Lessons from my PhD
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Lessons from my PhD
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Re: Lessons from my PhD
#2Invaluable.
I've put that on my list of things to distil, review, and put into action.
Re: Lessons from my PhD
#3This is really good and I've saved it to revisit it later. Very concrete and insightful. Unlike a lot of meta-posts about PhDs that tend to be pretty watered down or abstract.
Re: Lessons from my PhD
#4This is really good advice, with actionable tips for once. Bravo!
Re: Lessons from my PhD
#5I also did a PhD and this is all true. I realized many of these things years later.
I think many of these points come down to confidence. When you are in the trenches, you really, really do know a lot, and you know it in incredible detail. In fact, in your career, if you leave academia you will probably never know a unique small "thing" in such detail ever again simply because you will have to make something as opposed to studying it. Not even your professor knows everything about what you do, and so she may give advice that seems to contradict what you think. It is vital that you trust yourself enough to speak up. Yes, the professor is really smart, and knows more than you, but she didn't spend 3 weeks in the lab wrestling with some optical setup like you did and you know some things better then her, better than anyone in fact. It's hard to admit, I know.
Also, you may really have wrong assumptions about the progress you're going to make in the project. You may feel very bad after a year of messing around while the prof thinks you're doing well. Talk about these feelings. The prof knows what's normal, you on the other hand may think you're the next Einstein (and assume Einstein wrote something great every other month) and constantly disappoint yourself.
Re: Lessons from my PhD
#6Two things I would add to this that I learned early on in my PhD:
1. Presentations aren’t really about conveying information.
I sat though so many dull presentations, they were very informative but I can read a paper quicker than they can badly present the same information.
The best presentations were the ones that covered the whys of the work, the applications, the next steps, the specific problem areas - often these aren’t covered in the paper but, armed with that extra insight I am far more likely to read the paper and remember it.
Presentations are (as the author says) about telling stories.
2. Show up. So many PhDs waft around not doing a whole lot, and so land up being on the program forever. This only benefits the uni and is detrimental to the student. I noticed in the first month of my PhD that most people did a lot more work at the end than the beginning - so I flipped it, worked consistently from day one and got done in just under 3 years.
Carry this over to your daily life and it’s almost a super power for getting stuff done. Consistently showing up and plugging away in something reaps rewards.
Re: Lessons from my PhD
#7Unmotivated details are also my pet peeve. I want to know why something is important or valuable before I decide to invest my time and energy into it.
Other people generally don't care about your personal struggles with a problem, so leave them out. Or at the very least don't lead with them. Lead with something that piques the interest of your target audience.
Re: Lessons from my PhD
#8The topic sentence idea is particularly valuable, and it's something I try to pass on to students. I also use latex macros to turn this on and off (and to put in margin notes, also). All of this advice was so similar to that I give my students that I went to the author's homepage here on HN, to see if it was somebody I had taught. (Nope, wrong field.)
Re: Lessons from my PhD
#9Solid advice, not just for PhD students. This is also invaluable for helping final year/capstone students navigate their supervisor interactions.
There’s nothing better than a student you wind up and they go off and solve a bunch of problems in interesting ways. They’re having fun, you’re workload is reduced and there’s even potential for a publication. Meetings are indeed about giving feedback and learning on both sides.
In contrast other students show up empty handed, unmotivated and expect a list of instructions some of which they might attempt. You feel like repeating yourself constantly and that they are not listening.
Re: Lessons from my PhD
#10The topic sentence idea is particularly valuable, and it's something I try to pass on to students. I also use latex macros to turn this on and off (and to put in margin notes, also). All of this advice was so similar to that I give my students that I went to the author's homepage here on HN, to see if it was somebody I had taught. (Nope, wrong field.)
I do that too, I tell students to first make a skeleton document, with titles that read like a story.
I do the same when programming btw, my function names read like a story with their complexities hidden lower in the class/library. Yes I have function names that some may find ridiculously long but it helps me a lot.