
and actually working on awesome projects that excite me.
When you compare that with the academic learning system, I much prefer Youtube.
I dont know I used to want to teach at the university system and that was you know why
I was going off to this destination of professor but really I am so much more excited by the
reach that you can get online.
Just in a video made in your bedroom you could reach a million people, you could never really
reach that same sort of audience teaching in a conventional environment.
And maybe it's not as impactful if you're just you know talking through a video but
I actually find it more impactful because you guys get to know me and the people that
I watch on YouTube, I feel sort of connected to them in a way that i don't feel when i'm
learning in a conventional place.
I'm also doing a little bit of freelance science communication work and in general just pursuing
the projects that i'm interested in.
I am interested in like start-ups and that sort of community and so maybe I would like
to make my own business.
Probably based around education and online education but we will see what happens there.
I haven't got any solid plans at the moment that's just something that I know I'd really
enjoy.
While I have this momentum in this science communication aspect of my life at the moment
I just want to run with it and see where we go.
It was a bit of a risky decision for me to just quit my PhD and I felt a bit like it
was metaphorically jumping off a cliff because i was sort of jumping into the unknown.
I'm still floundering in the unknown a little bit, especially because these projects that
I want to work on are still in their infancy but I do have confidence and i'm happy with
what i'm doing so yea i'm just going to keep doing it.
When I did decide to do this I was really scared of disappointing people.
The number one person I was scared of disappointing was my PhD supervisor and I guess it took
me multiple meetings with her to actually work up the courage to say that I wanted to
leave.
That's because she was a really good supervisor.
But I think that fact was reflected in what her response was which was that she was excited
for me and um after a while like she said that she felt like her job as a supervisor
was done that she'd you know set me off on a path to doing something i enjoyed and that
was so nice and i guess so perfect to what I wanted to hear.
And i feel like that really was the goal of a supervisor to get their students you know
to a pathway to a job to do something that they enjoy so yea i guess i didn't need to
be so afraid there.
There was other people that I was afraid of disappointing too, I did have this quite fancy
PhD scholarship from one of the banks in Australia, Westpac, and I was kind of afraid of what
would happen when I told them that I was leaving the program that they'd like been giving me
money to do but actually they were really supportive as well and when i told them that
i'd quit, they actually were like oh can we write an article about you and what you're
doing now because that's so exciting and so just this week they published an article about
my YouTube channel.
So im like well maybe I didn't need to be so worried.
Um the only other people that i'm really worried about disappointing is you guys because sometimes
I get comments saying like that i'm someone's inspiration in terms of pursuing physics or
maths or whatever and I dont know how much of that inspiration comes from the fact that
i'm a PhD student and that you know that's my current title.
I guess this doesn't change anything of like my knowledge or what i've done or achieved
in the past but I felt sort of afraid that people would no longer find me as inspirational.
But really I want to be authentic with people here on Youtube and I want you to know that
I am also a student just like you and so I have my own things to figure out as well.
You know I get asked a lot of questions to do with um giving advice on picking majors
or picking courses or anything like this as if I am you know up on a pedestal handing
out advice because I know the perfect way to do everything but that's so far from the
truth.
I only have my own experience and i'm still figuring things out too.
So I want you to know that I have flaws as well so you can watch my journey here but
you know it is a journey so i'm not at that destination yet I feel.
If I had a time machine and could go a few years into the future and already have my
PhD degree and already have the qualification and I think well what would I do with it,
what I would want to do is exactly what im doing right here right now.
So i'm really grateful to have you watching and to have this way to provide educational
content.
it's something that I really appreciate and I really enjoy.
Because i'm already doing exactly what I want to do right now, that's why I felt like I
didnt need my PhD degree.
But you know, i know that people's minds change, i'll see how I feel in a few more years maybe.
Thank you so much for your support, from here if anything things will be the same but i'll
be uploading more content, hopefully better content, thank you for sticking around and
thanks for watching :)