14 Graduate student essays on the PhD experience

This is a great book (35 pages) that is a must-read for postgraduate researchers. With personal accounts that are intended to give advice that has been learned the hard way, it is essential reading for less experienced research students.
The topics range from networking, communication, supervisory issues, presenting, publishing and, of course, doing research.

How to survive your PhD

Ten tips for the first 100 days of a PhD

To date, we have focused more on issues that affect students in the later stages of their PhD. Here, we make ten suggestions on key activities for PhD students during their first 100 days.

1. Agree/develop a modus operandi with your supervisor(s) (e.g. agree where and how often you expect to meet, how to assess progress when the supervisor is away, the different types of feedback expected etc.).  In some universities, there may be a form to facilitate this (e.g. a learning plan or candidature plan). The following questionnaire may help you to investigate (and discuss with your supervisor) your underlying beliefs (and supervisors) about the student-supervisor relationship: Expectations in supervision questionnaire.

2. Take responsibility for arranging meetings with your supervisor, and provide an agenda in advance of the meeting, ideally with a few short explanatory notes about each topic. This will help your supervisor to understand the issue, and give them more time, subconsciously at least, to spend more time thinking about your agenda items. Make written notes (minutes) of the plans that are agreed with your supervisor.  Even a quick email to your supervisor can be very helpful to enquire ‘this is what I think we agreed, am I on the right track?’  Thinkwell provides a Thesis Meeting Template that should help you structure the main outputs to be achieved from meetings.

3. Write a project plan listing some key initial research objectives and preliminary deadlines (at least). This is easier said than done! This can then become the basis for more detailed planning. See Chapter 3 of Getting a PhD, which addresses project management for PhD students, and there is a multitude of project management resources available online. Remember that a key feature of the assessment of the PhD degree is based on the quality of work - see our earlier post and resources therein for more on this. For planning within shorter timescales, here is a template for a weekly planner.

4. Produce a Gantt chart based on the above for your project activities for the first, say, 6 months. This is a tangible output from your planning, and can serve as the basis for useful discussion with your supervisor.

5. Read journal articles, take notes and write a short literature review (even a few thousand words). You will learn a lot more by writing about what you read than by reading alone, and there is a huge satisfaction in feeling you have a folder on your computer labelled ‘my thesis’ with something in it.  This also makes sure you practice academic writing - a key skill- from your first day.

6. Get feedback from your supervisor(s) on this literature review; on your writing style and how to improve it where necessary; on whether you have read the right articles and; whether you are understanding the knowledge and uncertainties associated with your topic.

7. Read recent PhD theses in your topic to see what is ultimately expected of you. It is amazing how many PhD students do not do this, or leave it until they are almost finished their thesis!

8. Learn and practice new methods that you will need to use - before you start your research. Ensure that you can implement methods correctly - there is no point in progressing with methods and work if you cannot rely on the outputs and results.

9. Develop good professional habits for keeping all your information and data safe and organised (hard copies, papers, data, electronic files etc.). Think about everything that could go wrong (fires, floods, computer viruses) and make sure that data loss will never happen to you.  Increasingly, funding agencies require researchers to protect and archive their data in a secure manner. Check what storage facilities or formal requirements for data storage is available in your lab or institution.

10. Formally or informally review your skills (probably with your supervisor) and do a self-assessment of your training needs. This should help you to work out what skills you need to develop and what opportunities are available to develop these. Then, make a plan to participate in any relevant training events as soon as possible, and before you get really busy. In a previous post, we highlighted resources that should be essential reading, and another post discussed various forms of training.

Of course, there will be many other activities that you should be doing, and different people will have different priorities. Please let us know what other issues or resources that you think are priorities for settling in during the first 100 days!

PhDSkill: Actively manage the early stages of your PhD. The time in your first three months of your PhD is as precious as the last three months - use it as productively as possible! 

John Finn and Alan Kelly

Useful resources 

John Finn. 2005. Getting a PhD: an action plan to help manage your research, your project and your supervisor. Routledge. (Contains lots of advice on starting a PhD, and develops many of the above points in more detail.)

Bench 21. Starting well: how to do a good first year in your PhD. (Blog post)

Introduction to resources by Thinkwell: Seven Secrets of Succesful Students

photo credit: emdot via photopin cc

Seven secrets of successful students - report on training event

This post is a short report on a training event at which postgraduate research students and research supervisors at Teagasc attended a training day provided by Dr Hugh Kearns of Flinders University, Australia.  Hugh is an expert on procrastination (!), an internationally renowned speaker for his motivational seminars, and an accomplished educational researcher.

Here, I want to give an overview of some of the main messages from the day, and also provide further links to some of the resources that Hugh referred to. I aim to have a follow up post with some examples of practical lessons that I took from the event.

Hugh's consultancy provides a number of resources for PhD students and supervisors, and are well worth exploring.

The training focused on 'The Seven Secrets of Highly Successful Students'. A central focus of the day was the supervisory relationship, and the importance for students to write early and often. Whilst students and supervisors are often told this, there was a lot of practical advice on how to better ensure that this aspiration is realised. The table of contents of the accompanying book outlines the seven secrets:

• Care and maintenance of your supervisor

• Write and show as you go: This is show and tell not hide and seek

• Be realistic: It's not a Nobel Prize

• Say no to distractions: Even the fun ones and the ones you think you must do

• It's a job: That means working nine to five but you get holidays

• Get help: You are not an owner-operator single person business

• You can do it: A PhD is 90% persistence and 10% intelligence

Hugh's presentation is peppered with evidence-based analysis, relevant anecdotes and large doses of practical actions for both students and supervisors.
In the session for supervisors, the following questionnaire generated quite a deal of interest as a means of investigating the underlying beliefs of supervisors and students about the student-supervisor relationship:
Expectations in supervision questionnaire


Selected publications by Hugh Kearns
Gardiner, M. & Kearns, H. (2012). The ABCDE of Writing: Coaching high-quality high-quantity writing. International Coaching Psychology Review, 237-249.

Kearns, H. & Gardiner, M.L. (2011). Waiting for the motivation fairy. Nature, 472, 127.

Gardiner, M. & Kearns, H. (2011). Turbocharge your writing today. Nature, 475, 129.

Kearns, H. & Gardiner, M.L., (2011). The care and maintenance of your adviser. Nature, 469(7331), 570-570.


PhD Skill: learn how to improve your quantity and quality of writing and eliminate procrastination.

Training comes in many guises

Training helps to realise your potential.

The award of a PhD degree recognises your successful training to be an independent researcher. 

Therefore, it's not surprising that PhD research involves a lot of training and learning! Some of the usual training needs include project management, time management, statistics, research methods, reference management software, oral presentations, poster presentations, career development and many others. 

So when was the last time you had some training?

Unfortunately, some PhD students do not receive as many training courses as they expect. However, we often have more opportunities for training than we think. Training is not just something that happens when someone from somewhere else turns up and gives a course. 

A lot of training happens without courses. A few examples should make it clear how training and learning occur in many different forms: 

- attendance at departmental seminars

- discussions with your supervisor about research methods, ethics, publication practices etc.

- reading books about a specific topic

- learning by doing (even if it means making mistakes at first)

- receiving instruction on equipment or methods from a technician

- reading online material about a specific topic (this is how I first learned to create a blog)

- discussions with other researchers about your work or related research

- journal clubs

- receiving advice from other students about software packages

- presenting your work as a poster or seminar, and receiving feedback.

This variety of forms of training doesn't mean that courses are not important. But if you can't get to as many courses as you would like, there's still plenty of training that's available. 

PhD Skill: identify your training needs, some of which may require courses. Be aware of the training that you are receiving, in all its forms, and how it contributes to your professional development.  

photo credit: kevinpoh via photopin cc