Summary
Doctoral students often feel responsible for everything: funding, supervisor behaviour, shifting expectations, peer competition and publication outcomes. When all of these moving parts are treated as personal failings or successes, a PhD can become emotionally exhausting and far harder than it needs to be.
This article provides a practical guide to what PhD students can and cannot control, and how to respond to each domain. It separates factors such as external deadlines, job markets, funding trends and reviewer decisions from elements that are more influenceable: daily habits, writing practices, professional relationships and attitudes towards setbacks.
By focusing energy on controllable actions — skills development, time management, proactive communication and high-quality writing — and accepting what lies outside their reach, doctoral students can protect their wellbeing, make more consistent progress and emerge from the PhD with both a thesis and a sustainable approach to academic work.
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PhD Students: What You Can Control—and What You Cannot—in Your Journey
Few experiences combine opportunity and uncertainty quite like a PhD. You have the chance to spend several years exploring a topic in depth, developing expertise and contributing something genuinely new to your field. At the same time, you are navigating unstable funding, complex power structures, publication pressure and a job market that can feel brutally competitive.
When everything feels high-stakes and uncertain, it is easy to fall into one of two traps. The first is believing that you can and should control absolutely every outcome: every reviewer decision, every grant result, every line of your supervisor’s schedule. The second is the opposite: feeling that nothing is under your control, that the PhD is just a series of unpredictable events that you can only endure.
Neither perspective is accurate, and neither is healthy. Thriving in a PhD means recognising the difference between what you can influence directly, what you can influence indirectly and what lies completely outside your control. Once you make this distinction, your decisions, your effort and even your self-criticism become more focused and more productive.
1. Out of Your Control: The Landscape Around Your PhD
First, it helps to name the factors that are not in your control. This does not mean they are unimportant; many of them shape your experience profoundly. But seeing them clearly as external conditions rather than personal failings can reduce unnecessary guilt and anxiety.
1.1. Funding decisions and research trends
You cannot control national research priorities, the budget of a granting body or the sudden popularity of another topic that seems to eclipse your own. Large-scale trends in funding and attention move slowly and are driven by factors far beyond any individual student: political priorities, industrial partnerships, crises and public opinion.
What you can do is remain informed. Read calls for proposals, follow disciplinary debates and pay attention to where your work might intersect with more visible conversations. You may adjust your framing or highlight certain applications, but that is adaptation, not responsibility for the entire landscape.
1.2. External deadlines and administrative rules
Universities impose submission deadlines, ethics approval procedures, progress reviews and format requirements. Journals have their own policies and turnaround times. Visa regulations may dictate how long you can remain in a country after graduation. You cannot negotiate all of these structures into something perfectly comfortable.
Recognising that some rules simply exist frees you to work with them rather than constantly wishing they were different. You can plan backwards from key dates, ask for clarification, and, when genuinely necessary, request reasonable extensions. But you are not failing when a bureaucratic system is slow or rigid; you are living in reality.
1.3. Reviewer and editor decisions
Few experiences sting more than a curt rejection after months of work. It is natural to replay the process in your mind, wondering what you should have done differently, but there is a limit to how far those reflections can go. You cannot control which reviewers are selected, what mood they are in, or whether they happen to favour your theoretical tradition.
What you can control is the quality of your submission, the clarity of your response to comments and the choice of journals or conferences. Beyond that point, editorial judgements are just that: judgements. They may be informed, fair and insightful, or they may be idiosyncratic. They are never a complete verdict on your worth as a researcher.
1.4. The academic job market
During or after the PhD, many students become acutely aware of the structural scarcity of permanent positions. Economic shifts, institutional hiring freezes and demographic patterns shape how many posts are available in any given year. You cannot single-handedly create more jobs or redesign the entire system of academic employment.
You can, however, take steps to broaden your options, gain transferable skills and present your achievements honestly and persuasively. Recognising that the market is a structural issue rather than a personal failure can protect your sense of worth, even if your path ultimately leads beyond academia.
2. In Your Control: Daily Practices and Attitudes
Once you have acknowledged what you cannot control, it becomes easier to focus on what you can. Many of the most powerful levers for shaping your PhD experience are surprisingly small: the routines you build, the way you respond to setbacks and the care you invest in your writing and communication.
2.1. How you manage your time
Time management is not only about scheduling more hours. It is about aligning your time with your priorities. A PhD can easily dissolve into weeks of answering emails, reacting to others’ requests and tinkering with analyses that are not central to your thesis. You cannot extend the day, but you can choose how you allocate your attention.
Simple practices such as blocking regular writing sessions, reserving concentrated time for reading, and setting modest but specific daily goals can dramatically change the trajectory of a project. Even if you can spend only ninety focused minutes per day on your thesis, those minutes compound into chapters over time.
2.2. Your approach to writing and revision
Writing is one of the areas where your choices have a direct and visible impact. You can decide to treat writing as something you do only when inspiration hits, or you can approach it as a skill to practise regularly, much like an experiment or analysis method. Drafting early, seeking feedback and revising in stages are all within your control.
Investing in professional support can also be a proactive choice. When English is not your first language, or when your thesis must meet specific formatting and style requirements, using a PhD thesis editing service or academic proofreading service can help move your work from “understandable” to “publishable”. This does not replace your responsibility for the arguments and data, but it does demonstrate control over presentation quality.
2.3. How you interact with your supervisor
No PhD relationship shapes the experience more than the one with your supervisor. You cannot control your supervisor’s personality, workload or history, but you can influence how you interact with them. Clear communication, realistic expectations and respectful assertiveness are all actions that lie on your side of the line.
Preparing agendas for meetings, sending concise progress updates, and asking for specific feedback (for example, “Could you focus on the structure of this argument?” rather than “What do you think?”) can make supervision more efficient and less anxiety-provoking. If serious problems arise — persistent unavailability, inappropriate behaviour, or a mismatch in expertise — you can seek support from programme directors, graduate schools or trusted mentors. You may not control the outcome, but you control whether you remain silent.
2.4. Your attitude towards feedback and failure
Rejections, critical comments and disappointing results are inevitable in research. What varies is how you interpret them. If every setback becomes proof that you are incapable, your motivation will erode quickly. If you view them as data — sometimes painful, often imperfect, but potentially useful — you maintain agency.
You can decide to read a harsh review once, set it aside for a day and then revisit it with a pen in hand, asking, “Is there anything here that can genuinely improve my work?” You can decide to show feedback to a trusted friend or colleague to gain perspective. You can decide that a particular suggestion contradicts your aims and, with justification, decline to follow it. These are all ways of exercising control without pretending that criticism does not hurt.
3. Shared Control: Areas Where You Can Influence, but Not Dictate
Between the extremes of fully controllable and completely external are many factors where you share influence with others: your lab environment, collaborations, co-authored papers and departmental culture. You cannot design these entirely to your liking, but you are not powerless either.
3.1. Lab and departmental climate
You may not be able to choose every colleague, but you can choose how you contribute to the atmosphere. Small actions — acknowledging others’ successes, offering help when you can, sharing resources — can make your environment more supportive. Over time, these actions attract similar behaviour from others and make it easier to weather stressful periods.
When conflicts arise, you can decide whether to engage directly, seek mediation or, in extreme cases, distance yourself from certain projects. You may not control the behaviour of every person in your programme, but you can decide that your own behaviour will not reproduce patterns you find harmful.
3.2. Collaboration and authorship
Collaboration is both an opportunity and a source of anxiety. You cannot always control when someone responds to emails or completes their part of a joint project. However, you can establish expectations early, propose written agreements about roles, and be clear about authorship order before the project advances too far.
When a collaboration becomes unbalanced, you may need to decide whether to accept a smaller role, renegotiate or step away. None of those choices are easy, but they are still choices. Seeing them as such helps you avoid the feeling of being trapped by other people’s timelines.
4. Reclaiming Agency: Practical Strategies for PhD Students
Understanding what is in your control is most helpful when translated into everyday practices. The following strategies draw together the themes discussed above and can be adapted to your field, institution and personal circumstances.
4.1. Regularly separate “problems to solve” from “facts to accept”
When you feel overwhelmed, write down everything that is worrying you: looming deadlines, unresponsive collaborators, fears about future jobs, confusing reviewer comments. Then mark each item as either actionable or non-actionable. For actionable items, note a next step, however small. For non-actionable items, note instead what you can do to adapt — for example, seeking advice, adjusting expectations or simply acknowledging that the situation is difficult.
This exercise is simple but powerful. It prevents you from spending all your mental energy on scenarios you cannot change and highlights areas where deliberate action is still possible.
4.2. Build sustainable routines rather than crisis responses
PhD life often oscillates between procrastination and panicked marathons before deadlines. Over time, this pattern drains energy and reduces the quality of your work. A more sustainable approach involves consistent, moderate engagement: working on your thesis most days, even briefly; scheduling time for rest; and resisting the temptation to treat every week as exceptional.
Routines do not have to be rigid. They should be flexible enough to accommodate conferences, teaching and personal life. The point is not to control every hour but to create a default structure that moves your project forward even when motivation dips.
4.3. Invest in communication skills
Clear communication is one of the most reliable levers of control available to you. The better you can articulate your ideas, your needs and your boundaries, the more likely you are to receive meaningful support. This applies to emails to supervisors, conversations with peers, conference presentations and, crucially, your thesis itself.
Improving your writing is part of this work. Drafting regularly, reading high-quality articles in your area and soliciting feedback can all help. Professional editing can also support this process, especially if you are writing in English as an additional language. The goal is not to eliminate your voice but to ensure that readers can see the strength of your ideas without being distracted by avoidable errors.
5. Protecting Wellbeing Without Abandoning Ambition
Some students worry that accepting limits — on what they can control, on how many hours they can productively work, on how quickly they can publish — is the same as lowering their ambitions. In fact, the opposite is often true. Few people produce excellent work when they are chronically exhausted, isolated or consumed by self-blame.
Recognising that you cannot fix funding systems or guarantee job offers is not defeatist; it is honest. Within that honesty, you can then choose where to direct your effort so that it has the greatest effect: learning methods thoroughly, designing careful studies, writing clearly, nurturing supportive relationships and leaving room in your life for interests and people outside the PhD.
Ambition that ignores reality burns out quickly. Ambition that understands its context can last a career.
Conclusion: Focusing on the Part of the Circle You Can Shape
If you imagine your PhD life as a large circle, a portion of that circle is filled with elements you do not control: policy changes, funding decisions, editorial whims, the global job market. Another portion is filled with the actions and attitudes that belong to you: how you organise your days, how you respond to criticism, how carefully you write and revise, how you communicate with supervisors and collaborators.
The aim is not to ignore the first portion — it shapes your constraints and opportunities. But the only part of the circle you can actively shape is the second. When you consciously invest time and energy there, the PhD becomes less like a storm you are trying to survive and more like a long, difficult but navigable journey you are actively steering.
Whatever the external circumstances, your work can still be clear, rigorous and honest. Your thesis can still make a meaningful contribution, even if its reception in the wider academic landscape is influenced by factors beyond your control. In choosing to concentrate on what you can do — today, this week, this year — you protect both your project and yourself.
If you would like support with one of the areas that is in your control — the clarity and accuracy of your written work — our PhD thesis editing service and academic proofreading service can help ensure that your ideas are presented in polished, publication-ready English, so that your effort is fully visible to examiners, reviewers and future readers.
