Tips for Phd Students

1) Write early and write often

Writing early will help you to develop and maintain your writing skills for when the time comes to write a full-fledged paper. By writing often you will accumulate content that you can reuse when you need to write abstracts, papers or proposals.

2) Register To Courses

Some PhD’s have to follow an extensive curriculum of courses. Others they can voluntarily attend workshops to develop some useful skills.

3) Start A Literature Review:

You need to find what’s been done before in your field. What still needs to be done. What are the hot topics. You need to see where your research fits.You need to find papers, read them, summarise them and organise your learnings.

4) Choose  preferred Space and time

Everyone has a preferred place and most productive time of day. Find yourself a working place, somewhere that you feel comfortable and able to stay and work for a period of time. Similarly, whether a lark or a night-owl, identify when you best work and use it.

5) Know Your References / Bibliography

An intimate knowledge of your field is key, for a number of reasons. First and foremost, you don’t want to be that one PhDstudent who spends 4 years on a project, only to find out when writing the thesis that someone did the exact same work 20 years ago, thus invalidating the novelty of your contribution

 

6) Put Yourself in Your Examiner’s Shoes

Your examiners are busy people, so try to not piss them off. Here’s what’s probably going on through their mind when they open up your work: “oh no, not another thesis to read”, tempered with a faint optimism of “it might help me keep up to date with this area of research” and “it might teach me something or inspire me”. They’ll probably read your baby on trains, planes and in the back row of departmental seminars and meetings. They’ll love a good abstract, proper citing of the right papers, clear arguments, complete contents, and any papers you’ve published will help put them on your side. And some will think that they haven’t done their job unless they find corrections to give back to you; don’t let that faze you.

 7) Backup, Backup, Backup

Put your thesis on multiple computers, put in on USB sticks, put in on external hard drives, and put in on a cloud-storage.