One of the catalysts that kickstarted this blog was the realization that PhD students are at a higher risk of mental health problems than other students and professionals. Yet, how bad is the problem really? Exactly how many PhD students are suffering from depression or severe anxiety right now? How many will drop out? In this quickie post, I pull from the data of a few recent studies to give a concrete, numeric answer guesstimate to these questions.

Aside from PhD students’ own motivational factors (e.g., how much progress they perceive, or how exhausted they are), the support they receive from supervisors is another key aspect related to doctoral completion. In the continuation of last week’s “study report”, we discuss how different kinds of supervisor support relate to those motivational factors and, eventually, the finishing of the doctorate. We will also see how supervisors could foster these motivational aspects and help their students complete the PhD.

Many factors seem to play out into whether we complete our PhD, or drop out of it. Some of them are external and largely uncontrollable (like financial or family problems), while others relate to our thesis project and motivation. In this new type of blog post (the “study report”), I dive into the results of a recent research study that defines five types of doctoral students, in terms of their motivational profile.

In last week’s post, we established that dropping out of a Ph.D. (or thinking about it) is surprisingly common, and we saw demographic and socio-economic factors that seem related to doctoral attrition. In this post, I dive into another strand of research that relates doctoral dropout with a general theory of human motivation: self-determination theory. This research helps explain why you may persist and finish your doctorate (and even have fun doing it), despite having such socio-economic factors playing against you. Or vice-versa. The post also gleans practical advice from the literature on doctoral attrition, in the hope of helping students and supervisors avoid this common pitfall.

Aside from the fact that doing a Ph.D. seems to put you at a greater risk of being anxious or depressed than other occupations, some students may also face the question: will I ever finish my thesis at all? This post digs into research about doctoral attrition and completion, and what factors seem to make dropping out more likely. Do not give up!… unless you really want to.