The pros and cons of self funding

​To self-fund or not to self-fund? That is the question. In 2009 I was pondering how I was ever going to secure my dream PhD when no-one (except me) was really interested in my chosen study system. I’d been thinking of doing a PhD for a long time, but stubbornly decided that I would only work on something that I was passionate about, and having always been motivated to create my own projects in the past, I decided to venture into the unknown. Perhaps a PhD wasn’t the best framework to achieve this, but I have a tendency to surge forward with new ideas and keep going until I achieve success, and so I suppose it was inevitable. It’s been a long and arduous road since then, with plenty of challenges along the way, and I often find myself looking back and reflecting on how I might have done things differently (or not), if I were to have my time again. 

Written by Zoe

One of the defining features of my PhD journey is that I chose to self-fund my studies. I know, I know, who is crazy enough to slog it out for 60+ hours a week, sacrifice weekends, family events, free time, leisure reading (and dare I say it… sanity?), AND choose to pay for the privilege? Not many people I have since found out, and for very good reason: it’s not easy! Self-funding your studies (and in my case fundraising from grants and other sources to raise the money I need to do my research) seems to be a topic among postgrads which stimulates quite a debate. When I tell other students that I self-funded my work, the response is mixed, but the most common reaction tends to be along the lines of, “Oh wow, I could never have done that!”. I disagree.  In fact, you could have done that, if you were really motivated.  I read a great quote once, which said “If you want something badly enough, you make arrangements.  If you don’t want it badly enough, you make excuses.”  It couldn’t be truer, and that’s why I made my PhD happen by raising the money I needed to do it.
Self-funding your PhD isn’t easy, but it’s a unique experience that will equip you with a whole range of skills that you may not have otherwise developed. However it obviously comes with many costs (financial and otherwise). So here is my list of the pros and cons of self-funding. This list is not exhaustive, but I hope it gives you some idea whether or not you want to start on this journey.

PROS

1. You get to write grant proposals. A lot of them. In fact, when you write your first grant proposal, you’ll spend days on it, honing your message and critically evaluating every word.  You’ll send it off with pride and nervously await the outcome. After months of definitely not obsessively clicking “refresh” in your mailbox to check if the decision email has come through yet (ahem), your heart leaps as the decision email finally pops into your inbox. You can barely contain your excitement as you read…“proposal was very interesting”…“value of your work”…where’s the important part…scroll down…scroll down…wait here it is! – “huge volume of applications”… “regret to inform you”. Oh. I never thought that four little words could ruin your day. Wait, sorry this is meant to be a PRO isn’t it?  What I meant to say – and the point I am making – is that you will write a LOT of grant proposals, and in my experience, only around 10-15% of them will get funded. But that’s a GOOD THING (I promise), because the more proposals you write, the better you get, and your success rate should grow. Every proposal you write helps you hone your writing skills, improve your ability to write succinctly, and you get better at framing your research in a way that funders want to see. Back to that first grant proposal, I spent days writing and refining it and I thought it was perfect. Fast forward to three years later, and I cringe when I read it. How did I even get funding with proposals like that?! The point is, you can only get better by doing, and if you choose to self-fund, you will be writing a lot of grant proposals, and hopefully be getting better with every one.
2. Same as above for mid-year and end of grant cycle reports. Although reporting on how you spent the money is always significantly less fun that planning how you want to spend the money, it’s an unfortunate fact of life. A bit like looking at your credit card statement at the end of the month.
3. You learn about financial management. Forecasting, budgeting, accounting, reconciliation, book-keeping. All things which I didn’t account for (pun intended) when I signed up to study biology. But, as it turns out, these are all things that are pretty important in the real world, and especially so if you want to know how to run a research project. Get to grips with the financial management and budgeting process of projects now, and you’ll be fully geared up to enter the real world at some point (pending a number of extended post-docs to delay reality, of course).
4. You develop excellent networking skills. I learned early on that building relationships and networking with people is critically important to raising funding. I really like working with people and am very sociable, so this came naturally to me, but I had never realised how important it is to have good people skills until it came to funding my PhD (ironic I know, since I study social networks). When seeking long term support for your research, it’s really valuable to be able to communicate your work and progress back to the people and organisations who are paying for it. When it comes to forging a career, building a strong network is as important as all the stuff you’re doing to put on your CV. If you can start building this professional network as a grad student, when you come to enter the workplace you’ll probably already have built relationships with people who are able to open a lot of important doors for your future.  
5. Your communication improves. When your grant writing skills are the one thing standing between you and that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow which will help you realise your dreams, you very quickly learn how to write well. From those heady days of spending weeks tailoring a single proposal, in just a few months of trial and error you will be finishing proposals in a matter of hours, having refined the ability to spot what the funder is looking for, tailor your application appropriately, and use the right language and key words to communicate that your project is just what they’ve been looking for their whole lives. Not only will funders thank you for being much more to the point, but your success rate will likely increase as you learn to present the key aspects of your research much more persuasively. Effectively communicating with impact in as few words as possible is a skill that can be applied to all areas of your life; your cover letters, CVs, Tweets and Whatsapp messages will be punchier from this day forth.    
6. You critically evaluate your work every time you seek funding.  Since the process of applying for funding effectively requires us to “sell” our projects to whoever we are asking to support them, this means that every time you approach an individual or organisation for money, you have to ask yourself some key questions. i) Why would this organisation be interested in supporting this work? ii) Why is my work interesting? iii) What important things could my work contribute to the world? iv) Why is it really important that my work gets funded so I can do this research? v) How am I going to communicate this to them and get them to believe in me? v̶i̶)̶ ̶W̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶e̶a̶n̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶l̶i̶f̶e̶?̶  Hopefully you can answer these s̶i̶x̶  five questions for yourself. The process of having to ask yourself this every time you apply for a grant means that you get to do a lot of s̶o̶u̶l̶ ̶s̶e̶a̶r̶c̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ critical thinking about your work, and evaluate it from multiple perspectives. This process has a tendency to weed out the bad things from the good, and so hopefully through this repeated process, your ideas, your work and your focus improves with time.
7. It motivates you. “Here, PhD student, have this funding cheque for £1,000,000 to fulfil your lifelong dream of pursuing your unique, focused and absolutely world-changing piece of research! Spend it as you like, and don’t worry about letting us know how you get on!” …said no funding body, ever. Here’s the thing. If you are self-funding then you’ve got to really want it. There will be good days and there will be bad days. Ultimately, you got yourself into this m̶e̶s̶s̶ joyous life-fulfilling experience, and you’re going to have to get yourself out of it. It’s down to you, and if you don’t do it, no one else is going to do it for you.  There’s one thing that can mean the difference between having a happy time of it, or failing miserably, and it begins with M. Nope, it’s not money. Or marriage.  Or even margaritas (although these do help considerably). It’s motivation.  Wikipedia* defines motivation as “what causes a person to want to repeat a behaviour” and what possible reason could you have for writing eleventy billion grant proposals in the knowledge that probably only one (or maybe none) might get funded. BECAUSE YOU WANT IT SO BAD! If you don’t want it so bad, give up now, go home and ask your Mum to help you get you a job where you might actually get paid for the hours you invest in it.                                                                                                                                                                     *Disclaimer: Don’t cite this source in your thesis unless you want your examiners to laugh at you. 
8. You can add a “Grants Awarded” section to your website to show the world how brilliant you are at writing words to get money to Do Important Science! But seriously, it does also show potential employers/housemates/ex-boyfriends that you are actually good for something, that you’re not making it all up and that you can Get Stuff Done. 

As you can see from the list above, self-funding your PhD is quite simply the best idea ever!  Or is it?

That moment when you realise that you’re the one paying for recovery/repairs and you can’t just hand it back to your faculty….

CONS

1. See PROS 1, 2, 3, 6 & 8
2. Time. If you’re considering doing a self-funded PhD then you (hopefully) already realise that this means you’ll be doing the whole thing in an unpaid capacity. Grant proposals take approximately eleventeen billion hours to complete, and although all that time is spent gaining valuable skills (see pros 1-8), it is also the same time that your fellow, fully-funded PhD students are using to Get Stuff Done on their actual PhD work, before going on a summer holiday and having a break. You will quickly begin to feel like the administrative assistant for your postgraduate studying self, as you spend hours researching grants, writing initial enquiry letters which you send into the abyss never to hear back from again, reading grant application guidelines, waiting on decision emails and building fancy Excel spreadsheets to track the applications that are planned. In reality, if you’re doing a 3-year PhD just bite the bullet now and register for 4 years instead. That extra year is probably the cumulative time you’ll spend on grant research, applications and c̶r̶y̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶i̶n̶t̶o̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶c̶o̶f̶f̶e̶e̶  your application admin.  
3. Rejection.  People don’t enter TV talent shows believing they will get rejected, just like I won’t apply for a grant if I think my project will get rejected. Notice I said “my project” and not “I”. This is an important distinction to make if you are to pursue this self-funded route. If you start to see the rejections – of which there will be many – as comment or reflection on your personal ability to Do Science then you have failed before you have even begun. You will get rejected. Repeatedly. Often it’s not related to your writing or your scientific brilliance (or lack thereof), it’s purely because there were more applications than they had money available. Rejection is part of the process and you learn to pick yourself up and carry on. This process teaches you resilience, tenacity and the quiet art of determination. I suppose this could be turned into a pro, but I’m meant to be discussing cons so I’ll leave it here and you can decide how to categorise it.
4. Uncertainty.  You’re applying to grants because you need money. You need money to achieve your dreams of running your dream research project. It’s important to you, and you’ve sent out applications for thousands of dollars’ worth of funding. BUT here’s the catch: you don’t know if you are going to get all of it, or none of it! Deciding to self-fund inevitably means a lot of sitting around in limbo, waiting for funding decisions to be made. Some grants will make you wait up to a year before you hear the outcome of your application. This requires you to be immensely organised, and submit applications for work that you might do 18 months in advance. Within the time-scale of a typical PhD this can be quite challenging, but it teaches you good organisational, planning and time-management skills (hang on, this is starting to sound like another pro…). Remember that 4-year time period I recommended for a self-funded PhD? Now you get it. Eat, sleep, write, wait, repeat.  
5. Lack of money.  See cons 3 & 4. You’ve applied for the grant. At worst, you are rejected outright, at best you are given all the money. But an equally likely scenario is that you are part-funded, pending you securing the remainder of the funding from another source. So now you have a double problem; not only have you only been awarded half of what you asked for, you now have to find someone else to give you the other half of the money, or you won’t even get the first half! It’s as if the grant-making powers that be thought about how they could further trip you up just when you thought it was going well. The point I am inelegantly trying to make here is that your cash flow will strongly resemble a slow-motion version of the Morse code; periods of abundance followed by gaping silence, interspersed with occasional blips of hope on the horizon.
6. Surprisingly, I can’t actually think of any other cons so I’m just going to add this explanation to try and even out the list a little. I’m aware that two of my six cons actually turned out rather like pros, con #1 is really not a con at all, and con #6 is also masquerading as a con. Like the logical scientist that I am, this leads me to conclude that I have presented a list of 8 pros, 2 pseudo-pros, 2 real cons and 2 fillers. 

I hope the above has provided some insight into the rocky road of self-funding, and please take my mock cynicism with a shovel of sodium chloride. It’s a journey and a struggle, but one which repays you greatly with feelings of achievement, self-confidence and additional skills that you may not have otherwise been able to develop. In hindsight, I recognise the valuable skills and experience that I gained through the endless hours of grant writing, report writing and presenting information to funders, but I also acknowledge the weeks and months of time I spent doing those things that other (funded) students would have been b̶r̶o̶w̶s̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶f̶a̶c̶e̶b̶o̶o̶k̶ dedicating to their PhD work. Choosing to self-fund has shown me that I can successfully launch, run and operate a field research project independently, I’ve learnt an incredible amount and it’s given me more confidence in pitching ideas, selling myself and having the confidence to stick with my convictions.  
So, if I had my time again would I choose to self-fund?  That’s not an easy question to answer. Instead, I will turn to a man who had a much more elegant way with words than I, and leave you with a few modified verses of Frank Sinatra’s 1969 hit, “My Way”:

– Frank Sinatra, 1969
Yes, there were times, I'm sure you knew
When I bit off more than I could chew
But through it all, when there was doubt
I ate it up and spit it out
I faced it all and I stood tall
And did it my way
For what is a PhD student, what has he† got
If not his own conviction, then he† has naught
To say the things he† truly feels
And not the words of one who kneels
The record shows I took the blows
And did it my way
Yes, it was my way
 
†Don’t sue me for upholding gender inequality in science, these are Fred’s words, not mine.  Blame him.