My PhD Journey - Josh

I want to begin by acknowledging that self-funding sounds very scary, especially in today’s economic climate. Here I am going to explore how much a PhD is going to cost, what funding there is to support you and whether working and doing a PhD at the same time is even sustainable. After reading this, I hope to give you a clearer self-funded picture, to give you clarity over what a self-funded PhD might look like.  

So, who am I to talk on this issue? I am currently in my first-year of a self-funded PhD in Sociology here at Leeds. The reason I am self-funding is that I applied for funding multiple times unsuccessfully and decided I had the means to just get on with it. Of course, my experience is individual and yours will be too, but hopefully my story and thoughts will prove useful if you are deciding whether to undertake a self-funded PhD. It is also important to state at this stage that I am full-time, and therefore this narrative will apply slightly differently if you are part-time. I mainly hope that I don’t scare you away with lots of big numbers! 

However, reality is reality, so let’s start there. I always feel that the scary part should be upfront. Doing a PhD is an expensive endeavour. It just is. For a home student, you are looking at around £15k in fees over the 3 years. If you are an international student then these numbers skyrocket to quite eyewatering amounts and unfortunately no amount of part-time work will be likely to save you. You then of course need enough money to live, and live somewhat comfortably. If we are being fair, you are likely to be able to live on £15k a year, including rent. So, across the 3 years, you are looking at 60k minimum, it may even be more than that. That is a lot of money to find without a scholarship, so where do you begin? 

The most obvious port of call is the Postgraduate loan available through the Students Loan Company. As of the 25/26 academic year, the loan sits at £30.4k. This means that the loan is likely to cover around half of your expenses. This is a start! For those of you who are wary of taking out what is likely yet another loan, I would have this advice: the loan is there to support you, and if like me, you have no other option, take it. I say this not as financial advice, but as life advice. If you really want to do a PhD, like I did, I am happy to take on the debt to do something I love. I imagine I would spend the rest of my life asking ‘what if I did that PhD, where would I be?’. I truly believe in life we regret the things we didn’t do, rather than the ones we did. 

Ok, so that’s some of the cost covered, but what about the other half? In my personal situation, I worked for 3 years abroad as a teacher and managed to save some money to help me, but still nowhere near enough to cover the costs of 3 years study. Some people may have very little saved which is also ok. Either way, this leads to only a few options. One of which, is work. Yes, it is almost guaranteed that as a self-funded student, you will need to work in some capacity. Eventually, after you pass your transfer, this may be working as a teaching assistant in your school, which many PGRs do. For me, this is currently teaching part-time online. For others, it could look completely different and the choice of job is really up to the individual.  

So is it possible to work whilst doing the PhD. The short answer is yes. Am I slightly jealous of those who have funding? Of course! However, needing to work also opens up opportunities to immerse in the wider community, meet new friends, and gain added experience in a relevant field. Life isn’t always so linear, and there is no shame in doing a PhD and finding a way to fund yourself. It may be that after the first year, you are struggling and need to move part-time to earn more money. Here at Leeds, I know that there is great support available and on top of that, many funders will open up their training and events to self-funded students! 

The important questions to ask yourself include some serious reflection: how much do I want this? Do I have time to attempt to get funding again? is this financially feasible for me? What support can I utilise? 

If the answer to these questions leaves you in a position to self-fund, it is a viable option and can bring with it a real sense of achievement. I hope this short blog has proved useful,, and I wish you the best in whichever path you decide to take. 

Handling rejection is something that I have become accustomed to in my academic career. I would argue that I have become somewhat of an expert at it. Here in this reflection, I will share with you my own meandering story in starting a PhD, that included 4 years of rejection, and a trip across the world, before finally starting my self-funded PhD. 

If I’m honest, PhD study was not a life goal of mine growing up, in fact I only went to Uni for the party and because I hated my 9-5 job as a car salesman. I still remember the conversations I had at that time, I saw it as a way out, a now or never decision. I didn’t like the life I was living. So how did I end up here? 

Well, first we need to do some time travelling. Welcome to the year 2022. I was in the second semester of my masters in Sociology at Durham University. I had just received fantastic grades for my January essays, including an 86 in a critical pedagogy essay! Safe to say, I was feeling on top of the academic world. I had never even considered a PhD before this point, but with confidence at an all-time high, I genuinely believed I was perfect for doctoral study.  

I had conversations with some staff in the Sociology department, and they put me in touch with two brilliant academics from the Education department who were working on projects linked to assessment. We began the process of writing a proposal and as the months went by, the hard work left us with a proposal ready for the NINEDTP (North-East equivalent of WRDTP). Upon submission, we first had to pass an internal panel who would decide which proposals were even worth sending to the DTP. I made it through. At this stage I remember feeling supremely confident, surely there was no way I would be rejected?  

Life has a funny way of bringing you down to earth doesn’t it, and after what I thought was a brilliant final interview, two places were to be given from the five of us shortlisted. I was told that unfortunately, I had missed out. 

How could this be? Was it my proposal? Was it my supervisors? Was it me? 

After a few days of feeling sorry for myself, I needed answers. 

I contacted the team who dealt with proposals to get some feedback, to find out what went wrong, and more importantly, what I could do next time to fix it. They were very kind and said that my proposal scored extremely highly but that the two chosen scored higher. Of course, this is completely reasonable, and they gave me some tips in terms of my proposal saying that my methods could have been slightly more thought through. So, if you do happen to encounter rejection, you can ask for feedback! In fact, I would argue you must ask for feedback, even if this feels scary. 

Upon my rejection, I realised that I had a year until I could reapply for another scholarship. Armed with my feedback, I felt confident again, but I couldn’t sit still for a year, I needed to improve myself and my proposal. At the time, I had a part-time job in a café and whilst I felt it was a stable and good job, it wasn’t a CV improver in terms of education, so what could I do instead? I toyed with the idea of an internship and did some looking but couldn’t find anything suitable that would also pay the bills. I had always thought I might enjoy teaching, and upon the realisation that I couldn’t teach in England due to a lack of a PGCE, the idea of teaching abroad floated through my mind. 

In the end, on December 1st 2022, I set foot on a flight at Heathrow bound for Guangzhou, China. Was I mental? I asked myself this question as I sat on that plane, but I remember thinking at the time, that as one door closes, another opens. Life has a funny way of taking you down unexpected paths, but for very good reasons. Maybe I wasn’t ready to do my PhD in 2022? Now, I won’t go into too much detail here about my experience in China, but all I will say is that I LOVED it. As the year progressed, I was no longer in contact with my supervisors at Durham (mainly because I neglected to keep the relationship going), but I had some wonderful colleagues at Northumbria who I had worked with during my undergrad. 

We prepared my applications ready for submission through the NINEDTP and Northumbria’s internal funding scheme. I again felt confident, surely, I was a shoe in this time? (I hope you are starting to notice a pattern). I again reached the final interview stage and again I was told that unfortunately it wasn’t to be. What! I had taken on all the advice and felt my project was much better than last year.  

I was dejected. 

Luckily, I was loving my life in China and staying there was not so bad, I was earning good money and felt I was developing as a teacher. I found that with every rejection, we have a choice. We are allowed to feel dejected, sad and confused, but after all is said and done, life moves on. Opportunities to see the good in the bad are all around us. Whilst rejection feels personal at the time, it very rarely is. It clearly wasn’t my time, life had other plans for me.  

For some strange reason, I still wanted to do a PhD, I felt I was meant to do one, so why wasn’t I getting the funding? I extended my contact in China and again reached out to the people making the decisions.  

“Tell me, what is it I need to do to?” – this was basically the question I posed to the head of research at Northumbria on a teams call as I sat at my desk in China. I was used to rejection at this stage and wanted answers. Notice, I was used to rejection. In life, and certainly in academia, this will become normal. Rejection is part of the game; the important part is how you bounce back. 

So, what did I do? 

I waited another year and to cut a long story short, I was didn’t get the funding for a third-year running. Many of you will be reading this and thinking, come on mate, maybe this just isn’t for you. People close to me said the same, but I wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of me doing a PhD, I still felt it was part of my destiny. Maybe I was deluded. 

I just couldn’t bring myself to give up, I still wanted to do a PhD as badly after this rejection as I had after the first, in fact, I might have even wanted it more as crazy as that seems. I still believed. There had to be a way for this to work. I spoke to my parents, supervisors, everyone I could that I trusted. I came to the realisation that maybe funding wasn’t the path and that life was yet again taking me in a new direction. If China had taught me anything it was that going down the unexpected route can lead to the most beautiful paths. 

Having spent 3 years in China, I was luckily enough to have saved a substantial amount of money, namely because I didn’t pay rent for the whole time, and decided that if DTP’s and Universities weren’t going to fund me, I was going to grab life by the scruff of the neck and do it myself.  

I want to recognise here how lucky I am to have this option. I also have very supportive parents, and I appreciated not everyone is in as lucky a position as me. I understand my privilege.  

I had sent a random application to Leeds alongside my Northumbria application and whilst Leeds weren’t offering me funding, they were offering me a place, and my proposed supervisors seemed really interested in my ideas. So, in October 2025, relatively fresh off the plane from China, I finally started my PhD at the University of Leeds. 

What do I hope can be learned from my story? I hope reading this you see the value of persistence. I could have given up so easily and sometimes I wonder why I didn’t, it would have been the easy thing to do. A drive inside me was telling me that this was what I was here to do. As Frank Sinatra brilliantly sang “I thought of quitting baby, but my heart just ain’t gonna buy it” and I truly believe in the notion that we are all here for a reason. I believe the reason I am here is to use my passion for teaching and education for good and this 3-year PhD is going to be the culmination of not just these 3 years coming, but the 4 or 5 it took to get here as well. All the setbacks, the doubt, the lessons, all lead up to this. 

Hopefully, this story provides some helpful ways of thinking and handling rejection, and it is my hope that you too, follow your dreams, whatever they are. 

 

After many rejections on the way to my PhD (see my blog on handling rejection for that story!), I finally receiving my PhD offer from Leeds. I felt a sense of relief and also excitement about what was to come. I was, and still am, keenly interested in my subject area of the sociology of assessment  

When I began, I quickly realised that a PhD is much less about having the answers and much more about learning how to ask better questions. Now, whenever I attend a lecture or a workshop, I always try to think of questions to ask. The first few months were dominated by reading (far more than I initially anticipated!). I immersed myself in literature on assessment in higher education, social theory, and educational inequality. This period was crucial as it allowed me to build a strong foundation in theory and gave me the space to refine the direction of my research before moving into more formal writing. 

Alongside reading, I worked closely with my supervisors to clarify the scope of the project and begin shaping my literature review. Those early supervisory conversations were invaluable in helping me move from broad ideas based on curiosity to a focused and coherent project that is actually achievable. Often, we have lots of energy and ideas and those need refining over time. By the end of the first six months, I felt that the project had shifted from an abstract idea into something tangible and achievable. 

Beyond my own project, I’ve also tried to engage actively with the wider postgraduate community. I’ve been developing plans for a cross-faculty network for PGR students researching Higher Education, which has been both rewarding and energising. Connecting with other doctoral researchers has been one of the most fulfilling aspects of the experience so far. 

In terms of support, the Doctoral College and PGR structures have been incredibly helpful. Training opportunities, workshops, and clear guidance around milestones such as the transfer process have provided structure in what can otherwise feel like a very open-ended journey. Knowing there are formal and informal support systems in place makes a significant difference. Having access to a PGR tutor and departmental support also provides reassurance that there are people you can speak to outside of your supervisory team if needed. 

If there is one thing I wish I had fully understood before starting, it is that uncertainty is not a sign that something is wrong. It is part of the process. The PhD stretches you intellectually and personally. Progress often feels incremental rather than dramatic, and that is normal. Learning to value steady development over quick wins has been one of the biggest adjustments for me. 

A PhD is a huge challenge! However, it is also a rare opportunity: time to read deeply, think carefully, and contribute something original. If you embrace the process, including the uncertainty, it can be an incredibly rewarding experience.