Surviving a PhD – Doing your research!
If you have gotten this far, and have passed your end of year examination, you will now be embarking upon your research. The key to this stage of your work is planning and contingency. Doing your research is about getting the most from the time you have and running several tasks concurrently. It takes a little practise, but it’s worthwhile.
Doing your research is about as fun (if you choose to believe it) as doing your PhD gets. Okay, so I’m leaving out conferences, but we’ll get to that in another article.
The challenge with doing your research is knowing that there is always an outside chance that your work will not actually work, and you’ll have to fall back upon your contingency plans.
I mentioned already about running tasks concurrently. I found this very useful as my PhD research was computationally based. I could set up my models over a few days, and let them compute over another few days. It’s important to not waste this time – don’t have a holiday – you can always be doing something else.
I found that by spreading my workload so that tasks overlapped meant that I had time to work on other things that were important to my research.
The best piece of advice I ever received was by a research fellow,
Always document what you do
I think this advice is timeless. I found when it came to writing up my thesis, on a number of occasions I was reaching for my note pad of scribbles to recall what I had actually worked on – usually how I set up my models!
This lead to the second best piece of advice. Always write up your work, to a point that you could extract it for publishing in conference and journal papers. It will save you the time when you have a weeks notice to throw together an abstract.
Finally, whilst you are doing your research, it is still important to note that it’s worth reading over various articles of literature, albeit at a lesser pace than in your first year. This helps keep your general knowledge of the field up-to-date. It also gives you opportunity to refine your literature review!