To pursue a PhD is not a simple task. The expectations on the doctoral students are high, the atmosphere is competitive and while expected to perform well they are also forming a new professional identities as researchers. To their assistance they have one or several supervisors, who need to possess a vast range of skills in order to perform the task of supervising; tasks that only a few supervisors possess in full. It is not strange that a vast majority of doctoral students never complete their studies. In light of this the organizing of the PhD-work as a project seem a promising path. Being thought of as an efficient and result-oriented mode of organizing, increasingly more and differing work have been organized in projects during the past decades. This trend of “projectification” may be explained from a narrow perspective (that projects are used since they are better than other ways of organizing work) or from a broad perspective (that projects are thought to be better than other ways of organizing work which provides this particular mode of organizing with legitimacy). This article uses narrow and broad perspectives when studying how doctoral students make sense of their PhD-work from a project perspective. Combining the two perspectives help us understand the benefits as well as the potential drawbacks of understanding doctoral studies as projects.