Question: Is it hard studying for a PhD? I've heard that it takes a while...

Kieren Bradley answered on 9 Mar 2014:

It is quite hard, firstly you have to do a 3 or 4 year degree in the first place and get a good enough grade and get through an interview to get onto the PhD course. Then in the UK you have to spend between 3 and 4 years doing lots of experiments, reading lots of other peoples papers, learning theory, analysing data and writing up your results into papers and finally a few tens of thousands word thesis. Once you hand your thesis in it is sent to an expert at another university who reads it before interviewing you for 2 to 6 hours, giving you some suggestions on what to change and hopefully declaring that you have a PhD and call yourself Dr. The process is definitely difficult, but so are quite a lot of other jobs, and most people research something that they find really interesting so they don’t mind the hard work and you get great satisfaction once it is finished (well from what I’ve been told, I’m a bit over halfway through mine.)

Other countries take longer, Germany you have to do a 5 or 6 year course before you start and then the PhD takes another 4 or 5 years. In America they usually have to do 2 years, write a big report and then another 4 years doing their actual PhD, so I think I’m probably actually lucky in doing it in the UK.