This page was first posted on January 23rd of 2023, and later modified on August 20th of the same year.
Mixing vibrant elixirs, designing perfect experiments, using top-notch equipment, spending most of our lives in a laboratory, and chanting eureka every week. This is how the life of a PhD student is usually depicted in the media; they usually only get one of those things right.
For better or for worse, the reality is very different. Not that we do not get to use fancy devices and get to design sometimes very engaging experiments, but I doubt any PhD student has ever chanted “eureka” upon finding something interesting. On the contrary, the usual reaction is “I must have f#*&ed something up”.
Not doing a PhD was never an option for me, unfortunately that blinded me from researching more about what lied ahead on my path. This led to me having little information on what I should prioritize during my PhD and what I could gain from it. With that in mind, I decided to collect a series of things that were useful during my PhD. Even more, things that I had to unlearn.
Disclosure: I am inherently biased. I have only lived this one life, so I can only give you my opinion, which by definition is far from an objective truth. Although I believe that this can help people, keep in mind that what works for you might be different, but it might still be worth considering some of these points.
1. Balance your life
I know, this is something that you might have heard a million times before. But if you take something from this post, let it be this, finding a balance between work and private life that suits you is crucial, especially during your PhD. One of the reasons is that we are usually told that we do our PhD for ourselves. Although that is partially true, people that say it conveniently omit the rest of the truth, which is that we also provide a lot of support for the lab, and that we are generally seen as cheap labor, not by everyone, but by many. A student that truly believes that they do a PhD only for themselves is a person who does not complain about their salary, it is a person who does not question all those over hours, it is a “good and motivated student”. It comes to no surprise that we are at a high risk of developing mental health issues, and have a hard time finding a healthy work-life-balance. I have seen several people go through burn-outs and pockets of depression, having even gone through one of them myself, and I can tell you that it always comes at a high cost. I implore you to listen when I tell you that it is a good idea to put your health as a priority. Sometimes small changes to your life bring an incredible increase in the quality of your life. An example of that is related to the amount of sleep that I was getting every day. I was getting too little sleep every night, mainly because I felt that I should be doing something productive, and that I would be wasting time otherwise. The way I thought about this topic changed after reading the book from Matthew Walker “Why we sleep”, if you are facing issues related to sleep, I would recommend giving it a read.
2. Failure is the bread and butter of PhDs, so you might as well make a French toast
We can’t enjoy kissing just anyone, but we can relish being right about almost anything.
— Kathryn Schulz (Being Wrong, adventures in the margin of error)
It is undeniable that we all enjoy being right about something, whether it is about an experiment, or a random fact in a conversation. I can still remember that sweet feeling of designing an experiment and getting the exact results I expected, even after repeating it. Unfortunately, I can also tell you that for each of those moments, there were many more where my predictions were completely off. We, PhD students, start to get accustomed to failure during our masters, some perhaps more than others, and we all face it in great quantities during our PhD. Which is why being able to deal with those failures is what I believe to be one of the most important skills for any PhD student. At the same time, it is one of the skills that are entirely ignored during our training. I can only recommend reading the book from Kathrin Schulz “Being wrong, adventures in the margin of error”, it served me greatly during my PhD.
You might never be able to design perfect experiments all the time, but it might help to ask ourselves: If I magically knew the exact outcome of an experiment, would it be worth doing?
3. Not all who wander are lost
Most of us have, or will, at some point hear expressions like “you should get the lay of the land before moving forward …”, “it is ok to branch out at the beginning of your PhD, you can focus later on …”. However, almost nobody talks about when that precious time to focus will come. I am not here to tell you that you should focus after six months, three weeks or one year after starting your PhD, nobody has that kind of answer, and that is a good thing. It is almost universal that at the beginning, we feel that we are not making any progress. I am here to share with you that it is ok to feel that way, exploring will help you along the way more than you might think. What I found to be useful is to organize meetings with my PI to design together a roadmap of where to go with my PhD, you do not have to face this alone. Just don’t let that undefined part of your PhD extend for many years.
On a related note, something that I only found out close to the end of my PhD, most of the things that I worked on did not make it into my final dissertation. It is very challenging fitting three to five years of research into a couple of hundred pages. My advice is to prioritize having a consistent and interesting story rather than a collection of fancy experiments. As Stephen King, and many other writers like Arthur Quiller-Couch (“Q”), would say in a different context:
Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.
— Stephen King (On writing: A memoir of the craft)
4. Having a supportive PI is crucial
We never get to know our PIs before starting our PhD, not really, even when you have been already in the lab as a master student. I will be honest, many people suffer greatly over the course of their PhD, and sometimes it is not related to how their project is going, but rather because of how their PIs treat them. This is partially because PI positions are usually granted based on achievements with disregard on how those achievements are accomplished. One could write entire books about leadership in academia, but that is not what I would like to discuss here. Unfortunately, I cannot teach you how to judge the character of your PI, I think there are people who are far more qualified than I am for that task. What I can tell you is that you should expect new challenges in this arena, and that you should not ignore red flags. When you identify something that troubles you, it is always better to discuss it directly rather than to ignore it and let it fester in the with your supervisor. You will get to know more of your supervisors’ character once you discuss such problems, maybe you will even come to an agreement, perhaps not, but you are disadvantaged if you don’t raise such issues.
By saying this, I am not attempting to absolve PIs from any wrongdoing, I believe they carry responsibility to recognize these issue and address them, that is part of being a leader. However, this post is intended to help PhD students address such difficulties, and not to tell PIs what they should be doing.
5. You don’t have to work alone
This is one of my favorite tips. Mainly because it is about something that I had to unlearn. Before I started my PhD, I had the idea in my head that doing a PhD meant working alone in a topic that belonged only to me, and that I would be solely responsible for it. This was only reinforced by advertisements from recruiters stating that “as a PhD, you should work independently …”. Although true in some scenarios, it promotes individualism that I think only hinders us, and it paints a pretty lonely and bleak path to walk on. I understand that many students are in a position that they feel that cannot be changed because their topic is far off from what other people in their department are doing, but it does not have to be that way. You might be surprised by how interesting your work can be to other people, and how they might want to collaborate with you. Even more, you might be interested in their topics, and you might want to collaborate with them. I have found that the quality of my work is always better when I work together with others, I can only encourage you to try, and you will most likely be surprised.
6. Documenting experiments saves tons of hours
This might sound obvious to anyone, but it is also something that I have seen most people underestimate, including myself. We did not evolve to be people capable of memorizing all the details of our experimental setups, or even capable of recalling with precision the intended use for some experiments in a landscape of constantly changing methodology. Occasionally, there is a stigma associated with students forgetting details of their experiments, but it is only human to forget. I will not describe the tools that I have used over the years to document my experiments because I can already hear the shouts from people saying “but that does not do this …” or “that app does not support that …”. I would rather emphasize the fact that making summaries of your experiments is crucial, what I have found that works well is to make a short summary that answers (at least) the following questions:
a) what is the research question that my experiment tries to answer?
b) what is the design of the original experiment (details go here)?
c) what was the actual implementation of the experiment (even more details here)?
d) what is the answer to the research question stated in a)?
I believe special attention should go into c) because let’s face it, experiments rarely go as expected. Tracking both the original design and the actual implementation of an experiment would help you understand why the changes took place.
7. Your PI might know a lot, listen to them
Wanting to develop our own way of thinking, our own writing style, and our own way of designing experiments is a good thing, I would encourage anyone to do it. However, in this pursue of our own style, we might be tempted to not follow the advice of others, and that is a slippery slope. PIs generally have a ton of experience, and you might agree that they have a lot of knowledge on how to conduct research. This does not mean that everything that your PI tells you is pure gold, but it would be a mistake not to listen. There is a great book on the topic of improving communication skill that I would like to recommend, it is the book by Kate Murphy “You’re not listening”.
8. Your PI does not know everything
Nobody is perfect, and we need to learn to admit that. PIs are not exempt from making mistakes, but I have noticed that they might be some of the people who find it very challenging to accept their own mistakes. We all struggle with that aspect of life, some more than others. Part of the challenge might come from the culture that we have developed in the academic environment, where fear of ruining our credibility lures at every corner, and where people expect that at any moment someone will jump from a shadow and scream “aha! You made a mistake! We need to remove your title now! I knew it!”. I might be exaggerating a little here to make my point, but the reality of many people is not far from it. Which is why it is important to understand that PIs also make mistakes, and we need to learn to recognize them, not to rub them in their faces, but to avoid them and possibly learn from them.
If there is any PI (or future PI) still reading this, there is a book that I would recommend in this context: written by Alina Tugend “Better by mistake, the unexpected benefits of being wrong”.
9. Be empathetic, not just to your collaborators
There are many advantages and challenges that come together with collaboration partners. Probably one of the most prevalent ones is related to timing, sometimes they will ask for something in a timeline that you consider unreasonable, and sometimes you will ask for something that they will not deliver in time. I know it can be frustrating, I have been there, but we sometimes forget that just like us, they also have other responsibilities and their own supervisors that might want things done differently. I am not saying that it is always the case, but giving them the benefit of the doubt is usually a good idea. Also, communication is key, try to talk (calmly) about why things are not moving at the pace you expected, you might be surprised about the reasons, I know I have been.
Equally important, do not forget to be empathetic to yourself, this is something we are almost programmed to ignore. Let me ask you something, if a friend comes to you telling you about one of their failed experiments, would you dare tell them that it must have been their fault and that they should reconsider their career? Absolutely not, you would most likely offer them some words of comfort and maybe even try to help them solve the problem. So, why do we usually tell this to ourselves when something goes wrong? I don’t have the answer, but I can tell you that I am much happier when I am more compassionate about what I think of myself.
10. Do not underestimate transferable skills
This is a tricky topic because its relevance depends on whether you stay in academia, go to industry, become a consultant, go into teaching, etc. The types of skills that I would recommend PhD students to acquire would be different depending on the path that they want to follow. I understand that most of us do not know where we want to go, and you know what, that is ok. However, that is not an excuse to not acquire new skills. If you are not sure about what path you would like to take, I would recommend to focus on transferable skills, that is, skills that can be applied to a variety of occupations. For example, project management skills can serve both in industry and academia, the details of the implementation might vary, but many aspects remain the same in both types of occupations. I am not an expert in career management, so I cannot recommend you a list of skills to work on. If you are interested in planning to develop your skills, I would recommend talking to your supervisor, or the career management program of your institution, in case they offer one. I would also recommend doing this from the start of your PhD and not waiting until the last year of your PhD. I attended several transferable skill courses during my PhD, and I still wish that I had started sooner.
Together with acquiring transferable skills is the topic of researching potential careers after finishing your PhD. This is sadly omitted from the curriculum of many institutions, so we end up with a very narrow vision of what we can do after our PhDs: industry or academia. The reality is not binary though, there are plenty of careers that we can follow and that do not fit in individual boxes: consultancy, scientific journalism, science illustration, science patent law, etc. Don’t let all the noise around this topic prevent you from researching your options. You will only be disadvantaged if you do not inform yourself.
11. The AssertionErrors are in the details
Sometimes things go wrong, and that is ok, we might get a little punch to the ego, but we can manage. However, sometimes there are experiments that are supposed to be simple and should work, but of course, they don’t. For example, I was writing a computer program that was supposed to simply read a stream of data from my disk, transform it using a simple equation and then plot it. I thought that it would just take me 20 minutes to finish, max. So like the naïve person that I was back then, I started writing this script on a Friday at 15:00 …. Do you see where I am going with this? Of course, the script did not run on the first try, or the second, or the third. I ended up spending three hours trying to debug this script. Deep down, I knew that I must have made a simple mistake, but for the life of me, I could not find it. I ended up going home disappointed, feeling like a failure, and basically questioning every decision I ever made, just to come back on Monday and realize that there was a special letter in the data I was trying to read that was messing everything up because it was a “non-standard character”.
There are two messages that I am trying to convey here, first, when there is a problem that should be easy to solve, but it is not, take a walk, you are most likely overlooking something and your state of mind is not ready for it. Second, we are bound to make mistakes, some of them we can prevent, but we cannot prepare for every single mistake that we could possibly make. So, I encourage you to actively look for inconsistencies in your data, experimental designs, programs, etc. Look where you least expect it because there is where those little bastards like to hide.
I tried to condense in this post several topics that, I think, are relevant for a PhD student. Some of these topics can be elaborated to great extent, there are entire books about some of them, but I wanted to point them out here and give reference to some helpful literature. There are also several topics that I did not include in this post, either because I did not want this text to be an endless list, or because I did not think I was the right person to talk about it.
I just want to leave a couple of last advice before writing the last dot in this post. Learn to celebrate your successes, even if they seem little to you, celebrate after a successful milestone meeting, celebrate after submitting a paper, celebrate after submitting a rebuttal, and even after a successful presentation. Finally, set your goals higher than you think is possible, you might never be able to fly, but you could end up gliding over the hills, and that is a pretty sweet view.
