Hi, I'm Casey. I'm a professor in an information
science department. Last year I wrote a blog post with
advice to new PhD students, in part because last year I
was the director of our graduate program for the first time,
and I was thinking about all the things that I wish
I had known or thought about when i started my PhD.
And now I've decided to make a video about it,
because it's 2020 and the world is a garbage fire, and I really, really miss
talking to people. So now i'm talking to you, brand new
PhD student. First of all, congratulations! The fact that you are here at
all is a big accomplishment, and you are about
to embark on a very exciting journey. It will have its ups and downs, it will
certainly not be all good, but it will definitely be
exciting. So very importantly, first take a moment
to celebrate. [happy music!]
Okay, and now that you've done that,
you're a little bit terrified, right?
I mean, that's completely understandable. This is a big change, and most people
don't really know what it's like to get a PhD, and i can tell you right now
you're going to be explaining it to people for a long time. So there are
probably so many pieces of advice that I could give, and a lot of them are
quite low level. But i'm going to start with five.
Five pieces of advice, one of which is so important, and I'm going to give it
to you first, and it's super concrete. And the rest are all very abstract and
philosophical, but hopefully will help you
think about the way that you're seeing yourself in your PhD program.
Also let me give a small disclaimer, which is that
my PhD and my current faculty position are both in STEM fields.
Well, STEM with a smatter of social science.
But your mileage may vary if you are, for example, in a more humanities-style
PhD program. But I think that a lot of this advice
is definitely broadly applicable. Number one:
Get a citation manager, and read and cite papers like you are going to be citing
them for the next 30 years of your career.
It's really easy to focus on one thing at a time, and so when you're doing a
literature review, for example, for a paper even for a class,
you're just thinking of getting through that class. But I can tell you as someone
who is years out of their PhD that I am
constantly thinking back to things that I
read early in my graduate training, and wishing that I had had the foresight
to organize my readings well so that what they were still helpful for me now.
10 years in the future you will be so grateful
to past PhD student you for labeling and tagging and organizing the
papers that you read, so that you're not like me and
constantly like, oh I think i read something about this
seven or eight years ago. What was it? Where did I read it? I think
the author's name might have started with a K.
Or a C. Let me think of every relevant keyword and plug it aimlessly into my
citation manager or Google Scholar. Why did I not do a better job organizing
for the last 10 years? This is also probably something that I
could fix for myself now, but now it seems a much more daunting challenge
than it would have 10 years ago. And this also goes to a broader
principle that I think is a good way to think about your PhD, which is that it is
a long game. Everything that you're doing now,
it's not just to get through that one class or that one paper or even that one
dissertation. You are setting the foundation for the rest of your career.
Even if your research area completely changes,
at some point, you are still learning things
that you're going to be thinking about 30 years from now.
So just try to set yourself up well for that now.
All right, piece of advice number two: You don't know everything, and that's okay.
There's gonna be some point at the first
year of your PhD, probably multiple points. Maybe it's the
first day of your PhD. When you're going to be in a group of
people, and you're going to have the thought -
oh, they know so much they know so much more than me, and
I will never know that much. I remember a very
specific incidence of this when I was a
first-year PhD student. I was at a lab meeting, and the second
years had just done their qualifying exams. And my phd advisor
threw out one of the questions and asked everyone in the lab what they thought.
And the more senior PhD students in the program
started spouting off the most amazing smart answers that I completely did not
understand. And I just sat there thinking - that's
supposed to be me in a year? I will never
know as much as them. I don't know how I could possibly learn
these things. And then I did. And so will you.
And the other important part of this is that you have to
be willing to listen and be willing to learn
and to ask questions. Because that's how you learn things.
And you might be really hesitant to ask questions because you don't want to
project that you don't know things. You don't want other people
to think that you're stupid or to think that you shouldn't be there.
But that's not how this works. Eeveryone knows
that everyone has to have time to learn. And also there are always going to be
things that you know about that other people
don't know about. And this brings me to my third piece of advice:
Don't compare yourself to others. I know that this is very, very hard to take to
heart, and that you're probably gonna do it anyway.
But it's really important to keep in mind that
everyone's PhD experience is very different
for lots of different reasons. Your research,
your PhD situation, your personal circumstances
are completely different than the person next to you.
It's like comparing apples and oranges. Or ethnographers and data scientists.
However you want to think about it. Or even if someone is doing very similar
research to you in your very own program, your experience
is still different and unique to you. There's
going to be some point when you look around
and think that the people around you are all publishing more or faster or
accomplishing more. But there are lots of reasons why that
might be, right? Maybe someone comes into their PhD
program and has a research project just handed
to them that's already in progress and is
exactly what they want to do. Whereas maybe someone spends a couple of
years on a research trajectory and then decides they want to do something
completely different. Maybe someone has a lot of collaborators
and that can speed them up. It's just so unique to everyone.
And also going slower isn't a bad thing. Because the other thing to keep in mind
is that you should really want to focus on quality and not
quantity. I know that it is very, very tempting to
bean count. Because you know that someday someone is
going to be counting the number of publications on your CV. But even if
that happens sometimes, in terms of people
knowing you and knowing your work and having conversations about you,
they're not going to remember that you had N number of papers at some
particular conference in some particular year.
They are going to remember the awesome finding
of one of your papers that has contributed to the field or that they're
citing and that they remember later. Imposter syndrome is
rampant in academia, and you're gonna feel it at some point. So
maybe the comfort that I can offer you is that
everyone feels it. Whoever it is that you admire, whether
it's a more senior PhD student or a faculty
member who's far along in their career, and you think
that is who I want to be. There's probably someone that they feel that way
about. And also there's going to be someone who
looks up to you in that same way. You need to be
successful for you, and to do what makes you feel
like you are accomplishing things and moving forward.
And what that means is completely unique to you.
All right, piece of advice number four: Find your people. I know that this is
harder than ever right now. I can't imagine what it's like
starting your PhD in the middle of COVID. You might even be
doing everything completely remote, and you're
not even meeting your new colleagues in person yet. The
world is such a garbage fire. But first, it's not going to be that way
forever. Fingers crossed. And second, you can still meet people.
You can still find people, make friends, find collaborators, find mentors. It's
important that you have people to get advice from.
And hopefully you have an amazing PhD advisor who's going to be your first
line of defense there. But even if that's the case or not the
case, you still need more people to talk to.
And sometimes the very best mentors are actually
more senior PhD students as opposed to faculty.
these might be students in your program or just people in your field
and discipline. And even though you might not be meeting people at conferences for
a while, there are virtual conferences, there are
Facebook groups, there are Slack channels and Twitter, and lots of different ways
for you to connect with people who are like you.
And you shouldn't think of this as networking, you should think of it as
making friends. The people who you meet student
volunteering at a conference now when you're like a second year PhD
student are going to be the same people who
someday you are full professors with. Generations of academics grow up
together. Like, you're not getting rid of them
anytime soon, and they can really be some of your very best friends.
And it's really important to have people to commiserate with,
and to get support from, and advice from. And if you're having trouble finding
people, maybe ask some of the other PhD students
in your program to connect you with others in your discipline.
My final and perhaps most important piece of advice,
number five: you can and should have a life outside of your PhD.
There is this perception in academia
that we are all working 80 hour weeks, and you literally can't do anything else,
and that you have no life if you're an academic.
That is wrong. At least it doesn't have to be true, and you can
absolutely be successful while having good
work-life balance. Now the rhythm of a PhD or really any academic work
is uneven. Keep the all-nighters to a minimum.
But even if there are some weeks that are extremely unpleasant,
most are not going to be like that. You're going to have
some times when you can really breathe and you're not working as much,
to make up for some of those times when you really feel like you're working too
much. It is absolutely possible to be an
academic with a 40-hour work week. But even if you're working somewhat more
than that, and I could probably do some math and tell you
like how many hours there are left in a week when you're not sleeping,
you have to be doing something that you enjoy. And you should
not feel guilty for not working every spare moment that you have.
Every December I post a list of recommendations of my favorite fiction
novels that I read in the past year. Every year someone
comments on the fact that i have time to read.
And i'm just like, I like reading! That is a thing that I do in my free time. If you
have no free time such that you cannot do the things that
you want to prioritize, that is a problem. And in fact if you
want to read more, I will link to my fiction
recommendations down below, because i read some pretty darn good books.
I actually had a great conversation about this
on Twitter recently and this was in part because
I finally finished writing a novel. And a number of people asked me how as an
academic I have time to write a novel. And the truth is, I wasn't writing a
novel instead of writing papers or writing grants or doing work.
I was writing a novel instead of watching TV
or playing video games or other things that I enjoy. Sometimes you can't do
everything, but you should find the things that you want to prioritize
and do them. That's a way that you keep yourself healthy.
And it's really, really important. So those are my five big pieces of
advice, sort of the way to approach your PhD.
iIll link to the blog post down below as it might have had a little bit
more nuance. And I also know that there is so much more
that I could say. A lot of low-level things.
If you are a PhD student or someone who's out of your PhD,
I would love to know what your biggest pieces of advice are
for new PhD students. So you should put those in the comments below.
And also if you're a new PhD student and there are things that you are anxious
about that I didn't mention, or there are
questions that you have that maybe I could answer for you,
put those in the comments as well, and I'll do my best.
I suspect I might make more videos about advice on very specific things for PhD
students or maybe more later stage PhD students, so i would
love to know what you think. And if you followed me
here from Twitter, then you are welcome to respond to me
there too. this is actually my very first YouTTube
video ever, so I understand that I'm supposed to ask
you to subscribe, and like, and probably something else, I
don't actually know what it is. And while I am still starved to talk to
people, if there are other topics that you would
like me to cover, please let me know what they are. I'm
going to run out of ideas really quickly.
And if you are starting your PhD journey right now,
good luck! It's going to be really exciting, and I can't wait to see
what you have in store for the rest of the world!
All right, well this is Casey, and thanks so much for watching.