When people ask what I do, "PhD researcher" is usually enough to get a nod and a polite expression of interest. When I add "funded by the ESRC", the nod sometimes becomes a slight frown. Most people outside academia have not heard of the Economic and Social Research Council. Some who have assume it funds economists.
In reality, the ESRC is the UK government's primary funding body for social science research, investing around £200 million per year in everything from criminology to linguistics to environmental psychology. It is, in other words, the reason I get to spend four years studying how nature sounds shape human wellbeing.
What the WGSSS Award Is
My specific funding comes through a particular scheme: the Welsh Graduate School for the Social Sciences (WGSSS) Collaborative Doctoral Award. The WGSSS is a partnership of Welsh universities funded by the ESRC to train the next generation of social scientists in Wales. The collaborative element means my PhD is formally linked to a partner organisation outside academia: in my case, the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) Cymru.
This matters more than it might sound. A collaborative award means the research has to speak to both academic and non-academic audiences from the outset. My PhD is not just trying to answer a theoretical question in environmental psychology. It is trying to produce findings that the BTO can actually use in its conservation work and policy engagement. That creates a different kind of discipline: you have to know who your audience is, and you cannot retreat into jargon when the going gets difficult.
What the Funding Covers
For those curious about the practical reality, an ESRC-WGSSS doctoral award covers university fees in full, a yearly stipend at the standard UKRI rate, and a research training support grant. The total value over four years is in the region of £200,000.
More important than the number is what it enables: the freedom to do the research without teaching so many hours that it crowds out the work, without the financial anxiety that makes independent thinking difficult, and with genuine access to training, networks, and collaboration. Fully funded PhDs in competitive schemes like this are rare enough that they should be clearly labelled for what they are: an extraordinary opportunity.
The Interdisciplinary Reality
My PhD sits at the intersection of environmental psychology, ecology and psychoacoustics. None of those fields has a single agreed methodology, a single theoretical canon, or even a single home department. My supervisory team spans two different schools at Bangor University, and my partner organisation adds a third institutional perspective.
This is both the most interesting and the most challenging part of the work. Interdisciplinary research means you are always translating: explaining why a qualitative interview is a rigorous data source to people trained in experimental ecology, or why a 3x3 factorial design makes sense to someone trained in field observation. You spend more time than you expect defining terms and justifying approaches that would be taken for granted in a single-discipline context.
But you also gain things that specialised researchers do not have. You see connections across literatures that people trained in only one field miss. You find that the same phenomena look completely different depending on which theoretical lens you use. And you develop a habit of asking: what does this actually mean? Not what is the p-value, not what does the theory predict, but what is actually going on in the world that this research is about?
What I Would Tell a Prospective Applicant
If you are thinking about applying for an ESRC or WGSSS doctoral award, a few things are worth knowing. The competition is real, and the strongest applications have a clear research question, a genuine reason to care about it, and a track record of doing things outside the prescribed path. Supervisors matter enormously: find people who are intellectually generous and not just productive. The partnership element, if you go for a collaborative award, should be with an organisation that will challenge you, not just validate your plans.
And if you are told that your research idea is "interesting but does not quite fit" in one place, try somewhere else. The best research usually lives at the edges of what existing departments know how to categorise.
I did not plan, as a zoology graduate from Kerala, to end up studying the psychological effects of birdsong in a Welsh university. The path looked nothing like this from the beginning. That, as it turns out, was entirely the point.
Joseph Roy is an ESRC-WGSSS funded PhD researcher at Bangor University. Questions about PhD funding or his research are welcome via the contact page or LinkedIn.