What you should know at the beginning of your PhD
Part 1: Managing your projects
July 20, 2024
Starting a PhD is exciting. Often, people begin right after completing a Master's degree. Although you technically remain at university, your role is now quite different. Instead of following a predefined schedule of lectures, seminars, and lab courses, you focus on one research topic and are expected to contribute meaningfully to scientific progress. As with most other jobs, beforehand, no one really knows exactly how daily work life will look like. Thus, people enter research groups eager to learn what being a PhD student is like. However, every group is unique, so everyone will eventually have a different perspective on what doing a PhD actually means. Some PhD students are included in larger projects with pre-existing work and clearly defined roles. Others have the freedom to design their own projects and explore areas beyond their supervisors' expertise. Some join groups with a lot of structure, while others are not even part of a group but are supervised by a fairly independent researcher.
Your structural environment will strongly influence how you perceive your role as a PhD student. For example, your supervisors will likely have their own unique methods and expectations for supervision. I encourage you, as a new PhD student, to not rely solely on them to define your academic work life. I am not suggesting you challenge everything they do, but I recommend critically reflecting on the status quo and proactively taking responsibility for your role as a PhD student.
In the following, I have collected several pieces of advice for successfully completing your PhD. These are strongly influenced by my own experiences from the field of human neurosciences. Some may be more relevant to your field than others, but in either case, I hope they assist you in your reflection and planning, and in successfully completing your PhD journey. I split them up into three parts, 1) Managing your project, 2) Designing your daily work, and 3) Dealing with supervisors. This is part one, stay tuned for part 2 and 3.
Define your goals and make a plan
As with every project, for it to succeed, it helps to clearly define your scientific goal. You may say now “Sure, my goal is to get the degree PhD in about three years”. Having such a large goal can be overwhelming and lead to a constant feeling of not being on track. It is like having the goal of climbing a mountain, without seeing a path that goes up. So I recommend you to draw yourself a roadmap and define intermediate goals. What does it take to get to the top of the mountain? In most cases, (in the sciences) something like three first author papers are required to complete a PhD (I have some opinions regarding whether this is a meaningful requirement or not, but that’s a topic for another post). So the very first thing to do is to come up with a plan for what these papers could be about and what the timeline for each of them is. Of course, things may change, you may find something surprising that gives you a forth paper, or one of your ideas may not work out at all, which will require replanning.
To stay on track, one of my supervisors told me to write down my current research question on a piece of paper and stick it next to the screen, because my other supervisor and I would always get very creative during meetings, coming up with all these things we could still try out. Having this reminder in my field of view all the time helped me to stop myself from doing too many random things on a daily basis and first focus on the main plan.
If you start your PhD without having an “ideal” path to reach this goal in mind, then you may end up wandering in circles in the valley, not getting anywhere closer to the top. Some people may now argue (rightly so) that having published “papers” as a goal incentives bad scientific practices, as if the results are not great, you would be tempted to massage your data until you get something publishable. There is indeed a serious problem with the current academic system (#“publish or perish”). However, right now, by rebelling and not writing any papers, you will also not finish your PhD. This is why I recommend the following: plan your studies and experiments in a way that – no matter what the result is – the outcome is still informative and interpretable.
Think first: write project outlines
The more concrete you are with your goals, the easier it is to plan everything else around this. For example what literature you would need to read, what methods you need to learn about etc.
Working without concrete project outlines has two main disadvantages: first, you only have a certain number of years to complete your PhD, so the more random things you try out that do not lead anywhere, the more difficult it will be to stick to your timeline. Second, as mentioned above, you are also running into the risk of bad scientific practice. Especially, if you define your research aims in a directional way, such as “The aim of my PhD is to show that X is impaired in disorder Z”. Then you are running the risk of trying a lot of different methods until you reach this goal, and the more methods you are trying, the more likely you will “reach this goal by chance”.
Instead, writing a detailed project outline before you start any data collection or analysis, will make you really think about what your research question is, how to best address it and will help you to identify what you don’t know and will need to learn before you can tackle it. Sometimes you will need to do some of this for ethics applications, but for those, the committee will not comment on your methodological details, but just on how ethical your procedures are, so ethics application are generally a bit vague. Writing detailed outlines can be time-consuming, but will save a lot of time later, because you won’t collect unusable data or run unused analyses. They ensure good scientific practice and you can even think of writing this as a “registered report”, getting your methods reviewed through a journal, and having guarantee for publishing after you have done your study.
Find out what you are most interested in
Whilst the explicit goal may be to have a PhD, this implies becoming an “expert” in something. There are endless ways of addressing a question and framing a project, and you can only do one of them in the limited amount of time given. So figure out what you are most interested in, what excites you most and what you most want to learn about. If you can frame your project and the associated acquired skills according to that, you will have most fun!
Take as many training courses as you can in the beginning
Often, how things are done in labs is “inherited” from one person to the next. You can learn a lot by observing how other people do things, which is how we humans naturally learn. However, how things are commonly done is not always how things are best done, or most efficiently done. There are numerous ticks and tricks to project management, scientific presentation, writing etc. If you are a PhD student, you are most likely in the luxurious position to take high quality training courses for free. These also teach you transferable skills that can be super relevant for your future career, and your PhD time is a great opportunity to practice and practice and practice.