phd survival guide

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•       Resources       15 Tips on Surviving Your PhD Program

15 Tips on Surviving Your PhD Program

15 tips and advice on making it through a phd.

It can be extremely challenging to complete a PhD program while maintaining physical and emotional health. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that 50 percent of all doctoral students drop out of graduate school without completing their degree. Some schools report a 90 percent attrition rate. Common reasons for dropping out include academic shortcomings, students who change their career path, or those who lose interest in their pursuit. Some students have the ability to complete their degree but opt not to. One cause is the discovery of a poor job market for professors or private organizations in their fields. The Chronicle reports that math and science students leave in their third year. Some 25 percent of dropouts in Arts and Humanities occur after three years, potentially leaving candidates with high student debt and despair. This guide offers examples of concrete, accessible, and practical actions that can alleviate many problems that overwhelm doctoral students.

15 Tips on Surviving Your PhD

There is a legion of experts that offer advice on making it through the years of your PhD program. Many agree on the necessities of maintaining a balance of academic pursuits against routine personal outside activities that foster physical and emotional health. Here are 15 suggestions:

1. Establish a routine you can follow.

It’s crucial to stay on track. Your best option to do so and keep peace of mind is to create a schedule that you can follow – and commit to following it. Get up and do your work on schedule, just as you’d report for a job. Devote segments of your routine for research and reading pertinent literature in your field. Add time in your schedule to include sound sleep, good nutrition, exercise, socializing and recreation. Remember you’ll have other obligations such as attending lectures, symposia, commuting, parking, cleaning your living space, shopping for supplies, meeting with study groups and peer collaborators. At the same time, build a realistic schedule so you won’t work yourself into fear frenzy.

2. Start writing from day one.

Your writing practice and research methodology can put you ahead of schedule on your dissertation. That’s because learning to write comfortably in a scholarly fashion should become a second nature. To eliminate last-minute furies, organize your research times, round up and cite sources properly, and create a number of drafts. Writing at least 30 minutes daily can allow you to consolidate your notes and findings, and note discovery of areas that require additional research. Plus, much of what you write goes directly toward your understanding of your subject matter. Because of your other commitments to teaching, collaboration, and outside activities, keep a writing routine and stick to it. At the same time, read smarter, understanding how the literature fits to your purposes. In reading and writing, look for key points, not bulk.

3. Create a positive community.

Decide from the begging that you can’t afford to collaborate or socialize with friends or peers that exude negativity. Braggards or chronic complainers can sap your energy or even cause you to adopt negative thinking or comparisons with the progress of other PhD candidates. Lead your own research, but seek advisement from people that you can trust, who have your best interests at heart. Join groups involved in your major field of study with which you can share academic as well as social issues. A positive community can bring you out of isolation, and isolation can foster fear or despair.

4. Build effective networks.

Along with creating a positive community, get on with networking from the very beginning of your program. You’re going to spend four or five years at the university, giving you ample time to forge and grow partnerships with working professionals, educators, junior faculty, and peers that contribute to your evolving knowledge base. They can offer suggestions to explorer literature, research trends, and potential opportunities for publications, conferences, and workshops. Remember to investigate online tools and communities as part of your networking as a way to make yourself known as a colleague. Create your professional/research profile at places like LinkedIn or join a LinkedIn Discussion Group. Speak with presenters at seminars. Connect with authors you discover in your literature research and participate in career groups outside your usual sphere at the university. Finally, consider taking informational interviews as a means of understanding the workplace, getting your name out there, and connecting with potential employers.

5. Put money woes to rest.

Having ample money to get you through your program can be difficult, even excruciating. But just knowing solid funding resources can give you some comfort and save precious time. Have a financial plan and do the legwork vital to your economic survival. Don’t let finances overwhelm your primary purpose of discovering your interests, focusing on your expertise, and making progress. Financial aid options for doctoral students are available at the U.S. Department of Education . You may need to combine several opportunities to cover your total expenses, including grants, scholarships, loans, fellowships, housing costs, and securing teaching and research assistantships. Some grad students make money tutoring but you’ll have to consider the time against your routine and academic schedule. GoGrad provides detailed PhD cost estimates broken down by professional field, along with scholarship/grant/fellowship search tools.

6. Make sound nutrition your ally.

Rutgers University advises students to find other ways to palliate stress than by overeating – even healthy foods. Eat lots of fruit and vegetables and all your meals at the right portion sizes. Cut out junk food and sugary treats that create the craving to keep eating them. That goes for alcohol, too, which can contribute to a decline in your health and create another source of worry. Student and faculty events often include drinking, so proceed wisely, even if peers call you a wimp. Vary your meals and include a free day for eating what you want without guilt. WebMd suggests that students include berries, oats, milk or yogurt, salmon, dark green veggies, walnuts, beans, and dark chocolate. Coffee is okay in small doses (8 oz) and without lots of sugar. Latte and mocha drinks are satisfying but often contain large amounts of sugar. Green tea can wake you up, if you don’t want to overdo coffee, but eschew energy drinks or other stimulants that make you jittery.

7. Add exercise to your routine.

Exercise, even moderate, can do wonders for both your physical and emotional wellbeing. Among its benefits, regular exercise fights stress, improves memory retention, and boosts your mood (particularly in winter). Researchers at Colorado Tech report that exercise increases “the number of brain cells in the hippocampus, which controls the formation, retention and recall of memories – all essential for student success. In most adults, the hippocampus starts to shrink in the late twenties, leading to memory loss over time.” Exercise can also add to your social bandwidth if you have regular workout partners or participate in intramural team activities. Remember to stretch. Consider taking a yoga class or Pilates workout. Do some running, weight lifting, swimming, or join a rowing group. Hike with friends or colleagues. Get out the mountain bike. For best results, get in a 30-minute workout at least three times a week. Time Magazine reports that cardiovascular exercise can positively affect depression, anxiety and mood disorders. And you’ll sleep better, too.

8. Learn how to deal with rejection.

Rejection in an PhD program is a routine, unwanted emotional downer. But how you react to it is crucial. Unsolicited advice can feel abusive. Competition for internships, fellowships and publications can stress you out to the point of collapse. Coping tools include not taking rejection or undue criticism personally and chalking it up to experience. It can soften the blows as they come. Comparing yourself to other candidates can be toxic. As with athletics, there will always be someone better than you. But you’re not pursuing your colleagues’ goals, dissertations, or even the identical degree – you’re pursuing personalized knowledge and skills for your life after the doctorate. Barbara Robson, an Associate Editor for two academic journals, writes in Quora that most papers (80 percent or more) are rejected and that there’s an element of luck in getting published. If your paper is rejected by a journal, find another suitable place to submit it. If you’re passed over for a conference, don’t sent a hate letter or academic rebuttal. Move on.

9. Choose a qualified graduate advisor and mentor.

Finding the right mentor and dissertation advisor is pivotal to your academic success and survival. The Gradhacker Blog at Inside Higher Ed suggests that you choose an advisor that shares your research interests and career path. Ask about their success rate in graduating students that they mentor. Check out whether they walk the walk by viewing their list of publications, conference presentations, and other research accomplishments. Find out if they’re available for ongoing advising. Explore their aptitude as a mentor and the personal chemistry toward working together. Are they hard to communicate with, abusive or condescending? Are they unable to otherwise maintain a productive and respectful relationship during the time you’ll be in the program? Not all accomplished professors make for good advisors. Some may be too wrapped up in publishing or attending conferences to meet with you. You should leave advising sessions feeling more focused, energetic about your research and dissertation, and armed with strategies for accomplishment.

10. Build in time for family and friends.

There’s an old joke where a friend asks if you can hang out and you say, “I’m in a PhD program so ask me again in five years.” It’s vital to maintain relationships with family and friends. They can sustain you and keep you from deadly isolation. At the same time, they can be distracting. It’s useful to maintain balance by scheduling time with family and friends while sticking to the need to bear down on research and writing. The PhDStudent Forum says when possible to combine family or friend events around studying. For example, take study time for yourself during a longer visit to family to keep your academic momentum. Visit a coffeehouse where you can study along with family and friends that also like reading in public. Be sure to communicate clearly about your schedule and find ways to book in indispensable phone calls and visits. Join friends for exercise or recreation.

11. Set aside time to pursue non-academic interests.

Yeah right, when is that supposed to happen? It happens when you make it happen. To maintain a sane equilibrium, devote some time to routinely indulge in things you like doing. For example, work in the garden, take a massage class, learn photography, play live music, go kayaking, join a cooking class, volunteer in civic or advocacy activities or learn a foreign language. Build something with your hands. Play scrabble. Paint to indulge your playful or creative side. Take a dance class. Learn meditation or improve your ping pong game. Because it can be near impossible to turn off your PhD brain, relegate it to background noise. That way you might have breakthroughs or discoveries that emerge when you return to work.

12. Arrange and maintain a peaceful learning environment.

Living alone may create a peaceful learning atmosphere, but not if you have noisy neighbors above, next door, or below you. Yet you can develop a horrible sense of cabin fever if you isolate at home. Wherever you reside should be comfortable and workable. Clutter can be a source of stress. According to Inside Higher Ed , living with roommates can save on expenses, but comes along with its own set of challenges. Roommates can have other routines and schedules that introduce unwanted noise, emotional drama, unwanted guests, or social habits that can send you off the edge. Research potential housemates carefully, allowing a back-up plan for dealing with inevitable problems. Developing a friendly but direct communication strategy can help. Or, you can create a work zone in your bedroom that lends for privacy. If necessary, you can find a quiet study environment in a library carrel or small café. The same suggestions apply if you’re living with family.

13. Address your emotional health.

According to Inside Higher Ed , there is a mental health crisis in graduate education. Grad students are six times more susceptible to anxiety and depression than in the general population. The study found that “transgender and gender-nonconforming graduate students, along with women, were significantly more likely to experience anxiety and depression” than their straight or male counterparts. A poor work-life balance can be a powerful contributor to burnout and depression. The worst thing you can do when you experience mental health issues is to keep them to yourself or feel like a failure for having them. Seek out the campus counseling center (student health center) or a trusted outside mental health organization for personal counselling. Join their emotional support groups. The National Grad Crisis Line (877 472-3457) provides free intervention services, confidential telephone counseling, suicide prevention assistance, and referral services. Look into NAMI on Campus Clubs which are student-run mental health support organizations.

14. Deal with expectations

Who you are, ultimately, is not a PhD student. Your grad program is what you’re currently pursuing. The Indiana University guide to thriving in graduate school suggests that you shrink overwhelming expectations into bite-size challenges. It’s normal for doctoral students to think that they’re an imposter among experts. Johns Hopkins University found that striving to meet your expectations can cause low self-esteem, procrastination, guilt and depression. You may find yourself unable to meet your expectations for perfectionism, so modify your plans to hit deadlines with your best effort. The guide further advises to straighten out the expectations that others may have for you. This can be especially true with families and people who provide financial or emotional support.

15. Make conferences a part of life.

Opportunities to attend conferences and presentations are richly rewarding. First, you become part of the greater community in your research niche and you can build a lifetime network of colleagues. You can also gain a greater understanding of the professional options available to you. Even attending conferences out of your niche area can stimulate ideas and send you home refreshed. Participating in panels is a great way to network and demonstrate your expertise. Attending job fairs is another way to network while exploring the professional environment. By networking at conferences, you can set up additional meetings with experts by phone, virtually, or before the next conference. It doesn’t hurt to cite conferences and your own presentations on your CV.

From the Expert

What are PhD students afraid to talk about?

The number one thing that PhD students are afraid to talk about is the lack of progress that they are making on their PhD dissertation. This was certainly true in my case and also in the case of many of my classmates whom I spoke with. The dissertation is such a big project with different stages in it and requires such self-discipline over a sustained period of time. When I got past my embarrassment about it and started speaking to others about it helped a lot and I found a way forward.

Another thing that PhD students are afraid to discuss is their ambivalence about being in a doctoral program and whether they've done the right thing and whether they should continue. These are all important questions that such students need to be aware of and speak to others (counsellor, friends, etc.) about.

What was your greatest challenge and how did you succeed?

As mentioned, my greatest challenge in relation to completing my PhD was getting through the dissertation process. Two things really helped me get over the line (and came from speaking to friends and classmates). (1) Since my dissertation was quantitative, I hired a statistics advisor that I met with on a regular (weekly or fortnightly) basis and this helped me make good progress in that it served to provide much needed structure (and assistance with statistical analysis). (2) I fired my dissertation chair and found a new one that I had a much better working relationship with. My new chair was more knowledgeable about my dissertation subject area and also he was much more supportive. I made significant progress with him and thereafter completed my dissertation in a relatively short time frame.

What are good ways to alleviate stress and anxiety?

There are a number of ways that I think will help with stress while working on one's phd. The usual suspects are approaches such as regular exercise, good diet, fun activities (e.g. movies), counselling and/or talking to friends and/or family.

However, I think the best approach that one can take is to get steadily work through each aspect one-by-one of the PhD program towards completing it. A useful way to think about it (with both the dissertation and the PhD program itself), is to not get overwhelmed by the size of this enormous project but instead cut it up into separate pieces and focus on each piece at a time, complete it, and then move on to the next piece.

How did you handle the challenges of extreme competition?

My tip for students who are experiencing high levels of competition is to try put it all into perspective: Do your best to get the finest resources (internships, grades, etc) that you can but know that once you're out in the profession, some of those things might really matter that much in the bigger picture. So, one can be just a 'pass' in your doctoral program but then get out into their profession and make a big splash.

What can you recommend to keep interest or inertia up so you’ll finish the PhD/Dissertation?

‘Cut up the sausage' and focus on/work on it a piece at a time; Locate assistance or supportive individuals and meet with them regularly and ongoing throughout; Create 'deadlines' and milestones for yourself to work towards and have these other (helpful) individuals assist in keeping you accountable.

Find ways that work for you that help to bring structure into this enormous unstructured (or scantily structured) project called a PhD -- and especially its dissertation. At the end of the day, it's really about just getting through it and into the next (and bigger) stage of your profession. Just do your best while you're in it and don't get too caught up in the moment.

Additional Resources & Help for PhD Students

You should realize that you can’t do everything on your own. To do so is a recipe for financial despair, insurmountable academic challenges and poor overall wellbeing. At the same time, you may need to sift through the wealth of outside resources to find the one that addresses your concerns. The following links will connect you with financial options, bulletin boards in your field, and academic resources. Find tips for time management, exam preparation, and help with emotional issues that can and will arise:

• GoGrad Guide to Paying for Your PhD : Students are currently paying upwards of $80,00 in tuition to complete their PhD. Use our guide to research your financial aid options.
• PhinisheD : This free, comprehensive bulletin board is devoted to PhD students struggling with completing their degree. Find links for reference guides, financial aid, health and well-being tips, and writing guides.
• National Grad Crisis Line : It’s for when the going gets rough. The National Grad Crisis Line at (877) 472-3457 was founded in 1988 to provide free mentoring, confidential counseling, and referral services.
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention : The CDC offers a pithy, wide-ranging college resource for maintaining wellness through sound nutrition and exercise. It offers diet plans, activity guidelines, and stress-prevention tips.
• U.S. Department of Education : Learn about financial aid for graduate or professional students including grants, loans and scholarships. The page links to government sites for applications and additional financial resources.
• ThoughtCo : This site is packed with articles on graduate school written by experts. Topics include prepping for comprehensive exams, time-management skills, and dealing with procrastination.
• Meetup : Student Meetups provide free, online listings for students to connect PhD candidates seeking peer support. Join an existing group or start one at your university.
• GoGrad : Discover tips for PhD students who want to complete their degrees online. Featured affordable online doctoral fields include business, computer science, criminal justice, education, nursing and psychology.
• The Grad Café : As host of graduate-school forums, the Grad Café operates a peer-run group that discusses the advantages and negative aspects of living alone or sharing housing.
• PhDJobs : Register for free and post your VC. Search among 1,600 current listings for PhDs and sign up for job alerts or information about post-doc programs.

101 Health and Wellness Tips for College Students Rutgers University

12 Tips for Surviving and Thriving in Grad School PsychCentral

CAPS Grad School Survival Guide Indiana University

Mental Health Crisis for Grad Students Inside Higher Ed

Modest Advice for New Graduate Students Medium.com

Surviving PhD and Postdoctoral Programs: Tips to Guarantee Success! Enago Academy

The Crucial Issue of Doctoral Non-completion The Chronical of Higher Education

Top 10 Smart Foods for College Students WebMD

Breadcrumbs Section. Click here to navigate to respective pages.

Your PhD Survival Guide

DOI link for Your PhD Survival Guide

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Accessible, insightful and a must-have toolkit for all final year doctoral students, the founders of the ‘Thesis Boot Camp’ intensive writing programme show how to survive and thrive through the challenging final year of writing and submitting a thesis.

Drawing on an understanding of the intellectual, professional, practical and personal elements of the doctorate to help readers gain insight into what it means to finish a PhD and how to get there, this book covers the common challenges and ways to resolve them. It includes advice on:

• Project management skills to plan, track, iterate and report on the complex task of bringing a multi-year research project to a successful close
• Personal effectiveness and self-care to support students to thrive in body, mind and relationships, including challenging supervisor relationships.
• The successful ‘generative’ writing processes which get writers into the zone and producing thousands of words; and then provides the skills to structure and polish those words to publishable quality.
• What it means to survive a PhD and consider multiple possible futures.

Written for students in all disciplines, and relevant to university systems around the world, this unique book expertly guides students through the final 6–12 months of the thesis.

The 'Insider Guides to Success in Academia' offers support and practical advice to doctoral students and early-career researchers. Covering the topics that really matter, but which often get overlooked, this indispensable series provides practical and realistic guidance to address many of the needs and challenges of trying to operate, and remain, in academia.

These neat pocket guides fill specific and significant gaps in current literature. Each book offers insider perspectives on the often implicit rules of the game -- the things you need to know but usually aren't told by institutional postgraduate support, researcher development units, or supervisors -- and will address a practical topic that is key to career progression. They are essential reading for doctoral students, early-career researchers, supervisors, mentors, or anyone looking to launch or maintain their career in academia.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter | 8  pages, introduction, part i | 48  pages, focusing on the project, chapter 1 | 9  pages, defining the project, chapter 2 | 8  pages, getting through the crunch, chapter 3 | 19  pages, practical project management, chapter 4 | 10  pages, working with your strengths and weaknesses, part ii | 49  pages, focusing on the person, chapter 5 | 13  pages, ‘no pain, no gain’ and other unhelpful myths, chapter 6 | 14  pages, your harshest critic, chapter 7 | 4  pages, getting unstuck, chapter 8 | 16  pages, working with your supervisor, part iii | 70  pages, focusing on the text, chapter 9 | 17  pages, getting words down, chapter 10 | 34  pages, making the thesis into a coherent work, chapter 11 | 15  pages, making the words good, part iv | 22  pages, finishing the phd, chapter 12 | 4  pages, reflecting on what it means to be a researcher, chapter 13 | 8  pages, do you actually want to finish the phd, chapter 14 | 8  pages, relief and grief of finishing a phd.

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Mastering Your PhD

Survival and Success in the Doctoral Years and Beyond

• © 2022
• Latest edition
• Patricia Gosling 0 ,
• Bart Noordam 1

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ASML (Netherlands), Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Is packed with highly valuable insights for doing or considering a Ph.D., especially in natural sciences

Features a now essential guide to remote learning, virtual meetings and conferences, and online collaboration

Covers everything from choosing the right programme to navigating group dynamics and publishing scientific papers

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About this book

This bestselling book guides PhD students through their graduate years and beyond. Filled with practical advice on getting started, communicating with your supervisor, staying the course, and planning for the future, this book is an indispensable guide for graduate students who need that extra bit of help getting started and making it through.

Who  should  read  this  book? Any student currently in, or curious about, a PhD programme, be it in the physical and life sciences, engineering, computer science, math, medicine, or the humanities — this book tackles the obstacles and hurdles that almost all PhD students face during their doctoral training. Whether you’re at the very beginning of your research, close to the end, or just feeling frustrated and stuck at any point in between…it’s never too early — or too late — to focus on your success!

This third edition contains a variety of new material, including additional chapters and advice on how to make the most of remote learning, collaboration, and communication tools, as well as updated material on your next career step once you have your coveted doctoral degree in hand. Some of the material in the third edition appeared as part of a monthly column on the ScienceCareers website.

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• Graduate Student Guide
• Organizing PhD Work
• Guide for PhD Students
• Planning a PhD Thesis
• Social Networking for Graduate Students
• Wikipedia for Department
• Virtual Scientific Conferences
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• How to Write a Scientific Paper
• How to Get Research Funding
• Peer Review Process
• First-Year Evaluation
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• Non-Academic Career Opportunities
• Should I Stay PhD

Table of contents (25 chapters)

Front matter, choosing a research group: pluses and pitfalls.

• Patricia Gosling, Bart Noordam

Getting Started

Setting goals and objectives, how to think like a scientist, designing good experiments, charting your progress month by month, dealing with setbacks, mentors, leadership, and community, how to get along with your labmates, et al., group dynamics: dealing with difficult colleagues, the art of good communication, mastering presentations and group meetings, searching the scientific literature, your first international conference, remote collaboration, from data to manuscript: writing scientific papers that shine, celebrate your success, how to make the most of your annual evaluation, the final year: countdown to your thesis defence, authors and affiliations.

Patricia Gosling

Bart Noordam

About the authors

Dr. Patricia Gosling has worked in several science-related fields since earning her PhD in organic chemistry, including medical publishing and medical communications. After many years as a medical writer in the Clinical Sciences and Regulatory departments in the Pharma and Biotech industry, she currently works as a freelance science editor.

Prof. Dr. Bart Noordam has supervised close to 10 PhD students in experimental physics. He is currently Senior Vice President Strategy at ASML in the Netherlands, manufacturing complex machines for the production of computer chips. He has also worked as the Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Amsterdam, McKinsey & Company, and as chair of a regional audit organization.

A Survival Guide to a PhD

Sep 7, 2016

This guide is patterned after my “Doing well in your courses” , a post I wrote a long time ago on some of the tips/tricks I’ve developed during my undergrad. I’ve received nice comments about that guide, so in the same spirit, now that my PhD has come to an end I wanted to compile a similar retrospective document in hopes that it might be helpful to some. Unlike the undergraduate guide, this one was much more difficult to write because there is significantly more variation in how one can traverse the PhD experience. Therefore, many things are likely contentious and a good fraction will be specific to what I’m familiar with (Computer Science / Machine Learning / Computer Vision research). But disclaimers are boring, lets get to it!

Preliminaries

First, should you want to get a PhD? I was in a fortunate position of knowing since young age that I really wanted a PhD. Unfortunately it wasn’t for any very well-thought-through considerations: First, I really liked school and learning things and I wanted to learn as much as possible, and second, I really wanted to be like Gordon Freeman from the game Half-Life (who has a PhD from MIT in theoretical physics). I loved that game. But what if you’re more sensible in making your life’s decisions? Should you want to do a PhD? There’s a very nice Quora thread and in the summary of considerations that follows I’ll borrow/restate several from Justin/Ben/others there. I’ll assume that the second option you are considering is joining a medium-large company (which is likely most common). Ask yourself if you find the following properties appealing:

Freedom. A PhD will offer you a lot of freedom in the topics you wish to pursue and learn about. You’re in charge. Of course, you’ll have an adviser who will impose some constraints but in general you’ll have much more freedom than you might find elsewhere.

Ownership. The research you produce will be yours as an individual. Your accomplishments will have your name attached to them. In contrast, it is much more common to “blend in” inside a larger company. A common feeling here is becoming a “cog in a wheel”.

Exclusivity . There are very few people who make it to the top PhD programs. You’d be joining a group of a few hundred distinguished individuals in contrast to a few tens of thousands (?) that will join some company.

Status. Regardless of whether it should be or not, working towards and eventually getting a PhD degree is culturally revered and recognized as an impressive achievement. You also get to be a Doctor; that’s awesome.

Personal freedom. As a PhD student you’re your own boss. Want to sleep in today? Sure. Want to skip a day and go on a vacation? Sure. All that matters is your final output and no one will force you to clock in from 9am to 5pm. Of course, some advisers might be more or less flexible about it and some companies might be as well, but it’s a true first order statement.

Maximizing future choice. Joining a PhD program doesn’t close any doors or eliminate future employment/lifestyle options. You can go one way (PhD -> anywhere else) but not the other (anywhere else -> PhD -> academia/research; it is statistically less likely). Additionally (although this might be quite specific to applied ML), you’re strictly more hirable as a PhD graduate or even as a PhD dropout and many companies might be willing to put you in a more interesting position or with a higher starting salary. More generally, maximizing choice for the future you is a good heuristic to follow.

Maximizing variance. You’re young and there’s really no need to rush. Once you graduate from a PhD you can spend the next ~50 years of your life in some company. Opt for more variance in your experiences.

Personal growth. PhD is an intense experience of rapid growth (you learn a lot) and personal self-discovery (you’ll become a master of managing your own psychology). PhD programs (especially if you can make it into a good one) also offer a high density of exceptionally bright people who will become your best friends forever.

Expertise. PhD is probably your only opportunity in life to really drill deep into a topic and become a recognized leading expert in the world at something. You’re exploring the edge of our knowledge as a species, without the burden of lesser distractions or constraints. There’s something beautiful about that and if you disagree, it could be a sign that PhD is not for you.

The disclaimer . I wanted to also add a few words on some of the potential downsides and failure modes. The PhD is a very specific kind of experience that deserves a large disclaimer. You will inevitably find yourself working very hard (especially before paper deadlines). You need to be okay with the suffering and have enough mental stamina and determination to deal with the pressure. At some points you will lose track of what day of the week it is and go on a diet of leftover food from the microkitchens. You’ll sit exhausted and alone in the lab on a beautiful, sunny Saturday scrolling through Facebook pictures of your friends having fun on exotic trips, paid for by their 5-10x larger salaries. You will have to throw away 3 months of your work while somehow keeping your mental health intact. You’ll struggle with the realization that months of your work were spent on a paper with a few citations while your friends do exciting startups with TechCrunch articles or push products to millions of people. You’ll experience identity crises during which you’ll question your life decisions and wonder what you’re doing with some of the best years of your life. As a result, you should be quite certain that you can thrive in an unstructured environment in the pursuit research and discovery for science. If you’re unsure you should lean slightly negative by default. Ideally you should consider getting a taste of research as an undergraduate on a summer research program before before you decide to commit. In fact, one of the primary reasons that research experience is so desirable during the PhD hiring process is not the research itself, but the fact that the student is more likely to know what they’re getting themselves into.

I should clarify explicitly that this post is not about convincing anyone to do a PhD, I’ve merely tried to enumerate some of the common considerations above. The majority of this post focuses on some tips/tricks for navigating the experience once if you decide to go for it (which we’ll see shortly, below).

Lastly, as a random thought I heard it said that you should only do a PhD if you want to go into academia. In light of all of the above I’d argue that a PhD has strong intrinsic value - it’s an end by itself, not just a means to some end (e.g. academic job).

Getting into a PhD program: references, references, references. Great, you’ve decided to go for it. Now how do you get into a good PhD program? The first order approximation is quite simple - by far most important component are strong reference letters. The ideal scenario is that a well-known professor writes you a letter along the lines of: “Blah is in top 5 of students I’ve ever worked with. She takes initiative, comes up with her own ideas, and gets them to work.” The worst letter is along the lines of: “Blah took my class. She did well.” A research publication under your belt from a summer research program is a very strong bonus, but not absolutely required provided you have strong letters. In particular note: grades are quite irrelevant but you generally don’t want them to be too low. This was not obvious to me as an undergrad and I spent a lot of energy on getting good grades. This time should have instead been directed towards research (or at the very least personal projects), as much and as early as possible, and if possible under supervision of multiple people (you’ll need 3+ letters!). As a last point, what won’t help you too much is pestering your potential advisers out of the blue. They are often incredibly busy people and if you try to approach them too aggressively in an effort to impress them somehow in conferences or over email this may agitate them.

Picking the school . Once you get into some PhD programs, how do you pick the school? It’s easy, join Stanford! Just kidding. More seriously, your dream school should 1) be a top school (not because it looks good on your resume/CV but because of feedback loops; top schools attract other top people, many of whom you will get to know and work with) 2) have a few potential advisers you would want to work with. I really do mean the “few” part - this is very important and provides a safety cushion for you if things don’t work out with your top choice for any one of hundreds of reasons - things in many cases outside of your control, e.g. your dream professor leaves, moves, or spontaneously disappears, and 3) be in a good environment physically. I don’t think new admits appreciate this enough: you will spend 5+ years of your really good years living near the school campus. Trust me, this is a long time and your life will consist of much more than just research.

Student adviser relationship . The adviser is an extremely important person who will exercise a lot of influence over your PhD experience. It’s important to understand the nature of the relationship: the adviser-student relationship is a symbiosis; you have your own goals and want something out of your PhD, but they also have their own goals, constraints and they’re building their own career. Therefore, it is very helpful to understand your adviser’s incentive structures: how the tenure process works, how they are evaluated, how they get funding, how they fund you, what department politics they might be embedded in, how they win awards, how academia in general works and specifically how they gain recognition and respect of their colleagues. This alone will help you avoid or mitigate a large fraction of student-adviser friction points and allow you to plan appropriately. I also don’t want to make the relationship sound too much like a business transaction. The advisor-student relationship, more often that not, ends up developing into a lasting one, predicated on much more than just career advancement.

Pre-vs-post tenure . Every adviser is different so it’s helpful to understand the axes of variations and their repercussions on your PhD experience. As one rule of thumb (and keep in mind there are many exceptions), it’s important to keep track of whether a potential adviser is pre-tenure or post-tenure. The younger faculty members will usually be around more (they are working hard to get tenure) and will usually be more low-level, have stronger opinions on what you should be working on, they’ll do math with you, pitch concrete ideas, or even look at (or contribute to) your code. This is a much more hands-on and possibly intense experience because the adviser will need a strong publication record to get tenure and they are incentivised to push you to work just as hard. In contrast, more senior faculty members may have larger labs and tend to have many other commitments (e.g. committees, talks, travel) other than research, which means that they can only afford to stay on a higher level of abstraction both in the area of their research and in the level of supervision for their students. To caricature, it’s a difference between “you’re missing a second term in that equation” and “you may want to read up more in this area, talk to this or that person, and sell your work this or that way”. In the latter case, the low-level advice can still come from the senior PhD students in the lab or the postdocs.

Axes of variation . There are many other axes to be aware of. Some advisers are fluffy and some prefer to keep your relationship very professional. Some will try to exercise a lot of influence on the details of your work and some are much more hands off. Some will have a focus on specific models and their applications to various tasks while some will focus on tasks and more indifference towards any particular modeling approach. In terms of more managerial properties, some will meet you every week (or day!) multiple times and some you won’t see for months. Some advisers answer emails right away and some don’t answer email for a week (or ever, haha). Some advisers make demands about your work schedule (e.g. you better work long hours or weekends) and some won’t. Some advisers generously support their students with equipment and some think laptops or old computers are mostly fine. Some advisers will fund you to go to a conferences even if you don’t have a paper there and some won’t. Some advisers are entrepreneurial or applied and some lean more towards theoretical work. Some will let you do summer internships and some will consider internships just a distraction.

Finding an adviser . So how do you pick an adviser? The first stop, of course, is to talk to them in person. The student-adviser relationship is sometimes referred to as a marriage and you should make sure that there is a good fit. Of course, first you want to make sure that you can talk with them and that you get along personally, but it’s also important to get an idea of what area of “professor space” they occupy with respect to the aforementioned axes, and especially whether there is an intellectual resonance between the two of you in terms of the problems you are interested in. This can be just as important as their management style.

Collecting references . You should also collect references on your potential adviser. One good strategy is to talk to their students. If you want to get actual information this shouldn’t be done in a very formal way or setting but in a relaxed environment or mood (e.g. a party). In many cases the students might still avoid saying bad things about the adviser if asked in a general manner, but they will usually answer truthfully when you ask specific questions, e.g. “how often do you meet?”, or “how hands on are they?”. Another strategy is to look at where their previous students ended up (you can usually find this on the website under an alumni section), which of course also statistically informs your own eventual outcome.

Impressing an adviser . The adviser-student matching process is sometimes compared to a marriage - you pick them but they also pick you. The ideal student from their perspective is someone with interest and passion, someone who doesn’t need too much hand-holding, and someone who takes initiative - who shows up a week later having done not just what the adviser suggested, but who went beyond it; improved on it in unexpected ways.

Consider the entire lab . Another important point to realize is that you’ll be seeing your adviser maybe once a week but you’ll be seeing most of their students every single day in the lab and they will go on to become your closest friends. In most cases you will also end up collaborating with some of the senior PhD students or postdocs and they will play a role very similar to that of your adviser. The postdocs, in particular, are professors-in-training and they will likely be eager to work with you as they are trying to gain advising experience they can point to for their academic job search. Therefore, you want to make sure the entire group has people you can get along with, people you respect and who you can work with closely on research projects.

Research topics

So you’ve entered a PhD program and found an adviser. Now what do you work on?

An exercise in the outer loop. First note the nature of the experience. A PhD is simultaneously a fun and frustrating experience because you’re constantly operating on a meta problem level. You’re not just solving problems - that’s merely the simple inner loop. You spend most of your time on the outer loop, figuring out what problems are worth solving and what problems are ripe for solving. You’re constantly imagining yourself solving hypothetical problems and asking yourself where that puts you, what it could unlock, or if anyone cares. If you’re like me this can sometimes drive you a little crazy because you’re spending long hours working on things and you’re not even sure if they are the correct things to work on or if a solution exists.

Developing taste . When it comes to choosing problems you’ll hear academics talk about a mystical sense of “taste”. It’s a real thing. When you pitch a potential problem to your adviser you’ll either see their face contort, their eyes rolling, and their attention drift, or you’ll sense the excitement in their eyes as they contemplate the uncharted territory ripe for exploration. In that split second a lot happens: an evaluation of the problem’s importance, difficulty, its sexiness , its historical context (and possibly also its fit to their active grants). In other words, your adviser is likely to be a master of the outer loop and will have a highly developed sense of taste for problems. During your PhD you’ll get to acquire this sense yourself.

In particular, I think I had a terrible taste coming in to the PhD. I can see this from the notes I took in my early PhD years. A lot of the problems I was excited about at the time were in retrospect poorly conceived, intractable, or irrelevant. I’d like to think I refined the sense by the end through practice and apprenticeship.

Let me now try to serialize a few thoughts on what goes into this sense of taste, and what makes a problem interesting to work on.

A fertile ground. First, recognize that during your PhD you will dive deeply into one area and your papers will very likely chain on top of each other to create a body of work (which becomes your thesis). Therefore, you should always be thinking several steps ahead when choosing a problem. It’s impossible to predict how things will unfold but you can often get a sense of how much room there could be for additional work.

Plays to your adviser’s interests and strengths . You will want to operate in the realm of your adviser’s interest. Some advisers may allow you to work on slightly tangential areas but you would not be taking full advantage of their knowledge and you are making them less likely to want to help you with your project or promote your work. For instance, (and this goes to my previous point of understanding your adviser’s job) every adviser has a “default talk” slide deck on their research that they give all the time and if your work can add new exciting cutting edge work slides to this deck then you’ll find them much more invested, helpful and involved in your research. Additionally, their talks will promote and publicize your work.

Be ambitious: the sublinear scaling of hardness. People have a strange bug built into psychology: a 10x more important or impactful problem intuitively feels 10x harder (or 10x less likely) to achieve. This is a fallacy - in my experience a 10x more important problem is at most 2-3x harder to achieve. In fact, in some cases a 10x harder problem may be easier to achieve. How is this? It’s because thinking 10x forces you out of the box, to confront the real limitations of an approach, to think from first principles, to change the strategy completely, to innovate. If you aspire to improve something by 10% and work hard then you will. But if you aspire to improve it by 100% you are still quite likely to, but you will do it very differently.

Ambitious but with an attack. At this point it’s also important to point out that there are plenty of important problems that don’t make great projects. I recommend reading You and Your Research by Richard Hamming, where this point is expanded on:

If you do not work on an important problem, it’s unlikely you’ll do important work. It’s perfectly obvious. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them. Let me warn you, `important problem’ must be phrased carefully. The three outstanding problems in physics, in a certain sense, were never worked on while I was at Bell Labs. By important I mean guaranteed a Nobel Prize and any sum of money you want to mention. We didn’t work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It’s not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important.

The person who did X . Ultimately, the goal of a PhD is to not only develop a deep expertise in a field but to also make your mark upon it. To steer it, shape it. The ideal scenario is that by the end of the PhD you own some part of an important area, preferably one that is also easy and fast to describe. You want people to say things like “she’s the person who did X”. If you can fill in a blank there you’ll be successful.

Valuable skills. Recognize that during your PhD you will become an expert at the area of your choosing (as fun aside, note that [5 years]x[260 working days]x[8 hours per day] is 10,400 hours; if you believe Gladwell then a PhD is exactly the amount of time to become an expert). So imagine yourself 5 years later being a world expert in this area (the 10,000 hours will ensure that regardless of the academic impact of your work). Are these skills exciting or potentially valuable to your future endeavors?

Negative examples. There are also some problems or types of papers that you ideally want to avoid. For instance, you’ll sometimes hear academics talk about “incremental work” (this is the worst adjective possible in academia). Incremental work is a paper that enhances something existing by making it more complex and gets 2% extra on some benchmark. The amusing thing about these papers is that they have a reasonably high chance of getting accepted (a reviewer can’t point to anything to kill them; they are also sometimes referred to as “ cockroach papers ”), so if you have a string of these papers accepted you can feel as though you’re being very productive, but in fact these papers won’t go on to be highly cited and you won’t go on to have a lot of impact on the field. Similarly, finding projects should ideally not include thoughts along the lines of “there’s this next logical step in the air that no one has done yet, let me do it”, or “this should be an easy poster”.

Case study: my thesis . To make some of this discussion more concrete I wanted to use the example of how my own PhD unfolded. First, fun fact: my entire thesis is based on work I did in the last 1.5 years of my PhD. i.e. it took me quite a long time to wiggle around in the metaproblem space and find a problem that I felt very excited to work on (the other ~2 years I mostly meandered on 3D things (e.g. Kinect Fusion, 3D meshes, point cloud features) and video things). Then at one point in my 3rd year I randomly stopped by Richard Socher’s office on some Saturday at 2am. We had a chat about interesting problems and I realized that some of his work on images and language was in fact getting at something very interesting (of course, the area at the intersection of images and language goes back quite a lot further than Richard as well). I couldn’t quite see all the papers that would follow but it seemed heuristically very promising: it was highly fertile (a lot of unsolved problems, a lot of interesting possibilities on grounding descriptions to images), I felt that it was very cool and important, it was easy to explain, it seemed to be at the boundary of possible (Deep Learning has just started to work), the datasets had just started to become available (Flickr8K had just come out), it fit nicely into Fei-Fei’s interests and even if I were not successful I’d at least get lots of practice with optimizing interesting deep nets that I could reapply elsewhere. I had a strong feeling of a tsunami of checkmarks as everything clicked in place in my mind. I pitched this to Fei-Fei (my adviser) as an area to dive into the next day and, with relief, she enthusiastically approved, encouraged me, and would later go on to steer me within the space (e.g. Fei-Fei insisted that I do image to sentence generation while I was mostly content with ranking.). I’m happy with how things evolved from there. In short, I meandered around for 2 years stuck around the outer loop, finding something to dive into. Once it clicked for me what that was based on several heuristics, I dug in.

Resistance . I’d like to also mention that your adviser is by no means infallible. I’ve witnessed and heard of many instances in which, in retrospect, the adviser made the wrong call. If you feel this way during your phd you should have the courage to sometimes ignore your adviser. Academia generally celebrates independent thinking but the response of your specific adviser can vary depending on circumstances. I’m aware of multiple cases where the bet worked out very well and I’ve also personally experienced cases where it did not. For instance, I disagreed strongly with some advice Andrew Ng gave me in my very first year. I ended up working on a problem he wasn’t very excited about and, surprise, he turned out to be very right and I wasted a few months. Win some lose some :)

Don’t play the game. Finally, I’d like to challenge you to think of a PhD as more than just a sequence of papers. You’re not a paper writer. You’re a member of a research community and your goal is to push the field forward. Papers are one common way of doing that but I would encourage you to look beyond the established academic game. Think for yourself and from first principles. Do things others don’t do but should. Step off the treadmill that has been put before you. I tried to do some of this myself throughout my PhD. This blog is an example - it allows me communicate things that wouldn’t ordinarily go into papers. The ImageNet human reference experiments are an example - I felt strongly that it was important for the field to know the ballpark human accuracy on ILSVRC so I took a few weeks off and evaluated it. The academic search tools (e.g. arxiv-sanity) are an example - I felt continuously frustrated by the inefficiency of finding papers in the literature and I released and maintain the site in hopes that it can be useful to others. Teaching CS231n twice is an example - I put much more effort into it than is rationally advisable for a PhD student who should be doing research, but I felt that the field was held back if people couldn’t efficiently learn about the topic and enter. A lot of my PhD endeavors have likely come at a cost in standard academic metrics (e.g. h-index, or number of publications in top venues) but I did them anyway, I would do it the same way again, and here I am encouraging others to as well. To add a pitch of salt and wash down the ideology a bit, based on several past discussions with my friends and colleagues I know that this view is contentious and that many would disagree.

Writing papers

Writing good papers is an essential survival skill of an academic (kind of like making fire for a caveman). In particular, it is very important to realize that papers are a specific thing: they look a certain way, they flow a certain way, they have a certain structure, language, and statistics that the other academics expect. It’s usually a painful exercise for me to look through some of my early PhD paper drafts because they are quite terrible. There is a lot to learn here.

Review papers. If you’re trying to learn to write better papers it can feel like a sensible strategy to look at many good papers and try to distill patterns. This turns out to not be the best strategy; it’s analogous to only receiving positive examples for a binary classification problem. What you really want is to also have exposure to a large number of bad papers and one way to get this is by reviewing papers. Most good conferences have an acceptance rate of about 25% so most papers you’ll review are bad, which will allow you to build a powerful binary classifier. You’ll read through a bad paper and realize how unclear it is, or how it doesn’t define it’s variables, how vague and abstract its intro is, or how it dives in to the details too quickly, and you’ll learn to avoid the same pitfalls in your own papers. Another related valuable experience is to attend (or form) journal clubs - you’ll see experienced researchers critique papers and get an impression for how your own papers will be analyzed by others.

Get the gestalt right. I remember being impressed with Fei-Fei (my adviser) once during a reviewing session. I had a stack of 4 papers I had reviewed over the last several hours and she picked them up, flipped through each one for 10 seconds, and said one of them was good and the other three bad. Indeed, I was accepting the one and rejecting the other three, but something that took me several hours took her seconds. Fei-Fei was relying on the gestalt of the papers as a powerful heuristic. Your papers, as you become a more senior researcher take on a characteristic look. An introduction of ~1 page. A ~1 page related work section with a good density of citations - not too sparse but not too crowded. A well-designed pull figure (on page 1 or 2) and system figure (on page 3) that were not made in MS Paint. A technical section with some math symbols somewhere, results tables with lots of numbers and some of them bold, one additional cute analysis experiment, and the paper has exactly 8 pages (the page limit) and not a single line less. You’ll have to learn how to endow your papers with the same gestalt because many researchers rely on it as a cognitive shortcut when they judge your work.

Identify the core contribution . Before you start writing anything it’s important to identify the single core contribution that your paper makes to the field. I would especially highlight the word single . A paper is not a random collection of some experiments you ran that you report on. The paper sells a single thing that was not obvious or present before. You have to argue that the thing is important, that it hasn’t been done before, and then you support its merit experimentally in controlled experiments. The entire paper is organized around this core contribution with surgical precision. In particular it doesn’t have any additional fluff and it doesn’t try to pack anything else on a side. As a concrete example, I made a mistake in one of my earlier papers on video classification where I tried to pack in two contributions: 1) a set of architectural layouts for video convnets and an unrelated 2) multi-resolution architecture which gave small improvements. I added it because I reasoned first that maybe someone could find it interesting and follow up on it later and second because I thought that contributions in a paper are additive: two contributions are better than one. Unfortunately, this is false and very wrong. The second contribution was minor/dubious and it diluted the paper, it was distracting, and no one cared. I’ve made a similar mistake again in my CVPR 2014 paper which presented two separate models: a ranking model and a generation model. Several good in-retrospect arguments could be made that I should have submitted two separate papers; the reason it was one is more historical than rational.

The structure. Once you’ve identified your core contribution there is a default recipe for writing a paper about it. The upper level structure is by default Intro, Related Work, Model, Experiments, Conclusions. When I write my intro I find that it helps to put down a coherent top-level narrative in latex comments and then fill in the text below. I like to organize each of my paragraphs around a single concrete point stated on the first sentence that is then supported in the rest of the paragraph. This structure makes it easy for a reader to skim the paper. A good flow of ideas is then along the lines of 1) X (+define X if not obvious) is an important problem 2) The core challenges are this and that. 2) Previous work on X has addressed these with Y, but the problems with this are Z. 3) In this work we do W (?). 4) This has the following appealing properties and our experiments show this and that. You can play with this structure a bit but these core points should be clearly made. Note again that the paper is surgically organized around your exact contribution. For example, when you list the challenges you want to list exactly the things that you address later; you don’t go meandering about unrelated things to what you have done (you can speculate a bit more later in conclusion). It is important to keep a sensible structure throughout your paper, not just in the intro. For example, when you explain the model each section should: 1) explain clearly what is being done in the section, 2) explain what the core challenges are 3) explain what a baseline approach is or what others have done before 4) motivate and explain what you do 5) describe it.

Break the structure. You should also feel free (and you’re encouraged to!) play with these formulas to some extent and add some spice to your papers. For example, see this amusing paper from Razavian et al. in 2014 that structures the introduction as a dialog between a student and the professor. It’s clever and I like it. As another example, a lot of papers from Alyosha Efros have a playful tone and make great case studies in writing fun papers. As only one of many examples, see this paper he wrote with Antonio Torralba: Unbiased look at dataset bias . Another possibility I’ve seen work well is to include an FAQ section, possibly in the appendix.

Common mistake: the laundry list. One very common mistake to avoid is the “laundry list”, which looks as follows: “Here is the problem. Okay now to solve this problem first we do X, then we do Y, then we do Z, and now we do W, and here is what we get”. You should try very hard to avoid this structure. Each point should be justified, motivated, explained. Why do you do X or Y? What are the alternatives? What have others done? It’s okay to say things like this is common (add citation if possible). Your paper is not a report, an enumeration of what you’ve done, or some kind of a translation of your chronological notes and experiments into latex. It is a highly processed and very focused discussion of a problem, your approach and its context. It is supposed to teach your colleagues something and you have to justify your steps, not just describe what you did.

The language. Over time you’ll develop a vocabulary of good words and bad words to use when writing papers. Speaking about machine learning or computer vision papers specifically as concrete examples, in your papers you never “study” or “investigate” (there are boring, passive, bad words); instead you “develop” or even better you “propose”. And you don’t present a “system” or, shudder , a “pipeline”; instead, you develop a “model”. You don’t learn “features”, you learn “representations”. And god forbid, you never “combine”, “modify” or “expand”. These are incremental, gross terms that will certainly get your paper rejected :).

An internal deadlines 2 weeks prior . Not many labs do this, but luckily Fei-Fei is quite adamant about an internal deadline 2 weeks before the due date in which you must submit at least a 5-page draft with all the final experiments (even if not with final numbers) that goes through an internal review process identical to the external one (with the same review forms filled out, etc). I found this practice to be extremely useful because forcing yourself to lay out the full paper almost always reveals some number of critical experiments you must run for the paper to flow and for its argument flow to be coherent, consistent and convincing.

Another great resource on this topic is Tips for Writing Technical Papers from Jennifer Widom.

Writing code

A lot of your time will of course be taken up with the execution of your ideas, which likely involves a lot of coding. I won’t dwell on this too much because it’s not uniquely academic, but I would like to bring up a few points.

Release your code . It’s a somewhat surprising fact but you can get away with publishing papers and not releasing your code. You will also feel a lot of incentive to not release your code: it can be a lot of work (research code can look like spaghetti since you iterate very quickly, you have to clean up a lot), it can be intimidating to think that others might judge you on your at most decent coding abilities, it is painful to maintain code and answer questions from other people about it (forever), and you might also be concerned that people could spot bugs that invalidate your results. However, it is precisely for some of these reasons that you should commit to releasing your code: it will force you to adopt better coding habits due to fear of public shaming (which will end up saving you time!), it will force you to learn better engineering practices, it will force you to be more thorough with your code (e.g. writing unit tests to make bugs much less likely), it will make others much more likely to follow up on your work (and hence lead to more citations of your papers) and of course it will be much more useful to everyone as a record of exactly what was done for posterity. When you do release your code I recommend taking advantage of docker containers ; this will reduce the amount of headaches people email you about when they can’t get all the dependencies (and their precise versions) installed.

Think of the future you . Make sure to document all your code very well for yourself. I guarantee you that you will come back to your code base a few months later (e.g. to do a few more experiments for the camera ready version of the paper), and you will feel completely lost in it. I got into the habit of creating very thorough readme.txt files in all my repos (for my personal use) as notes to future self on how the code works, how to run it, etc.

Giving talks

So, you published a paper and it’s an oral! Now you get to give a few minute talk to a large audience of people - what should it look like?

The goal of a talk . First, that there’s a common misconception that the goal of your talk is to tell your audience about what you did in your paper. This is incorrect, and should only be a second or third degree design criterion. The goal of your talk is to 1) get the audience really excited about the problem you worked on (they must appreciate it or they will not care about your solution otherwise!) 2) teach the audience something (ideally while giving them a taste of your insight/solution; don’t be afraid to spend time on other’s related work), and 3) entertain (they will start checking their Facebook otherwise). Ideally, by the end of the talk the people in your audience are thinking some mixture of “wow, I’m working in the wrong area”, “I have to read this paper”, and “This person has an impressive understanding of the whole area”.

A few do’s: There are several properties that make talks better. For instance, Do: Lots of pictures. People Love pictures. Videos and animations should be used more sparingly because they distract. Do: make the talk actionable - talk about something someone can do after your talk. Do: give a live demo if possible, it can make your talk more memorable. Do: develop a broader intellectual arch that your work is part of. Do: develop it into a story (people love stories). Do: cite, cite, cite - a lot! It takes very little slide space to pay credit to your colleagues. It pleases them and always reflects well on you because it shows that you’re humble about your own contribution, and aware that it builds on a lot of what has come before and what is happening in parallel. You can even cite related work published at the same conference and briefly advertise it. Do: practice the talk! First for yourself in isolation and later to your lab/friends. This almost always reveals very insightful flaws in your narrative and flow.

Don’t: texttexttext . Don’t crowd your slides with text. There should be very few or no bullet points - speakers sometimes try to use these as a crutch to remind themselves what they should be talking about but the slides are not for you they are for the audience. These should be in your speaker notes. On the topic of crowding the slides, also avoid complex diagrams as much as you can - your audience has a fixed bit bandwidth and I guarantee that your own very familiar and “simple” diagram is not as simple or interpretable to someone seeing it for the first time.

Careful with: result tables: Don’t include dense tables of results showing that your method works better. You got a paper, I’m sure your results were decent. I always find these parts boring and unnecessary unless the numbers show something interesting (other than your method works better), or of course unless there is a large gap that you’re very proud of. If you do include results or graphs build them up slowly with transitions, don’t post them all at once and spend 3 minutes on one slide.

Pitfall: the thin band between bored/confused . It’s actually quite tricky to design talks where a good portion of your audience learns something. A common failure case (as an audience member) is to see talks where I’m painfully bored during the first half and completely confused during the second half, learning nothing by the end. This can occur in talks that have a very general (too general) overview followed by a technical (too technical) second portion. Try to identify when your talk is in danger of having this property.

Pitfall: running out of time . Many speakers spend too much time on the early intro parts (that can often be somewhat boring) and then frantically speed through all the last few slides that contain the most interesting results, analysis or demos. Don’t be that person.

Pitfall: formulaic talks . I might be a special case but I’m always a fan of non-formulaic talks that challenge conventions. For instance, I despise the outline slide. It makes the talk so boring, it’s like saying: “This movie is about a ring of power. In the first chapter we’ll see a hobbit come into possession of the ring. In the second we’ll see him travel to Mordor. In the third he’ll cast the ring into Mount Doom and destroy it. I will start with chapter 1” - Come on! I use outline slides for much longer talks to keep the audience anchored if they zone out (at 30min+ they inevitably will a few times), but it should be used sparingly.

Observe and learn . Ultimately, the best way to become better at giving talks (as it is with writing papers too) is to make conscious effort to pay attention to what great (and not so great) speakers do and build a binary classifier in your mind. Don’t just enjoy talks; analyze them, break them down, learn from them. Additionally, pay close attention to the audience and their reactions. Sometimes a speaker will put up a complex table with many numbers and you will notice half of the audience immediately look down on their phone and open Facebook. Build an internal classifier of the events that cause this to happen and avoid them in your talks.

Attending conferences

On the subject of conferences:

Go. It’s very important that you go to conferences, especially the 1-2 top conferences in your area. If your adviser lacks funds and does not want to pay for your travel expenses (e.g. if you don’t have a paper) then you should be willing to pay for yourself (usually about $2000 for travel, accommodation, registration and food). This is important because you want to become part of the academic community and get a chance to meet more people in the area and gossip about research topics. Science might have this image of a few brilliant lone wolfs working in isolation, but the truth is that research is predominantly a highly social endeavor - you stand on the shoulders of many people, you’re working on problems in parallel with other people, and it is these people that you’re also writing papers to. Additionally, it’s unfortunate but each field has knowledge that doesn’t get serialized into papers but is instead spread across a shared understanding of the community; things such as what are the next important topics to work on, what papers are most interesting, what is the inside scoop on papers, how they developed historically, what methods work (not just on paper, in reality), etcetc. It is very valuable (and fun!) to become part of the community and get direct access to the hivemind - to learn from it first, and to hopefully influence it later.

Talks: choose by speaker . One conference trick I’ve developed is that if you’re choosing which talks to attend it can be better to look at the speakers instead of the topics. Some people give better talks than others (it’s a skill, and you’ll discover these people in time) and in my experience I find that it often pays off to see them speak even if it is on a topic that isn’t exactly connected to your area of research.

The real action is in the hallways . The speed of innovation (especially in Machine Learning) now works at timescales much faster than conferences so most of the relevant papers you’ll see at the conference are in fact old news. Therefore, conferences are primarily a social event. Instead of attending a talk I encourage you to view the hallway as one of the main events that doesn’t appear on the schedule. It can also be valuable to stroll the poster session and discover some interesting papers and ideas that you may have missed.

It is said that there are three stages to a PhD. In the first stage you look at a related paper’s reference section and you haven’t read most of the papers. In the second stage you recognize all the papers. In the third stage you’ve shared a beer with all the first authors of all the papers.

Closing thoughts

I can’t find the quote anymore but I heard Sam Altman of YC say that there are no shortcuts or cheats when it comes to building a startup. You can’t expect to win in the long run by somehow gaming the system or putting up false appearances. I think that the same applies in academia. Ultimately you’re trying to do good research and push the field forward and if you try to game any of the proxy metrics you won’t be successful in the long run. This is especially so because academia is in fact surprisingly small and highly interconnected, so anything shady you try to do to pad your academic resume (e.g. self-citing a lot, publishing the same idea multiple times with small remixes, resubmitting the same rejected paper over and over again with no changes, conveniently trying to leave out some baselines etc.) will eventually catch up with you and you will not be successful.

So at the end of the day it’s quite simple. Do good work, communicate it properly, people will notice and good things will happen. Have a fun ride!

EDIT: HN discussion link .

1st Edition

Your PhD Survival Guide Planning, Writing, and Succeeding in Your Final Year

• Taylor & Francis eBooks (Institutional Purchase) Opens in new tab or window

Description

Accessible, insightful and a must-have toolkit for all final year doctoral students, the founders of the ‘Thesis Boot Camp’ intensive writing programme show how to survive and thrive through the challenging final year of writing and submitting a thesis. Drawing on an understanding of the intellectual, professional, practical and personal elements of the doctorate to help readers gain insight into what it means to finish a PhD and how to get there, this book covers the common challenges and ways to resolve them. It includes advice on: Project management skills to plan, track, iterate and report on the complex task of bringing a multi-year research project to a successful close Personal effectiveness and self-care to support students to thrive in body, mind and relationships, including challenging supervisor relationships. The successful ‘generative’ writing processes which get writers into the zone and producing thousands of words; and then provides the skills to structure and polish those words to publishable quality. What it means to survive a PhD and consider multiple possible futures. Written for students in all disciplines, and relevant to university systems around the world, this unique book expertly guides students through the final 6–12 months of the thesis. The 'Insider Guides to Success in Academia' offers support and practical advice to doctoral students and early-career researchers. Covering the topics that really matter, but which often get overlooked, this indispensable series provides practical and realistic guidance to address many of the needs and challenges of trying to operate, and remain, in academia. These neat pocket guides fill specific and significant gaps in current literature. Each book offers insider perspectives on the often implicit rules of the game -- the things you need to know but usually aren't told by institutional postgraduate support, researcher development units, or supervisors -- and will address a practical topic that is key to career progression. They are essential reading for doctoral students, early-career researchers, supervisors, mentors, or anyone looking to launch or maintain their career in academia.

Table of Contents

Katherine Firth manages the academic programs of a residential college at the University of Melbourne, Australia and founded the Research Insiders Blog which has been running since 2013. 　 Liam Connell has worked in research training and education since the late 2000s. He works in research development at La Trobe University, Australia. Peta Freestone has worked in higher education for over 15 years, creating award-winning initiatives including Thesis Boot Camp, founded in 2012. She designs and delivers writing and productivity programmes for universities and other organisations around the world.

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Insider Guides to Success in Academia

Katherine Firth

Taylor & Francis

21 December 2020

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Accessible, insightful and a must-have toolkit for all final year doctoral students, the founders of the 'Thesis Boot Camp' intensive writing programme show how to survive and thrive through the challenging final year of writing and submitting a thesis.

Drawing on an understanding of the intellectual, professional, practical and personal elements of the doctorate to help readers gain insight into what it means to finish a PhD and how to get there, this book covers the common challenges and ways to resolve them. It includes advice on:

• Project management skills to plan, track, iterate and report on the complex task of bringing a multi-year research project to a successful close
• Personal effectiveness and self-care to support students to thrive in body, mind and relationships, including challenging supervisor relationships.
• The successful 'generative' writing processes which get writers into the zone and producing thousands of words; and then provides the skills to structure and polish those words to publishable quality.
• What it means to survive a PhD and consider multiple possible futures.

Written for students in all disciplines, and relevant to university systems around the world, this unique book expertly guides students through the final 6–12 months of the thesis.

The 'Insider Guides to Success in Academia' offers support and practical advice to doctoral students and early-career researchers. Covering the topics that really matter, but which often get overlooked, this indispensable series provides practical and realistic guidance to address many of the needs and challenges of trying to operate, and remain, in academia.

These neat pocket guides fill specific and significant gaps in current literature. Each book offers insider perspectives on the often implicit rules of the game — the things you need to know but usually aren't told by institutional postgraduate support, researcher development units, or supervisors — and will address a practical topic that is key to career progression. They are essential reading for doctoral students, early-career researchers, supervisors, mentors, or anyone looking to launch or maintain their career in academia.

The PhD Survival Guide Podcast

• SELF-IMPROVEMENT

Are you a first year PhD student trying to figure out how to navigate grad life? Or maybe you're a fifth year looking for the motivation to write out the last chapter of your dissertation? Regardless of where you are or where you want to be, this is the podcast that talks all things grad school! The purpose of this podcast is to highlight some of the things that I, and others, wish they knew prior to starting their grad school journey. We will be covering a multitude of topics such as mental health, good practices, how to ace your first seminar, and much much more!

24. Casual Conversations: Exploring non-academic paths in the PhD - With Dakota, PhD

Welcome to the PhD Survival Guide Podcast! As we always say here on the podcast, every PhD journey is unique. I worked full-time in the laboratory and had the privilege of dedicating the majority of my time to my experiments. While I have talked in depth about the pros and cons of this, not all of you have the same experience. In this episode, I spoke to Dakota, a recent PhD graduate who juggled a full-time PhD with a full-time job outside of academia. We spoke about various topics, such as the challenges she faces, ways to expand on your research and experiences, and how to navigate non-academic careers during, and after, your PhD! As always, we hope you enjoy this episode! Dr. Dakota: Dakota is a recent PhD graduate who studied the experiences of Latino young adults using dating apps, their identity construction, partner preferences, and conceptions of happily ever after. She has six years of research experience in both the non-profit and tech sectors and currently works as a mixed methods User Researcher for a tech company. Dakota has previously worked at Facebook studying online connection and community in Facebook groups. In her past in non-profit research, she studied foster youth outcomes at the City University of New York (CUNY)’s Accelerated Studies in Associate’s Programs as well as social welfare intervention analysis for low-income Latino families at the National Hispanic Research Center. She earned her M.A. in Sociology and B.A. in American Studies from Columbia University and is a former Fulbright Spain grantee.  Connect with Dakota: Twitter: @dakotazrc Want to be a guest or send me a voice message? ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Check out our linktree!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ If you enjoy this podcast and want to tune in as more episodes of the PhD Survival Guide come out, please leave the podcast a like or follow! This way, you will be notified every time a new episode airs. Please share us with your friends! Don't forget to leave us a review! If you have any suggestions for future episodes or topics you would like to hear about, please let me know in the Q&A section below!  Follow us on Instagram! ⁠⁠⁠@PhDSG_Pod ⁠⁠⁠ DISCLAIMER: This podcast was written, produced, and hosted by myself, Ferass. While we do the best we can to gather information from various sources, it is important to remember that everything we say here is of our own opinions and inferences. All PhD students, mentors, and programs are unique and the advice may not always apply. We implore you to think with an open mind. The purpose of this podcast is to help guide and empower current and prospective students throughout their journeys. We appreciate your time. We are also on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts!

23. Casual Conversations: From diverse roots, to doctorate - Crossing academic origins - With Cristina, MPH and Sarah, BS

Welcome to the PhD Survival Guide Podcast! In the recent past, some of you have reached out asking these key questions: Does it really make a big difference to have a Master's degree? Or does the research experience you completed in your Bachelor's degree really prepare you for the research burdens in a PhD? What if you don't have either of these things, will you be at a severe disadvantage? In this episode, we tackle the origin stories of Cristina (who has an MPH), Ferass (who has a BS with lab experience), and Sarah (who has a BS with no lab experience). We talked about how how our previous experiences before our PhDs may have impacted or prepared our journies throughout our degrees. As always, we hope you enjoy this episode! Connect with Cristina on LinkedIn! Connect with Sarah on LinkedIn! Connect with Ferass on LinkedIn! Want to be a guest or send me a voice message? ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Check out our linktree!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ If you enjoy this podcast and want to tune in as more episodes of the PhD Survival Guide come out, please leave the podcast a like or follow! This way, you will be notified every time a new episode airs. Please share us with your friends! Don't forget to leave us a review! If you have any suggestions for future episodes or topics you would like to hear about, please let me know in the Q&A section below!  Follow us on Instagram! ⁠⁠⁠@PhDSG_Pod ⁠⁠⁠ DISCLAIMER: This podcast was written, produced, and hosted by myself, Ferass. While we do the best we can to gather information from various sources, it is important to remember that everything we say here is of our own opinions and inferences. All PhD students, mentors, and programs are unique and the advice may not always apply. We implore you to think with an open mind. The purpose of this podcast is to help guide and empower current and prospective students throughout their journeys. We appreciate your time. We are also on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts!

22. Casual Conversations: How to navigate relationships in the PhD - Creating sustainable connections - With Dr. Victoria Godieva

Welcome to the PhD Survival Guide Podcast! Pursuing a PhD can be a very isolating experience. You may soon come to realize that the demands of being a PhD student can consume your time. This drastic shift in your work-life balance can also significantly affect your relationships, including family, friends, and significant others. In this episode we talk with Dr. Victoria Godieva about how starting and pursuing our PhDs changed the relationships around us. We also talked about the qualities we looked for in relationships and how to create sustainable connections. As always, we hope you enjoy this episode! Dr. Victoria Godieva: Dr. Victoria Godieva is a recent PhD graduate in biochemistry from Florida International University. During her time in her PhD, Victoria worked diligently towards unraveling the mysteries of c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK3) in the brain. While juggling her own personal projects, she was also a dedicated mentor to various masters and undergraduate level students within her laboratory, as well as various students in her teaching assistant position at FIU. She has been awarded with multiple honors including the transdisciplinary biomolecular and biomedical sciences fellowship, the Sylvia Turman scholarship, and the dissertation year fellowship. Outside of the laboratory, she is a strong advocate for female representation in STEM and has grown her public platform to voice her opinions on these important topics as well as student life, transparency on a day in the life, and mental health. Victoria will be continuing her academic journey at the prestigious Yale University. Connect with Victoria: Instagram: @Vicky.The.Scientist LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoria-godieva-4b73abaa/ Want to be a guest or send me a voice message? ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Check out our linktree!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ If you enjoy this podcast and want to tune in as more episodes of the PhD Survival Guide come out, please leave the podcast a like or follow! This way, you will be notified every time a new episode airs. Please share us with your friends! Don't forget to leave us a review! If you have any suggestions for future episodes or topics you would like to hear about, please let me know in the Q&A section below!  Follow us on Instagram! ⁠⁠@PhDSG_Pod ⁠⁠ DISCLAIMER: This podcast was written, produced, and hosted by myself, Ferass. While we do the best we can to gather information from various sources, it is important to remember that everything we say here is of our own opinions and inferences. All PhD students, mentors, and programs are unique and the advice may not always apply. We implore you to think with an open mind. The purpose of this podcast is to help guide and empower current and prospective students throughout their journeys. We appreciate your time. We are also on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts!

21. NOTHING IS WORKING!!! - How to properly troubleshoot - Don't be the definition of insanity

Welcome to the PhD Survival Guide Podcast! In my PhD, behind every single successful experiment, there were multiple (and I mean a ton) of failed experiments. That's totally normal! It's through failure that we learn how to find success, and you're going to fail a lot in your PhD. As such, it's important to learn how to properly troubleshoot an experiment or procedure. This also applies to those students that are doing their PhDs outside of STEM. So in this episode, I lay out a 6 step (technically 7 but whatever) guide as to how to generally tackle any troubleshooting procedures. So before you go back to banging your head against the wall, please listen in! I hope you enjoy the episode! Want to be a guest or send me a voice message? ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Check out our linktree!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ If you enjoy this podcast and want to tune in as more episodes of the PhD Survival Guide come out, please leave the podcast a like or follow! This way, you will be notified every time a new episode airs. Please share us with your friends! Don't forget to leave us a review! If you have any suggestions for future episodes or topics you would like to hear about, please let me know in the Q&A section below!  Follow us on Instagram! @PhDSG_Pod  DISCLAIMER: This podcast was written, produced, and hosted by myself, Ferass. While we do the best we can to gather information from various sources, it is important to remember that everything we say here is of our own opinions and inferences. All PhD students, mentors, and programs are unique and the advice may not always apply. We implore you to think with an open mind. The purpose of this podcast is to help guide and empower current and prospective students throughout their journeys. We appreciate your time. We are also on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts!

20. Casual Conversations: Transforming your notes to transform your PhD - Tending to the knowledge garden - With Jorge Arango

Welcome to the PhD Survival Guide Podcast! In this episode, I talk to author Jorge Arango about his book - Duly Noted: Extend your mind through connected notes. This episode is packed with information on how to think differently about notes as well as how to use notes as tools to progress your research. As always, we hope you enjoy this episode! Get Duly Noted: Extend your mind through connected notes from Rosenfeld today with discount code PHDPOD for a limited time! Jorge Arango: Jorge Arango is an information architect, author, and educator. For the past three decades, he has used architectural thinking to bring clarity and direction to digital projects for clients ranging from non-profits to Fortune 500 companies. He’s the author of Duly Noted: Extend Your Mind Through Connected Notes, Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places, co-author of Information Architecture: for the Web and Beyond, and host of The Informed Life podcast. Besides consulting, writing, and podcasting, Jorge also teaches in the graduate interaction design program at the California College of the Arts. Connect with Jorge Want to be a guest or send me a voice message? ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Check out our linktree!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ If you enjoy this podcast and want to tune in as more episodes of the PhD Survival Guide come out, please leave the podcast a like or follow! This way, you will be notified every time a new episode airs. Please share us with your friends! Don't forget to leave us a review! If you have any suggestions for future episodes or topics you would like to hear about, please let me know in the Q&A section below!  Follow us on Instagram! ⁠@PhDSG_Pod ⁠ DISCLAIMER: This podcast was written, produced, and hosted by myself, Ferass. While we do the best we can to gather information from various sources, it is important to remember that everything we say here is of our own opinions and inferences. All PhD students, mentors, and programs are unique and the advice may not always apply. We implore you to think with an open mind. The purpose of this podcast is to help guide and empower current and prospective students throughout their journeys. We appreciate your time. We are also on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts!

19. Casual Conversations: Recruitment limitations, online PhD, working full-time - With Vinita Puri

Welcome to the PhD Survival Guide Podcast! In this episode, I had the opportunity to talk about so many different topics and issues that various students face, but I never had to deal with personally. I spoke to Vinita Puri, an international online PhD student from Canada doing her research in the United States. Vinita covers her experiences with recruiting for her research, what it's like to do an online PhD, having a full-time job while being a full-time student, and so much more. Vinita has a robust background in academia and considers herself a lifelong learner. Her passion for her research is exemplified in this episode as well as in her bio below. Vinita Puri: Dr. Vinita Puri is a highly experienced Registered Social Worker, Accredited Mediator and Industrial/Organizational Coach that provides evidence-based and solution-focused services to support positive outcomes for individuals, families and groups. Over the past 20 years, she has gained expertise in alternative dispute resolution and clinical psychotherapy which has enhanced her ability to support individuals as they navigate through life transitions and develop resiliency in the face of adversity. Her passion for social justice fueled her desire to advocate for disability prevention and anti-oppressive policies/procedures in the workplace. Over the last 6 years, Dr. Puri has been providing consulting and coaching services to a wide range of organizations and human resource teams on change management, crisis/conflict management, addressing barriers to inclusion and employee engagement. Her expertise in mediation and clinical psychotherapy facilitates her ability to help individuals identify their unique strengths so they can remove barriers that impede personal growth and development. Dr. Puri holds a Doctorate (Honoria Causa) in Industrial and Organizational Psychology, a Master’s in Criminological Research, a Master’s in Social Work, and a Specialized Honours B.A. in Sociology. At the present time, she is completing her PhD at Walden University in Psychology (Self Design) while owning and operating a clinical practice. She is the Clinical Director of Resilience Counselling and Coaching Services which provides a range of specialty mental health services and programs that include mindfulness based training and cognitive psychotherapy. Dr. Puri is a Board Member of the Ontario Association of Family Mediators (OAFM) and on the Diversity Advisory Committee (DAC) of the Psi Chi International Honorary Society in Psychology. Most recently, she has joined Western State University as a Faculty Member for the MS. in Psychology Program at Western State University (USA). Connect with Vinita: Instagram: @Resilience_16 Twitter/X: twitter.com/vinita_puri LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dr-vinita-puri-7647b7 Want to be a guest or send me a voice message? ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Check out our linktree!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ If you enjoy this podcast and want to tune in as more episodes of the PhD Survival Guide come out, please leave the podcast a like or follow! This way, you will be notified every time a new episode airs. Please share us with your friends! Don't forget to leave us a review! If you have any suggestions for future episodes or topics you would like to hear about, please let me know in the Q&A section below!  Follow us on Instagram! @PhDSG_Pod  DISCLAIMER: This podcast was written, produced, and hosted by myself, Ferass. While we do the best we can to gather information from various sources, it is important to remember that everything we say here is of our own opinions and inferences. All PhD students, mentors, and programs are unique and the advice may not always apply. We implore you to think with an open mind. The purpose of this podcast is to help guide and empower current and prospective students throughout their journeys. We appreciate your time. We are also on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts!

18. Conquering comprehensive exams - Comps, quals, prelims - What are they and why are they so scary?

Welcome to the PhD Survival Guide Podcast! At some point of your career as a PhD student, you will have to take the dreaded comprehensive exams (comps for short). Doesn't sound familiar? Maybe you call them preliminary exams or qualifying exams. Regardless, this exam is a necessary requirement for all PhD students to become PhD candidates. In this episode, I talk about why comps are so scary, what exam committees are and how to use them to your advantage, as well as the major formats of your comps and what to expect! Want to be a guest or send me a voice message? ⁠⁠⁠⁠Check out our linktree!⁠⁠⁠⁠ If you enjoy this podcast and want to tune in as more episodes of the PhD Survival Guide come out, please leave the podcast a like or follow! This way, you will be notified every time a new episode airs. Please share us with your friends! Don't forget to leave us a review! If you have any suggestions for future episodes or topics you would like to hear about, please let me know in the Q&A section below!  Follow us on Instagram! @PhDSG_Pod  DISCLAIMER: This podcast was written, produced, and hosted by myself, Ferass. While we do the best we can to gather information from various sources, it is important to remember that everything we say here is of our own opinions and inferences. All PhD students, mentors, and programs are unique and the advice may not always apply. We implore you to think with an open mind. The purpose of this podcast is to help guide and empower current and prospective students throughout their journeys. We appreciate your time. We are also on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts!

17. How to present with no data? - Seminar and presentation formatting - Ace your first presentation!

Welcome to the PhD Survival Guide Podcast! In this episode, we talk about how to give a presentation when you still have little to no data to present on. Whether you're a first year PhD or just starting a new project, you might be expected to present on your work and that can be pretty scary! Don't worry at all as I will go over how to format your presentation and recount my first ever seminar and what I learned from it! Want to be a guest or send me a voice message? ⁠⁠⁠Check out our linktree!⁠⁠⁠ If you enjoy this podcast and want to tune in as more episodes of the PhD Survival Guide come out, please leave the podcast a like or follow! This way, you will be notified every time a new episode airs. Please share us with your friends! Don't forget to leave us a review! If you have any suggestions for future episodes or topics you would like to hear about, please let me know in the Q&A section below!  Follow us on Instagram! @PhDSG_Pod  DISCLAIMER: This podcast was written, produced, and hosted by myself, Ferass. While we do the best we can to gather information from various sources, it is important to remember that everything we say here is of our own opinions and inferences. All PhD students, mentors, and programs are unique and the advice may not always apply. We implore you to think with an open mind. The purpose of this podcast is to help guide and empower current and prospective students throughout their journeys. We appreciate your time. We are also on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts!

Hey everyone! My name is Firas and I am super excited to announce the PhD Survival Guide Podcast! If you are interested in pursuing a PhD or are a current student, this podcast will be very helpful for you! I hope you all enjoy the podcast! Are you a first year PhD student trying to figure out how to navigate grad life? Or maybe you're a fifth year looking for the motivation to write out the last chapter of your dissertation? Regardless of where you are or where you want to be, this is the podcast that talks all things grad school! The purpose of this podcast is to highlight some of the things that I, and others, wish they knew prior to starting their grad school journey. We will be covering a multitude of topics such as mental health, good practices, how to ace your first seminar, and much much more!

Ratings & Reviews

General topics helpful for any phd.

cchevaliercmskwj&8

I’m a second year art history PhD, so some of the STEM specific topics are less relatable, but general topic episodes are super helpful! Really appreciate the time the host spends making these! This is maybe too far out of the STEM wheelhouse, but one of the things I see a lot of my peers struggle with is getting a PhD in a field that has very poor financial/job prospects (most humanities phds, tbh!), and how to stay motivated and excited about our work despite this. Would really appreciate an episode on anxiety about what comes next once the phd is nearing its end 🙂

Information

• Creator Ferass
• Years Active 2023 - 2024
• Episodes 25
• Rating Clean
• Copyright © Ferass
• Show Website The PhD Survival Guide Podcast

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The Ph.D. Survival Guide 2nd Edition, Kindle Edition

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There are many interpretations of what Ph.D. stands for, including the following: Patiently hoping for Degree; Professorship? hah! Dream-on; Please hire, Desperate; Pathetic hopeless Dweeb; Probably heavily in Debt; and Particularly hapless Dude. Perhaps the best way to understand what a Ph.D. is all about is to remember what a wise person once said: B.S. stands for Bull Shit, M.S. for More of the Same, and Ph.D. for Piled hire and Deeper. Prepare to find out just how deep it can get.

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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004QGYRBW
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 2, 2011
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 1413 KB
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• #794 in Education Aims & Objectives
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About the author

Eric jay dolin.

I grew up near the coasts of New York and Connecticut, and since an early age I was fascinated by the natural world, especially the ocean. I spent many days wandering the beaches on the edge of Long Island Sound and the Atlantic, collecting seashells and exploring tidepools. When I left for college I wanted to become a marine biologist or more specifically a malacologist (seashell scientist). At Brown University I quickly realized that although I loved learning about science, I wasn't cut out for a career in science, mainly because I wasn't very good in the lab, and I didn't particularly enjoy reading or writing scientific research papers. So, after taking a year off and exploring a range of career options, I shifted course turning toward the field of environmental policy, first earning a double-major in biology and environmental studies, then getting a masters degree in environmental management from Yale, and a Ph.D. in environmental policy and planning from MIT, where my dissertation focused on the role of the courts in the cleanup of Boston Harbor.

I have held a variety of jobs, including stints as a fisheries policy analyst at the National Marine Fisheries Service, a program manager at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, an environmental consultant stateside and in London, an American Association for the Advancement of Science writing fellow at Business Week, a curatorial assistant in the Mollusk Department at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, and an intern at the National Wildlife Federation, the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management, and the U.S. Senate. In 2007, I became a fulltime writer, which is by far the most challenging and rewarding job I have ever had.

I have always enjoyed writing and telling stories, and that's why I started writing books--to share the stories that I find most intriguing (I have also published more than 60 articles for magazines, newspapers, and professional journals). My most recent book is REBELS AT SEA: PRIVATEERING IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. REBELS was awarded the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award and the Samuel Eliot Morison Book Award for Naval Literature, given out by the Naval Order of the United States; and was a finalist for the New England Society Book Award and the Boston Authors Club Julia Ward Howe Book Award. REBELS was also selected as a “Must-Read” book by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Before that I published A FURIOUS SKY: THE FIVE-HUNDRED-YEAR HISTORY OF AMERICA'S HURRICANES, which was chosen as a best book of the year by The Washington Post, Library Journal, Booklist, and Amazon's editors. It also was a New York Times Editor's Choice, a "Must-Read" book, and was the winner of Atmospheric Science Librarians International Choice Award for History. Other books include BLACK FLAGS, BLUE WATERS: THE EPIC HISTORY OF AMERICA'S MOST NOTORIOUS PIRATES, which was chosen as a "Must-Read" book and was a finalist for the 2019 Julia Ward Howe Award given by the Boston Author's Club; BRILLIANT BEACONS: A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN LIGHTHOUSE, which was chosen by gCaptain and Classic Boat as one of the best nautical books of 2016, and as as a "Must-Read" book; WHEN AMERICA FIRST MET CHINA: AN EXOTIC TALE OF TEA, DRUGS, AND MONEY IN THE AGE OF SAIL (Liveright, 2012), which was the winner for history, in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards; received a Gold Medal, History, in the Independent Publisher Book Awards; and was chosen as a Highly Recommended Book by the Boston Authors Club, and as a finalist for the New England Society Book Award; FUR, FORTUNE, AND EMPIRE: THE EPIC HISTORY OF THE FUR TRADE IN AMERICA (W. W. Norton, 2010), a national bestseller, was chosen by New West, The Seattle Times, and The Rocky Mountain Land Library as one of the top non-fiction books of 2010. It also won the 2011 James P. Hanlan Book Award, given by the New England Historical Association, and was awarded first place in the Outdoor Writers Association of America, Excellence in Craft Contest; and LEVIATHAN: THE HISTORY OF WHALING IN AMERICA, which was selected as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and The Providence Journal. LEVIATHAN was also chosen by Amazon's editors as one of the 10 best history books of 2007. LEVIATHAN garnered the the 23rd annual (2007) L. Byrne Waterman Award, given by the New Bedford Whaling Museum, for outstanding contributions to whaling research and history. LEVIATHAN also received the 2007 John Lyman Award for U. S. Maritime History, given by the North American Society for Oceanic History, was named an Honors Book in nonfiction for the 8th annual Massachusetts Book Awards (2008-2009), and was awarded a silver medal for history in the Independent Publisher Book Awards (2008).

I am also a Switzer Environmental Fellow, a Dean John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellow, a member of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, and a Nantucket Historical Society Research Fellow, and I was awarded a special commendation from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for "Contributing to the Award of the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the IPCC."

Thanks for reading!

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• v.13(3); 2012 Mar

PhD survival guide

Leonardo Almeida-Souza

1 Peripheral Neuropathy Group, Department of Molecular Genetics, VIB and University of Antwerp, Belgium.

Jonathan Baets

2 Neurogenetics Group, Department of Molecular Genetics, VIB and University of Antwerp, Belgium.

By now you have secured your place on a PhD programme, your project is beginning to crystallize and you have a paid position or a fellowship to support you financially during your time in the lab. Time to put your brain and body to work at last. But beware, although your PhD will have many thrilling moments of discovery and insight, there will also be many pitfalls and perils to overcome or avoid. Here, we hope to summarize some of those challenges and offer a few tips that might help budding PhD students survive the bad times and enjoy the good.

First and most importantly, a PhD is not just a project to be completed and written up. It is a training period during which aspiring scientists must learn the right way to do science. You cannot always control the various and erratic factors that will contribute to your eventual success, but you can ensure that you acquire knowledge and skills that will always be an asset, regardless of your future career path. A PhD is a singular opportunity to learn. In fact, during the years to come, you should seize every opportunity to learn about every topic, both scientific and non-scientific, that either interests you personally or is important for your current project—bioinformatics, advanced microscopy or quantum physics—or your professional future—writing and presentation skills—or life in general.

[…] a PhD is not just a project to be completed and written up. It is a training period during which aspiring scientists must learn the right way to do science

The single most valuable skill that you will develop during your PhD is the capacity to tackle problems scientifically—to adopt a state of mind that allows you to look at things objectively, logically and factually. A PhD is a great training camp to hone your skills in critical thinking, hypothesis formulation and experimental design. You can also learn a lot by observing how your colleagues and other scientists from different backgrounds apply the scientific method to solve problems.

A scientific way of thinking is also extremely valuable outside the academic environment [ 1 ]. After all, PhD graduates are usually employed by companies because of their capacity to solve problems and not necessarily because they know everything about eye development of Drosophila .

Although your boss—usually a primary investigator (PI)—or other senior scientists in your lab will supervise your doctoral work, you will soon find out that you are expected to work independently on your project. This ‘mental solitude’ can be intimidating, but it teaches you to take charge of the task without expecting others to troubleshoot every mishap for you. Of course, PhD students are not usually marooned without help, but on the other hand, you do have to learn to take responsibility for your own project.

When performing scientific research, one is inevitably confronted with unknown terrain, both in terms of factual knowledge and technical approaches. This means that failures are inevitable. This might seem a daunting prospect to a junior researcher, but this challenge will help you to develop a tolerance for frustration that is essential to becoming a successful scientist. In science—but not only in science—we often learn the most from failure. As a scientist, you must constantly question yourself, your experiments and your data to find out what you might have overlooked, why the experiment did not work or why the results contradict your initial assumptions. This lengthy and inescapably frustrating process is the very heart of scientific discovery and it cannot be avoided without coming up hard against the damaging repercussions of research misconduct. You will be sorely tempted, late at night and facing a deadline, to ‘make the data fit’, ‘fudge’ the results or ignore the inconvenient outlier, but you will be doing a disservice to yourself, your supervisor and to science itself. Moreover, it could get you dismissed.

When performing scientific research, one is inevitably confronted with unknown terrain […]. This means that failures are inevitable

Serendipity is important in science and to be able to see and understand the unexpected requires knowledge, time and an open mind

Publishing is an integral part of science. All new scientific insights are, by definition, unproven until they have been validated and elaborated or refuted by the scientific community. This process is most effectively achieved by publishing your work in a peer-reviewed journal. However, to achieve this, you will have to master the particular scientific style in which papers are written. You might find that, owing to time pressures, your PI or postdoc will write the papers that cover your work. You should accept their help, but it is an essential part of your education that you write your own papers and master scientific writing. It is a skill that requires a lot of practice and the fortitude to face failure and respond positively.

Although a scientific article is a technical document written for a particular expert audience, the most compelling papers are those that lead the reader through the story of the research and make the data and discussion accessible to those outside your immediate field. Like any good tale, your manuscript requires careful construction: a compelling protagonist (your protein/gene) and antagonist (the hypothesis), dramatic action leading to some sort of climax (your results) and the message or meaning of the story (your discussion). You will have to shape your work into a concise, convincing and readable document and adequately cite the literature, all within the particular constraints of the journal to which you plan to submit. This implies that you will have to re-evaluate your initial hypothesis and often list your experiments in a different order than that in which they were actually performed to present a convincing argument for the reviewers.

Most research labs are under significant and mounting pressure from universities, research institutes or grant organizations to demonstrate progress. As a consequence, there is an insatiable hunger for publications and a preoccupation with journals with high impact factors (IFs) that too often turns the intrinsically enjoyable process of scientific publishing into a nightmare of terror, frustration, disappointment and reprimands. Nevertheless, you should keep in mind that the ‘gold standard’ in scientific publishing is a well-written story with a new and interesting hypothesis supported or disproven by solid results and a convincing analysis. The impact of your own work can either be higher or lower than the rank of the journal in which you publish, and either way, your findings will remain valid, no matter the IF of the journal. Note also that selection panels are increasingly aware of the limitations of judging a scientist by the IFs of the journals in which they have published, and now often use alternative metrics in combination with the IF to assess a candidate's impact.

Anecdotally, there are several articles that were published in small journals but eventually turned out to be landmark discoveries. An interesting example in our own field is the 1991 finding of a segmental duplication containing the PMP22 gene on chromosome 17, which causes the most common form of inherited peripheral neuropathy [ 2 ]. It was the first gene duplication to be shown to cause disease in humans. This highly cited article was published in the first issue of Neuromuscular Disorders , a journal that is still considered modest in terms of its IF. Some of the authors—who were PhD students at the time of publication—later became leading scientists in the field of inherited peripheral neuropathies.

Good communication is essential in any career, but it is particularly vital to avoid misunderstandings and conflicts in a lab. You do not have to be friends with everyone you work with, but a bad atmosphere can make your PhD miserable. Things as simple as who cleans the glassware, or issues as complex as the level of independence your PI expects from you can all be addressed and resolved through good communication. Furthermore, each lab or department will have its own policies and rules governing the way things work, both officially and informally. Spending some time talking to people at different levels can help you to grasp the modus operandi of your department and research group. The final factor in the equation is what you want from your PhD project and what your plans are for the future. Aligning your expectations with those of your supervisor and your lab will make everyone's life much easier.

Aligning your expectations with those of your supervisor and your lab will make everyone's life much easier

The only constant in science—and in life—is change. Keep in mind that as time goes by, your views about science will mature and possibly change. Similarly, owing to the high turnover of people and ideas in an academic environment, the modus operandi of your department might also change. Thus, efficient communication implies keeping the information in your policies/unwritten rules/expectations ‘folder’ up-to-date.

You inevitably encounter difficult characters in any professional environment, and the scientific world is no exception. The chances are that one of them is working very close to you or might even be your boss, which will make your journey more troublesome and, at times, next to impossible. Two generic strategies might be helpful to you to deal successfully with a difficult boss. The first is to be prepared: be aware of the working environment in your lab and know your peers and supervisors. The second is efficient and professional communication.

You might find that your PI has a very self-centred view of his or her students and projects. To an extent, this viewpoint is understandable given that your work is probably a part of the ‘bigger picture’ and needs to be conducted appropriately. One way in which this kind of issue can manifest itself is if your boss insists on being in control all the time. In this instance you need to earn your boss's trust and respect, perhaps by showing them how much you respect them also. Present your ideas by starting the conversation with something positive. Do not directly counter your boss's arguments; acknowledge them and present your own as a parallel approach. Do not imply that your idea is better, instead present your results and some evidence from the literature to guide your boss into connecting the same dots that you have.

You will often be under intense pressure to produce results. This is not all bad—we all need some degree of incitement to perform well—but productivity drops rapidly when pressure becomes unrealistic. This is a main threat for PhD students and might even end a scientific career prematurely. A PI should know where this threshold is for a particular project and student. In case of problems, the best option is to have a frank and professional chat with your boss, using as a starting point your sincere concern about the progress and general well-being of your project and the quality of your scientific education.

Do not be tempted to think that your boss actually knows what is going on—either in terms of your research or in terms of problems you might be having—and is just ignoring you. Your boss is supervising a lot of people and also has his or her own concerns; he or she might not have noticed a problem or might not remember the specific details of your work. Assuming your boss is in the loop can cause months of suffering and delay. It is your obligation to talk to people and explain your research or discuss your problem in a clear and professional manner to find a solution. It often happens that a certain problem that has been bothering you for weeks could be solved in a five-minute conversation.

Even assuming you have a good boss who supports you, teaches you and cares about you, do not make the mistake of only relying on his or her opinion. If you are to develop as a scientist, you need to start having your own ideas and making your own decisions. Some years ago, one of us was talking to an acclaimed scientist who suddenly stopped mid-conversation and said: “Can I give you some advice? Learn to ignore your supervisor.” This initially seemed a weird and awkward piece of advice, not least because the supervisor mentioned was participating in the conversation. Nevertheless, the eminent scientist went on to explain that during his career he had all too often seen students abandon projects or ignore results because their supervisors had told them to, only to have someone else explore the same results some time later and discover something very interesting. Ultimately his advice rang true for us and ignoring the advice of a supervisor led to the most interesting results of one of our PhD projects.

It would be rather foolish to think that this anecdote is valid for every conversation that you will have with your supervisor, but the important point is to stand up for your ideas and pursue what you feel to be right. In truth, your supervisor will be your primary source of ideas and advice and his or her experience will be essential to guide you through your research. Just be sure to balance his or her wisdom with your own growing expertise and knowledge of your subject and research. Begin to trust yourself.

In starting a PhD, you have embarked on a highly competitive, family-unfriendly and badly paid career path. In most parts of the world, the number of PhDs seeking a job greatly exceeds the demands of industry, let alone that of academia [ 3 , 4 ]. On the other hand, science is one of the most exciting career options for those hooked on the thrill of discovery or the desire to make a difference. The single most rewarding moment in science is seeing something that nobody has seen before. This high more than makes up for the mundane lows that are ultimately easily forgotten. In a way, science is more of a vocation than a regular daytime job [ 5 ]. The secret to surviving a PhD is proactively avoiding common problems and learning to enjoy what you are doing. Nothing in life is worth doing without passion, and a career in science is an exemplary case.

The secret to surviving a PhD is proactively avoiding common problems and learning to enjoy what you are doing

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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