in this video you will learn five skills which every research student must have
to succeed I have listed these skills on this slide and if you know what does it
mean and how to acquire these skills or you have these skills then you are
welcome to skip because your time is the most valuable entity you have but for
some students who want a little bit of explanation I will quickly but briefly
explain these things in this short video and if any one of you students can get
something out of this video so I would say that the purpose has been achieved
and we are starting right after this intro hello and welcome to my channel my
name is Tahir and if this is your first time please hit the subscribe
button and also the notification bell to get notified whenever I post a new video
on this channel every Tuesday and Friday so I have made this list in an
increasing order of importance so as you go down the list the importance of the
point goes up now let's talk about the first point organization you might be a
very smart or a clever student but if you are not organized chances are that
you will not succeed over a longer period of time because organization is
such an important skill for research students know here are some tips which
you can use to get organized so the first advice I would like to give you is
that make a habit of taking notes first of all you should make a comprehensive
list of what you want to do in your one year or in your one session or one
semester whatever you call it this list can be melt on your diary or you can
also make this list on any of the note-taking apps such as Evernote or
motion Apple nodes or OneNote anything any note-taking app or your personal
diary you can use you might think that this list will be a huge list yes of
course and of course this could be a huge list but this is the point that you
will at least understand and realize that you have a lot of work to do
on this list you will put everything what you have to do or what you want
do any appointments and it tasks any assignments projects or whatever you
want to do with your life as well put this everything on this list and then
what you want to do is you want to make a weekly to-do list no people have
suggested making daily to-do list I'm not a big fan of daily to-do list
because I don't think that we should memorize within a week what we have to
do what is important sometimes student our teachers are myself have used
calendar apps in the past you can try it as well so use calendar so this is how
you can organize your tasks now there are two more things I would like to
mention here for organization one is that I have seen that graduate students
are checking their emails all day long maybe 10 times a day so you have to do
something about this so the best practice is just check your email twice
because this will affect your daily routine are your daily to-do list if you
are using one in the morning and in the evening just twice you reply all your
emails and the second important thing is organize your folders on your laptop or
your desktop computer in a way so that you could be able to retrieve the
information as quickly as possible because a lot of time is wasted
searching in different folders so you have to name those folders in such a way
that you can understand ok this information ok I have to go there and
quickly retrieve the information so these are two other things but there are
some other things you can do to achieve this but I don't want this video to be
too long so just I will touch all these points quickly now the next point is
critical thinking so what is critical thinking critical thinking as the
research student is that you should be able to analyze the information and then
synthesize the information so these are two things so what information mostly as
a research student you will be looking at research of others
researchers other scientists so you are looking at the papers general paper or
maybe sometimes a textbook or some other things so what is analysis and what is a
synthesis so these are considered two pillars of critical thinking but
before I explain this one important thing is that you should be able to
evaluate the source of the information if you are getting something from a
textbook that is authentic if you are getting some material from a journal
paper that is authentic but if you are just relying on a some information on a
website that is wrong and these ebooks most of the time all a books are just
crap you have to evaluate the source first no
I am assuming that you understand that the information you are looking at the
research you are looking at is from authentic sources no you have to analyze
that thing so analysis means that you have to break down the main topic into
its subtopics into its components and then synthesis means that when you have
separate work separate research work or separate information from separately
from separate sources then how could you combine that thing into a single
conclusion so this is you doing synthesis that you first try to break
down the main topic into small topics and then you try to get information
about all those topics from different sources and then you try to combine
those things and that is called the synthesis process so analysis is
breaking down synthesis is combining so these are opposite of each other so what
is the purpose of this what is the purpose of creative thinking the purpose
is to have a conclusion so what is the story
what is the result you got out of all these activities so this is how you
should be able to do so the next point is communication so when we talk about
communication everyone tells us that you should be speaking effectively but
actually this is half part of the story the communication is a two-way process
so communication can be in different ways for example your communication with
the supervisor your communication with your research committee are your
communication in a kind of public speaking type of environment when you
presenting something in a conference when there are 100 people sitting in
front of you so these are different kind of communications you might have to do
so let's first talk about one-to-one communication the most important thing
for one-to-one communication is that you must be a good listener you must listen
to the point of view of other person before you start speaking so the
listening is the half part of the story so how will you check that you are not a
good listener so there are few things for example if you are interrupting the
other person it means you are not a good listener you are not giving the other
person a proper conversational space no the second symptom of being not a good
listener is that if somebody is talking to you and you are looking at your
mobile phone or maybe on your diarrhea some somewhere else so it means you are
not listening and the third indication that you are not a good listener is that
if you have to ask somebody to repeat what he has just said and if there is a
noise that is another matter but if it's a quiet room but you have to ask
somebody can you please repeat it means you are not listening so listen listen
to carefully to the other person and then speak then it will be an effective
communication so this is one tip for you the other tip is that if you are
speaking in a conference or in front of a research committee then what you need
to do is overcome your anxiety because I have seen people they are totally
nervous their legs are shaking so how to overcome this anxiety you accept this
anxiety this is the simplest way everybody gets nervous no problem you
accept this anxiety and then say ok no I can understand this then you will be
able to deal with this now the next point is managing stress stress is a
natural response of your body when there is a task which is uncompleted and you
have to complete it so you get a stress so that you could focus on that
particular task so this stress is helpful this is not depression
depression is a serious illness that is a something different so if you are
stressed then you should understand your stress the problem with this
is that every person has a different response to stress so I cannot give any
advice to how you can recognize that you are under stress but you have to
practice it you have to train your brain to understand that you are under stress
so a few examples of stress could be that you have to submit an assignment
and the deadline is approaching but you have not finished yet
similarly if you are studying abroad you have to pay your bills but you couldn't
get a regular job so you are under stress that you have to
pay the bills so in this situation the response should be that focus on your
assignment go get a or job do something pay the bill so this should be the
correct approach but the wrong approach that you just get stressed you don't do
anything and you can't do anything and you are just wasting your time so this
is a bad response to stress so when you are under stress there are few things
you can do the first tip is that you should understand that I am under stress
the second thing is you should appreciate the stress and you should say
to yourself that this stress is trying to help me to focus on my job the third
thing you can do is think logically not emotionally so this is another thing you
can do then there are few exercises breathing exercises take five to six
breaths in one minute so this is a good exercise just take deep breaths five to
six times in a minute and you will be a relief from this stress another thing
you can do is try to understand what is most important at this point your
assignment may not be the most important thing you should be doing right now so
if there is something else is more important then you should tell to
yourself I am stressed due to this thing but this is not important I am going to
do this whatever are the consequences of not submitting my assignment so this is
how you can manage your stress by talking to yourself training your brain
so that every time when you are under stress you must understand and then you
must appreciate it and then you must manage it and now let's talk about the
last point learned how to learn for this digital economy now this point is very
important and that's why I mentioned it at the end that top skill here is that
you must be adoptive to the new technology few years back when
students who are going to university they got their degree they come out and
they work for 40 years without ever learning anything else no more no you
have to adopt new technology on a continuous basis you are in a
continuously changing world you have to learn a lot of skills on a daily basis I
would say so you have to have this skill that how can I learn a new skill quick
fast this is the only way you can survive now the companies are asking
their employees to get training every month every three months there are
regulations around this there are laws around this you will be learning a lot
of new skills so the best thing for you while you are a student is to acquire
this skill of learning how to learn fast this is the main thing that you have to
keep yourself abreast with the technology but there are few other soft
skills associated with this and employers are now looking for these
skills so if you have to get a job you must also be learning these skills and
even if you are going to academia you will think that okay I just have to
teach I will go there with my diary I will write down something on the
blackboard and that's it No so as a teacher you have to learn a
lot of new technologies this is the old way of teaching now there are many new
concepts flipped classroom you have might have to create an online course
for your students you might have to use a learning management system like canvas
blackboard Moodle so there are a lot of technologies you have to learn not only
just taking lectures so therefore this is important that you understand that
you have to be adoptive of this technology quick fast but there are few
other associated skills and what are those those are you should be able to
understand the point of view of other person you should be able to understand
business models you should be able to understand digital economy we are moving
from industrial economy to digital economy so what what are some
the essential things like media skills you also have to have these media skills
not chatting purposeless purposelessly on Facebook but how to use media for the
business so these kind of skills these are some soft skills employers are now
looking for even in engineers they are looking for
these skills so these were some of the things which I wanted to highlight to
you so I hope you liked this video if so please give it a thumbs up and subscribe
to my channel because that will help me to create more of these videos thanks
for watching see you next time