20 Things to-do in Semester 1 of a PhD
Things you can do when you don’t know what do be doing (i.e. most of the time)
I’m going to let you in on a little secret: doing a PhD is hard, for reasons you might already know — a PhD is creating new knowledge and can require a lot of brain power. But there are also other difficulties.
When you start a PhD, you essentially are signing up to be your own boss on a project that you don’t yet know how to do. It can be tricky trying to figure out what you should be doing, especially in the beginning.
I’m currently 9 months into my PhD programme, and I wanted to share with you what kind of things I feel have helped me to have a very productive first year so far.
I’ve divided up the list into three categories:
- Personal: related to your life and health
- PhD Specific: related to your actual PhD
- Skills Related: the skills you should be developing throughout the course of the PhD programme.
Without further ado, let’s get into it.
Category 1: Personal
1. Make a Plan for your Physical and Mental Health
PhD students can end up losing motivation or becoming overworked or burning out completely in first year because they go at it too strongly and don’t know how to continue that momentum. A PhD is a marathon not a sprint and it’s important to treat it that way.
Coming up with a plan for how you’re going to stay physically and mentally healthy throughout the 4 years is going to be vital for staying motivated which is important in any long-term endeavour.
2. Figure out a Work-Style that Works for You
Find a work style that you can actually do long-term.
Is it better for you to break it up into a few hours at a time or a longer period? What breaks work for you? Try out a few different styles and see which works best for you.
You may find that different work styles work better at different times.
For me if I’m in thinking/planning mode then I can only do 3–4 focussed hours and then I need some rest to allow some creative breakthroughs to come. Whereas when I’m in go-mode and I know what I’m doing, I can work all day programming and writing. Figuring this out early on will be helpful for maximising your productivity.
3. Get your Office Setup
It’s good to setup both your office in your university if you have one, but also at home. Many of us are now working from home unexpectedly but I had already sorted out my home-office situation so it was a pretty easy transition. Making sure you have a good ergonomic setup — a table and chair to allow your legs and arms at a 90 degree angle, an elevated screen i.e. a monitor or laptop stand for your laptop, a keyboard and mouse to again allow for the proper angles.
Additionally, having any motivational tools, snacks, tea/coffee you need to get through the workday.
4. Setup a Budget
Whether you are self-funded, or funded by a university or research institute, money for PhD students can be pretty tight. It tends to be significantly less than people who go straight into industry after their undergraduate degrees earn. If you haven’t started yet, it is a good idea to determine whether you can actually live off the amount you will be getting.
Category 2: PhD Specific
5. Identify the Key Players in your research area
Who are the main researchers in your area? What are the key papers? Early on, it is good to do a mini-literature review to get an initial understanding of where the field is at the moment. This may be something your supervisor can help with if they work in the same area. You also should have some understanding of what still needs to be done in the area from coming up with your main research question and submitting your proposal.
Then you can start thinking about projects you can start working on now, what might need more time, what kind of data collection you need to be doing. Understanding these things in the beginning will get you off on the right track and should hopefully mean you can start working on papers earlier.
6. Identify the Main Conferences and Journals
This will give you an insight into what places you will be publishing your work. You can either look this up, or look at what publications your supervisor and their other PhD students made in the past. This helps you plan your research year: where and when you expect to be publishing. This sets a deadline of due-dates for submissions and then you can backwards plan projects that you can work on to have submissions ready for those due-dates.
If there’s a conference or submission date coming up then it’s a good time to work on research projects. However, (for me) in the summer time there are few submissions so it is a good time to start working on thesis writing, data collection etc.
7. Identify Competitions in Your Research Area
In computer science (my broad research area is machine learning), we have things like hackathons. Additionally, there are more general competitions in scientific communication such as Thesis in 3 which involves explaining your thesis to a general audience in 3 minutes.
These look great on your CV and are great for developing your skills, and can even be a source of some extra income.
Myself and a colleague took part in a student enterprise competition this month. We were able to learn a lot about innovation while developing a startup company, and managed to place third with a cash prize of €2000!
8. Get a Research Diary
Keeping track of your research is so important. Whatever way you choose to do this — on paper or digitally is up to you. But you must record what you are doing — a weekly summary typically helps. Even if you have a great memory, 4 years is a long time and you will forget things so absolutely keep track of everything.
Especially when you are working with data, recording things like preprocessing steps and experiment results in a designated location is very important.
9. Choose a Paper / Reference Manager
Similar to the last tip, it’s also very important to decide how you are going to organise your papers. Throughout the course of your PhD you may read thousands of papers, so deciding where to store all of those is key.
I personally use Mendeley, and within there I have broad topic folders that contain subtopic folders that then contain the individual papers. I also keep track of papers to read and papers read in a spreadsheet. I store individual paper notes in both Mendeley and the spreadsheet.
10. Learn to use LaTeX
I highly recommend LaTeX. It is so much easier than formatting by hand: you upload the formatting files and then when you type, it formats everything automatically. You can also easily cite things without having to type out everything — just using a keyword.
This is very convenient when you decide to submit something to a different conference than originally planned because you just change the format file and it automatically changes heading, reference style etc.
Word of caution: be sure to check with your supervisor that they are happy for you to use LaTeX, not everyone will be as familiar with it.
11. Learn About Your Supervisor
It’s good to figure out how your supervisor works early on. When you are in a meeting with them, what do they want to hear?
I was lucky because my supervisor straight-up told me that they were very results focussed. So I know that when I have an idea, I should do a bit of initial work and get up a graph of the results to show them something interesting rather than trying to tell them about something I am thinking of doing.
Figuring this out will mean your communication will be a lot smoother.
12. Write Your Abstract
People are a bit skeptical about writing the abstract early.
The abstract is essentially a brief summary of your work: what you did, why it was important, how you did it, what the results were, and what that means.
I took an academic writing class in my second semester of the PhD. They told us to write the abstract early and I feel that this has been a very good motivational tool to be able to read when you’re feeling a bit lost.
In the early stages, you can write what you expect to do, what you hope to find and what you feel that will mean.
Of course, it isn’t set in stone. You can update it as you go along. But it is good for staying on track and it is a good step towards describing your research briefly and getting that “elevator pitch”.
Category 3: Skills Related
13. Catch-Up on Your Research Area
Typically you won’t have all of the skills you need to carry out the PhD when you start. Don’t worry. It’s a common situation.
My programme brings together people from statistics, computer science, and engineering backgrounds that each have strong and weak points. I have to do more work on my programming, but others need more general statistics knowledge.
In the beginning it’s important to figure out your weak points and catch up.
14. Plan Your Transferable Skills
Throughout a PhD, apart from the skills you learn in your specific research area, you will also gain skills in:
- Research Skills
- Personal Organisation
- Teamwork
- Leadership
- Career Management
- Writing and Publishing
- Public Speaking
- Scientific Communication
- Media
- Entrepreneurship and Innovation
These skills are completely transferable and very employable so it is good to make a plan for how you can work towards these skills throughout the PhD and track your progress. I use this bullet journal spread to keep track.
15. Learn General Research Skills
We had the opportunity to take some workshops on:
- Research Ethics
- Research Integrity
- Scientific Communication
- Entrepreneurship
- GDPR
- Writing
You may also be able to take workshops like this in your university or you may be able to find some free online courses or videos on YouTube. All of these are very relevant to researchers so it is beneficial to learn about these in the initial few months.
16. Plan your Courses
In my programme, I have to take 30 credits of classes in the first 18 months. It is also recommended that you will do some teaching assistance throughout the programme.
In the beginning, plan out which courses will be good for you to take, which might be good to audit, and which it would be possible for you to do your teaching hours in.
Note: teaching hours may be a requirement in your university so be sure to find that out.
Teaching hours help with leadership, as well as developing teaching skills if you want to become a lecturer. It can also be some much needed additional income. Whether your university requires you to do teaching hours or not, it is definitely recommendable.
17. Setup your Social Media
This may seem counter-intuitive but networking is a big part of research. Twitter (ciaraxfeely) in particular is very big in the research world as a way to share your work. But also, Instagram (ciaraxfeely), and YouTube (PhD and Productivity) can be a great way to engage with other researchers and explain to a general audience what you are working on. Particularly, for myself, being a woman in computer science it is important to show future generations that anything is possible.
Setting up your social media profiles and making a plan for how often you will post will get you started with this.
Personally, I like to share tips on my social media about productivity in research such as this post that is on my startup’s Instagram profile.
18. Setup a LinkedIn Profile
This form of “social media” will be particularly relevant for your career. Many researchers and prospective injury partners and employers will use LinkedIn to connect with one another. Again, this is a great way to network that could lead to potential research collaborations or future employment.
19. Make a Career Plan
While the end of your PhD might seem far away now, it can creep up on you pretty quickly. It is useful to make a plan for life after your PhD in the early stages so that you can guarantee that you are making important steps towards that goal along the way. This can be in the form of specific internships or courses to supplement the skills you are gaining through research.
For example, being a mostly self-taught coder, if I want to work in the software industry I feel it is important to have a good understanding of proper software development methodology so I took a course in that this semester.
20. Make a CV
For me, this step is good for a two reasons.
First, it is good to setup a CV because you may need it for different occasions: e.g. I had to submit one along with my paper application for a doctoral consortium event.
But as well, it is possible to create a CV with the things you HOPE to achieve by the end of your PhD — i.e. how you think your PhD will look in 4 years. This is a great motivational tool. As you progress in your PhD you can mark milestones of key activities you have completed.
