Day 1 — First advice

It’s hard to say which day is really the first, but what matters is that I’ve started. After getting the information that I was accepted to doctoral program in Strategy and Venturing I visited the department to do some admin work and meet my supervising professors (one was new to me). During this day I got two distinct pieces of advice.

1. Start writing an article soon and work on your first publication. There is no reason to delay it too much. You have to learn the process and there is not better way to do it, than to actually do it. Besides, if you start with a conference paper (and it gets accepted to a suitable conference) you have good chances of publishing an article based on that paper. What could be a better start for doctoral studies if not getting the first article published. After that you can focus on more in-depth research quality.

2. Read a lot from the start. If you inverse that, people who don’t read enough at the beginning are likely to have challenges with positioning their work against existing body of knowledge. Therefore, to know where you’re going to you have to know where you’re starting from. And you are starting from where the current state of knowledge is.