Start off 2025 not with a resolution, but with a blog post that has the potential to change how you think about yourself and the place of other people’s advice in your life.

I love blogging for SGSAH. Writing about how I see my PhD and suggesting ways for readers to improve their PhD experiences helps me think about my own habits and motivations, and has ultimately made me more confident in my role. Becoming familiar with my own tendencies as a blogger, and with the possibilities and limitations of the blog medium more generally, has nonetheless often left me doubtful about how blog posts shape the relationship between blogger and reader.

Too often, a blogger takes on the role of advice-giver, someone loaded with experience, while the reader is the passive recipient of advice that I often suspect they have heard before. Of course, there can be a point to new PGRs listening to more experienced researchers and gain an understanding of what they have to expect for the next 3-7 years. At the same time, as the generous time span suggests, experiences vary so widely between PhD students that other people’s advice often tends to obscure and confuse more than it helps.

What is the place of advice-giving in academia? We’re here to become experts in our chosen fields, to gain a sense of authority and trust in our own minds and voices. We’re also here to initiate or take part in dialogues with supervisors and colleagues that further questions about society, culture and various aspects of being human. But are we here to anxiously try to get someone to tell us what to do so we don’t make too many mistakes on our learning journeys?

In a (Swedish) podcast interview with comic artist Liv Strömquist, she criticises the reliance many of us have on the advice of others, and especially the way that ‘influencers’ (a category to which bloggers belong, alongside life-coaches and a range of noticeable presences on social media) gain influence and, sometimes, economic prosperity from offering advice to their followers. The advice-giver has everything to win from treating followers as overly flawed individuals in need of help. The followers mainly gain a sense that they’re not fit to solve their problems on their own.¹

A 2018 psychology study has this to say about advice-giving:

‘[W]e predict that giving advice makes advisers feel that they have been influential, which in turn enhances their sense of power.’²

The article uses ‘power’ to indicate feelings of empowerment, noticeable in individuals as a sense of optimism, confidence, and willingness to take risks.

An experiment with American middle schoolers, also referred to by Strömquist, has shown that ‘students who gave motivational advice to younger students spent more time on homework over the following month than students who received motivational advice from expert teachers’.³ In its abstract, the study asks:

‘Why are people blind to the motivational power of giving?’

There’s no mystery around why I like blogging so much. The person I’m empowering is myself.

In light of all this, there’s only one advice I could give: if you’re reading this hoping to hear some expert opinion on how to be a good PhD student, you’ll be better off starting your own blog, teaching undergraduates, or signing up for the 2025 round of SGSAH’s PhD Applicant Mentoring Scheme (the 2024 call is here). Most importantly, I think we should all look inwards from time to time and try to advise ourselves a little more.

---

1. Värvet, ‘#645 Liv Strömquist’, 23 September 2024. ↩︎
2. Schaerer, M., Tost, L. P., Huang, L., Gino, F., & Larrick, R., ‘Advice Giving: A Subtle Pathway to Power’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 44 (2018), 746-761. ↩︎
3. Eskreis-Winkler L, Fishbach A, Duckworth AL., ‘Dear Abby: Should I Give Advice or Receive It?’ Psychological Science 29 (2018), 1797-1806. ↩︎