hello everyone and welcome back to my channel.
Today I'm going to be sharing with you guys 20 things that you should do early on in your PhD
So that could be in the first 3-6 months or year of your PhD
Or if you're further along in your PhD I think it's probable that you'll find something you haven't done already.
Before I get into that I wanted to say thank you so much to everyone who has been subscribing.
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I started this channel as a way to up-level my public speaking skill as part of my PhD
And since then I've been able to connect with so many of you and soon we will be able to connect even more with the community tab.
Now I'm going to get into the video so there are 3 main categories that I've broken these down into.
So the first are more personal things you should do early on in your PhD
The second is more specific to your research and your thesis and things like that.
And then the third will be to do with the additional skills you pick up as part of your PhD.
I have my notes in front of me in case you see me glancing down.
I didn't want to start and stop this video a hundred times.
The first couple of things are the more personal things I think are important to do early on in your PhD.
One of those things is to make a plan for your physical and mental health.
You'll often hear that PhD students lose motivation or burn out in first year because they go at it too strongly
but then they don't really know how to continue on that momentum for the 4 years.
The PhD is a marathon not a sprint so it's important to treat it that way.
So coming up with a plan for how you're going to stay physically and mentally healthy throughout the four years is really important.
It's actually really important for staying motivated so it's definitely something you should consider doing
If you want to hear my plan for staying health during this time then let me know in the comments below.
If there's anything in this video that you want to hear more about just let me know in the comments below.
The second thing is to figure out a work style that you can actually achieve.
So what way does it suit you to continue with your work.
Does it suit you to do a couple hours throughout the day or does it suit to do it all in one big chunk
What kind of breaks will you take? All of that is important to figure out early on
because that's gonna set the tone for how you're going to continue with your work throughout the 4 years.
It's good to figure out your work style so you can maximise your productivity and not waste time with a work style that doesn't work for you.
That's something I figured out pretty early. I definitely do try different things out with my schedule.
Just to see what might work but I think in general I'm able to work pretty diligently because I've figured out my work style.
The third thing would be to get your office set up.
Both in your office in your university if you have one, and at home.
Most people are working from home right now so it's a good idea to get your home office setup.
because you never know what might happen.
We are in a weird time where I feel a lot of people weren't prepared for working from home.
Even if it's in a shared living space.
Having that setup at an early stage in case anything like this does happen is very important
Because then if you ever need to work from home unexpectedly you'll know what you need to do.
And the fourth personal thing would be to set up a budget.
As you might know PhD students are notoriously penniless.
Obviously most people do have some form of income from their university or scholarship.
Or they work to subsidise their income.
But it is typically a lot less than people who got jobs after their bachelor's or master's degree.
So it's something to be aware of, if you haven't started your PhD yet it's a good thing to do before you start.
Determine if you can actually live off the amount you would be getting for your PhD.
The next couple of things I'm going to talk about are going to be about your PhD research and your topic.
The first thing that's important to do early on in your PhD
is to identify the main researchers in your area, the main papers related to your research
and do sort of a mini lit review at the beginning of your PhD
just so you can get a general understanding of where the field is at the moment.
and that might be something that your supervisor can help you with if they work closely in the same research area as you.
they might have a sense of what still needs to be done
and you probably will too from deciding your topic and writing your proposal
So you should have some understanding of how the field is at the moment.
But it's definitely important to identify those key researchers, the key papers and what still needs to be done
Because that's what's going to form the basis of your thesis.
Start thinking about what projects would be good to do now that you can you get working on now
what projects might need more time because of data collection etc.
Thinking about this early on will help you get started with writing papers early on rather than waiting until 2nd or 3rd year.
Another thing is to identify the main conferences and journals for your research area.
That way you'll know what kind of places you're expecting to publish your work.
That can be done either by looking up conferences related to your specific area.
Or you can look at your supervisor and their past students' publications
Where do they typically publish - what kinds of conferences and journals.
And which of those would be more relevant to your research topic.
This is important because it'll help you plan out the first year's work of when and where you expect to be publishing
And if you've seen my A4 bullet journal setup for the year 2020
You'll see this 5 year spread of when a conference due date is, when the notification is and when the actual conference is on.
It's good to know all of that because that helps you plan out your year.
When is a good time to work on research? If there's a conference coming up it might be a better time to work on research.
Whereas if there's no conferences for a while you can probably work on your thesis or lit review etc.
It's also good to identify some competitions that might be relevant to your area.
For computer science we have things like hackathons.
There'll be some more general ones like scientific communication competitions.
That anyone can enter into.
Explaining your thesis to a general audience.
If you want to participate in anything like that it will look really good on your CV.
and it'll be great for developing your skills as well.
Another thing is to organise how you're going to be keeping track of your research.
I've shared a lot of things about my A4 research diary.
And that's generally how I keep track of everything.
Sometimes I'll type up parts of that as notes for things that are a bit easier to track.
If I want to search a particular topic then I can see when I did that.
Keeping a general summary of what you did each week is important because you will forget things that you've done.
It's hard to keep track of those things and specifically if you're working with data
It's good to make sure that you track what kind of changes you make to the data.
Making notes about what you did to preprocess the data is important.
I like to use my A4 bullet journal research diary but you can do whatever suits you.
But you will definitely need something because 4 years is a long time and our memories are not that good.
You also want to know how you are going to keep track of all the papers you're reading.
You will come across thousands of articles throughout your PhD.
And it's very important that you have a good system in place for how you organise those.
And for me it's keeping things organised in very specific subfolders in Mendeley
And having bibtex files for references
but whatever works for you, you might want to use an excel sheet.
Just as long as you have something and getting that sorted early makes things so much easier in the future.
Lots of people have jumbled bits of documents everywhere and then they have to go back and sort through that.
It's a lot easier if you come up with a concise system early on.
Another good thing to do early in your PhD is to learn to use Latex.
Because it's so much easier than trying to reformulate all your headings
and your citations if you've changed where you're going to submit something to a different journal or conference.
Or maybe they've changed their referencing style.
It just makes things so much more difficult when you've to change those things by hand.
Whereas in latex you upload the file
it knows what to do
You just have to write and it sorts everything out for you
It's just so easy
Having written my master's thesis not in latex
Now working with latex is such a joy, it's so much easier
Even though there's parts of it I really don't like
There's just so much to be gained from it even to do with just referencing and headings etc.
Another thing is to figure out how your supervisor works
What do they want to know when you're in a meeting with them
I was lucky because my supervisor straight up told me they're more results focussed
They just like to hear about results
And that totally makes sense from a research stand point
Because you can come up with all these ideas but if you haven't tried it out and gotten some initial results
then there's not much to talk about until you go and do it so you might as well just do it
and then be able to say I did this, it worked or it didn't
That means I always know how to approach them
Getting that sorted means your whole 4 years will be a lot easier
The last thing in this sort of research area would be to write your abstract
This is your abstract for your entire thesis
Often people aren't sure about writing it early.
I did a whole video about what you should include in your abstract and why you should do it early
It's very motivational and it helps you stay on track
I do highly recommend it. If you want to learn more about that I recommend checking out the video all about that.
The next couple of things are going to be releated to the general skills and specific skills that you're going to learn as part of your PhD
First thing you need to do is catch up on the area.
if you have any skills that are slightly lacking
My PhD is in machine learning but there are a lot of people who have joined the course from an engineering background
They don't have the necessary applied statistics skills so they'd have to do more work on that.
I have to do more work on my programming.
Other people would have to do work on general statistics like experimental design
You have some time in the beginning to get on top of those specific skills that you're going to need as part of your research.
Definitely good to do that early because then you'll have a much easier time later on.
As well you can catch up on more general research skills.
We had the opportunity to take some research workshops which you may be able to do as well.
Or you could find some online course, or free courses or YouTube videos
in general research things such as scientific communication
research integrity, research ethics, entrepreneurship, GDPR
all of those things are pretty relevant for researchers
and it's just good to have a general understanding of them when you begin your research
I highly recommend that. I do believe it helped me a lot to have those in the beginning.
Another thing is to make a plan for how you're going to complete your credits if you have credits to complete.
Or what classes you are going to be doing demonstration or TA hours for.
Part of my requirements for my PhD is that I have to take 30 credits which is about 6 classes
I don't have to do any teaching hours but it is highly recommended
It helps if you want to become a post-doc or a lecturer in the future
As well it's good for developing your leadership skills
And it's a bit of extra income so I'm not gonna turn that down
I do that anyways but it's good to make a plan for the classes you want to be doing.
For my PhD as well we have stage 1 and stage 2.
Within 18 months you need to do your stage 2 transfer
Part of that is showing that you have a plan for your credits
and a plan for your teaching hours
as well as your transferable skills
I did do a whole video about what kind of transferable skills you can expect to learn as a PhD student
I also have a video about how I keep track of my development of those
Definitely recommend checking out those videos if you don't know what I mean when I say transferable skills
As I mentioned I HAVE to develop those as part of my PhD
But I highly recommend you do as well even if you don't have to
Because they're highly employable skills and whether you plan to work in academia or not they're going to be important skills to develop
Some of that will be to do with networking and social media is a great way to get out there and meet other researchers
instagram, twitter, etc. I obviously have YouTube but I do have an instagram and twitter
Both of which my handle is ciaraxfeely
That's just a great way to meet other researchers
Also for sharing things about your research
In today's world I think people often feel they can't connect with scientists.
As researchers it's important to be getting yourself out there.
And sharing your research in some way or at least sharing that you are a researcher
For me being a woman who is doing a PhD in a STEM subject
To be a face of that and show future generations that you can do a PhD in a STEM subject as a woman
It's completely possible, there are other people doing that. So I do think that's important.
One thing you can do is setup a linkedin page which is good for meeting other researchers
and also companies - people that would be good to work with and collaborate with in future
The last two things relevant to this area of developing transferable skills
firstly making a career plan for yourself
Understanding where your PhD is going to leave your career wise
And what kind of things you can do along the way to develop and advance your career.
One of those things will be working on your transferable skills and developing general research skills,
participating in some of the competitions that I mentioned, publishing, etc.
Having a understanding of how you want your career to advance from doing a PhD
and having a sense of what way you want your career to be going after your PhD is important
Another thing that comes along with that is making a CV for yourself
That can be done in a way that's almost motivational
What I have done is set up a CV for myself that is what I hope my CV will look like after the PhD
So all of the things that I want to do throughout the 4 years that will hopefully advance my career
I always have something to look at to know I am working towards something
and I always know what I need to do to develop myself further.
All of the things I mentioned, publishing, transferable skills etc. will be important things to put on your hopeful CV
Definitely you can develop that throughout the 4 years and it's definitely an important thing to have for after your PhD
That is it for this video, I really hope it was helpful even if you are not in the early stages of your PhD.
I hope you at least found something useful or something you haven't done yet that you might consider doing.
I really hope you enjoyed this video, if you did be sure to give it a thumbs up because it really helps me out.
Be sure you are subscribed and that you have all notifications on so that you know when that competition is up
Thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next video.
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