Surviving a PhD – Start out your PhD
Starting out your PhD will more than likely entail meeting your academic (possibly even industrial) supervisors. It’s a great time to put faces to those names which you have read about on your applications and acceptance letters. So you’re nervous – but hey, who isn’t, when you are starting out. More to the point, you are more than likely nervous because you’d rather be getting on with what you’re good at – applying your knowledge and researching a topic.
Before you begin, there are a lot of things I wish I knew before I started. Here it is best to take a step (or two) back, try and control that enthusiasm (believe me it will vanish otherwise), and approach this sensibly.
The first thing that I’m sure the majority of PhD candidates would say is that the first few months of your PhD will be nothing but reading, researching, more reading, and if you are lucky, maybe getting your hands dirty with practising what you will eventually do. However it is important not to get lost in all of this reading as you will loose your skills which will be so important later. I believe quite strongly that whilst the reading is very necessary, you need to keep practising with what you already have.
Okay, that aside – you’re reading – and you are wondering will it ever end. You can go days, weeks (even months) of reading through different books, journals, conference proceedings, technical notes and so forth to try and identify a niche that needs exploring. It is important to have a good grasp of the field around the topic you wish to research. After all, this is what will make up the backbone of your literature review in your thesis.
Beyond this, it is important to get yourself trained as early as you can in many transferable skills. Project management, risk assessment and anything to do with IT will be very helpful. Also it is useful to get trained up in any specialist software you may have to use. The point of this is so: a solid foundation will help produce good research!
Courses in project management are of unimaginable benefit. At some point you are going to have to discuss what you want to do with your supervisor. Planning out your work is the best thing you can do. Think about it logically. Break it down into managable pieces. Where possible run things concurrently.
This is something I did initially, and found I never reviewed what I was doing often enough. It is too easy to say, this is what I’ll do and how I’ll do it. It took me a while to get a better feel for how long tasks would take. I could then go back to my plan and update it, so I knew more accurately how the project was progressing.
With everything planned out, it is key to address the risks, or factors which may affect the outcome of your project. I did this by creating what is called aRisk Register. I included everything from the most unlikely scenarios to the most probable. You wouldn’t believe what can, and most often does, happen through the course of your research. Once I identified the risks which could affect the project, I determined what I could do to minimise the likelihood of them happening (mitigation) and also decided upon contingency plans to fall back upon should the problem be encountered.
Plan your work and assess the risks against it
I found these tips most beneficial to my research. I ran into numerous problems which needed to be addressed. Fortunately I had planned it well enough to recover and finish what I had started. This isn’t to say that my work finished on time. I freely admit I ran over – it was my fault. But employing the planning and risk methods I managed to curtail the damage and finished my research.
By this stage, you are probably quite early on in your research, say about 2 months in. You have a rough idea of what you will be doing. It may be vague, but you have something to handle.
When getting down the work, the temptation is to get everything done as fast as you can and get your tasks wrapped up nice and neatly. I can assure you that,
- working too hard will burn you out
- working fast will lead to mistakes
- tasks will seldom wrap up into the nice bundle you expect
I know from my own experience, in my first 6 months, I worked 9-5, 5 days a week. Sounds perfect – it was – except I didn’t take any real breaks between 9 and 5 each day. I worked over lunch, and maybe only conversed with people sparingly. After all, I’d work to do, and three years to do it. The problem was, I didn’t give myself any time to relax and unwind. I know now that by doing this, it leads to more productive work.
Coupling that burn out with working fast was a recipe for mistakes. I made tons of them. Some of them so silly I felt like slapping myself. Take your time and work at a steady pace.
A PhD is more like running a marathon, rather than running a series of 100m sprints.
The last thing I list – things will go wrong. Hypothesis may be wrong, or your simplification of a problem may be too stretched. At the end of the day, you have made contingency for problems. So the key is don’t stress.
So to summarise, when starting out…
- Read loads – but don’t neglect your skill set
- Teach yourself – attend loads of training courses
- Plan your work – Plan the work and assess the risks
- Give yourself a routine – Work to your plan and fall back on the contingency when you have to
- Relax – If it goes wrong, it’s not worth worrying over – this is what research is all about!