10 tips for new PhD students

Starting a PhD can be both exciting and daunting. Informal advice from other students further into their projects has been the most directly helpful to me in the last five years, so I put together a list of ten things I’ve learned along the way that I wish I’d known from the beginning.

This post is a write-up of a talk I gave to new PhD students in the School of Earth and Ocean Science at the University of Southampton and is based on my own experience there, so some advice might be applied-science- and UK-centric, but most should be more widely applicable.

The theme of most of these points is writing things down as you go and before you forget them:

4 years is long enough to forget anything
…but short enough to think you won’t!

They are (in rough order of relevance for a student who’s just started):

1. Keep a journal
2. Own your project
3. Use a reference manager
4. Revise as you go
5. Back up
6. Maintain a sample/data inventory
7. Keep a contributions list
8. Take all the opportunities you can
9. Build your CV
10. Have fun!

1. Keep a journal

• Write down what you did daily/weekly
  Work you started/worked on/finished, people you met, seminars/conferences/workshops you went to, things you did in the lab¹, etc. Make it a habit.
  As long as you can do a full text search on all your entries, it can help you answer questions like “Which conferences have I been to?”, “When did I start running those samples?”, “What did she say about my methods? I can’t remember when we chatted, but we were standing in the queue for lunch”, etc.

• Keep meeting notes (important!)¹
  Who was there, where you were (someone’s office, on Teams, in the lab, etc), what everyone said, and the things you (and others!) need to do afterwards.

• At the end of the month, summarize all the progress you’ve made
  The new skills, new knowledge, and new experiences you’ve gained.

• Then do a yearly review — you’ll be surprised looking back! It can be a great morale boost.

• Apps to try include Logseq, Obsidian, Appflowy, Tana, Notion, and many others. These apps are also good for task management and keeping notes in general.

2. Own your project

• This is your PhD.
  Your project, your work, your career, 4 years of your life. It’s also your research, your data, and your findings!
• If you don’t like some part of your project, ask if you can change it.
  You’ll be doing it for the next 4 years, so make sure you’re going to enjoy it. Changing earlier is much better than either suffering because you didn’t, or trying to change later.
• It’s probably up to you to make things happen, and it’s definitely up to you to manage your project.
  Depending on your project, you may need to be quite self-starting. Don’t wait around for someone else to do things for you. You need to be on top of organising everything:
  • Keep a to-do list (or similar)
  • Prioritise your tasks²
  • Enjoy ticking things off it!
  • Manage your time well
    That includes taking time off regularly for mental health!

3. Use a reference manager

• There is nothing worse than typing every single citation and reference out by hand and then being told you need to reformat to a different referencing style.
• You’re also going to need to keep track of all the papers you’ll read and cite.
• Zotero is a free and open source option. That means you’ll always have it! Other options include EndNote, Mendeley, Paperpile, etc. Your university should have licences for at least some of these, but when you leave you may lose that licence and all your data would be locked away.
• I recommend correcting metadata as you go.
  Make sure names are correct, no bibliographic data is missing, etc. If you don’t do it as you go, you’ll have to do it for dozens of them with a deadline fast approaching…
• Use it when writing!
  All the major apps have Word/Google Docs plugins, and can work with L^AT_EX.

4. Revise as you go

• If you don’t revise, you’ll forget over a few years.
• If you do, you can go into your viva with confidence!
• Use old-fashioned flashcards, or software like Anki (desktop & mobile apps)

5. Back up

• You will generate a lot of data
• Work out in advance where you’ll put everything¹
  • Buy an external hard drive
  • Your IT department will provisions for people who use or generate serious amounts of data
  • Use git if you know how. Avoid if you don’t.
• 3-2-1 strategy - at least:
  • 3 copies (original + 2 backups)
  • 2 devices (laptop + USB/external SSD)
  • 1 online/offsite (cloud storage)
• Back up often
• Check your backups work

6. Maintain a sample/data inventory

• If you are doing a lab-based project, you will process a LOT of samples.
• You MUST remember where you put all your samples, including samples you’ve sent/given to collaborators. Note the site, room, shelf, box/bag/container, etc., even if it seems obvious to you now. Things change.
• If you generate/process a lot of data, record which folder you keep it in, what processing steps you’ve applied to it, who it came from, who you’ve sent it to, etc.
• Version your data and documents with the date.
  (not _v4_final_final_usethisone)
• Keep one read-only version of your data — exactly as it came out of the lab.
  You might need to go back and re-process. On Windows, right-click > properties > read-only.
• Include the metadata IN the data file if at all possible.
  Source, processing details, version date

7. Keep a contributions list

• You will not do this on your own, but it’s easy to forget who helped you 4 years ago. Don’t unintentionally make enemies!
• Examples:
  • Laboratory/technical staff
  • Captain and crew of research ships
  • Field assistants
  • Data/sample repositories & their staff
  • Someone who proofread your manuscript
  • Someone who got funding/data/samples

8. Take all the opportunities you can

• However you’re funded, this is a brilliant time to do cool stuff
  • Summer schools
  • Conferences
  • Field work
  • Placements
  • Cruises
  • Outreach/media
• On some funded doctoral programmes in the UK, students have the chance to do placements, in industrial and/or academic settings.
  You’ll need to be organised. There’s often only one deadline per year, and it can take ages to get the host to organise themselves. So get thinking!

9. Build your CV

• Don’t do something just because someone says “It’ll look good on your CV!” — often a red flag! But do develop your soft (and hard) skills for when you finish your PhD.
• Show you contribute to the department/university:
  • Organise seminars
  • Help with open days
  • Attend job seminars (and ask questions)
• Show you’re part of the academic community
  • Peer review (shadow your supervisor or even do it yourself)
  • Organise conferences/sessions
  • Media/outreach
• Get involved in grants
  • Help write proposals for big projects
  • Get small grants to help with your PhD
• Get all the hard skills you can
  • Make sure you can run your analyses yourself (ask tech staff to teach you)
  • Use any university training workshops that interest you
  • Get certificates wherever you can! Teaching, First Aid, etc

10. Have fun!

• PhDs are infamous for being long-winded, difficult, and lonely
• …but they don’t have to be! Your student’s union, department, postgraduate society, or similar will probably have events and resources to help make things more fun:
  • department/research group coffee breaks
  • Try and eat lunch away from your desk
  • Attend seminars with others (in person!)
  • Postgraduate Society events or similar
  • University sports clubs and societies
• Try and do things in-person
• Look after your mental health. Take a break!
• Your university/graduate school/programme will have support mechanisms which you should use if you need them:
  • Paid sick leave (with doctor’s note)
  • Suspension of candidature
    (just pauses your stipend and pushes back your deadlines)
  • Special considerations to extend deadlines

If you have questions, ask others in your office, lab group, or cohort, the older cohorts, your supervisor(s), the graduate school office, or the general university student helpline. Lots of help available. Don’t suffer in silence!