What I would tell myself at the start of my PhD

Introduction

Completing my PhD in nuclear astrophysics in 2021 was the end of an experience filled with both immense challenges and rewarding experiences. After this, I transitioned from academia to industry and have worked for three years as a data scientist in financial services. I really enjoyed my PhD (despite the start of it being quite challenging and the pandemic making the end a bit of a damp squib) and it led to a very satisfying job in a team I really enjoy being part of, but there are lots of things I wish I had said to myself or had done differently during my PhD. One of the perennial problems in academia is that the knowledge and experiences of people in research groups are often lost as they move to different roles in different institutions. This happens very commonly with departing PhD students; the people who were once a major component of a research group are now only remembered by their names on the side of old theses on an office shelf. Given this, and since I’ve been away from my PhD long enough to see the world outside academia and reflect on things, compiling advice to give my past self seemed like a good activity.

I started my PhD in nuclear astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh after completing my integrated master’s at Queen’s University Belfast, in a different sub-field to that of my master’s project. After submitting my thesis I got a job in a large retail bank as a data scientist, where I still work. The thoughts in this article will be specific to these experiences, and might not be directly applicable to those in other fields, programmes, or who continued their academic career, but hopefully some parts will be of use to anyone undertaking a PhD. This blog post contains the advice I would give to myself at the start of my PhD, to provide a little bit of help navigating the highs and lows. Whether you’re just starting out or knee-deep in your research, I hope you find something here that is of some use, or at least resonates with you.

Get organised and learn the skills you will need from the start

Stay Organised

Taking steps to be organised from the get go will serve you well as you establish yourself as a reliable department member and reduce the cognitive load of juggling things in your mind. The week-to-week rhythm of a PhD programme is much less structured than undergrad programmes, so keeping track of a wide range of events may be somewhat new. Whether with a physical diary or a virtual calendar, use whatever tools you need to keep yourself accountable and remember meetings, deadlines, and appointments.

Learn to Code Efficiently

Something that I think is chronically underrated in most PhD programmes is learning how to use your terminal and write high-quality code. A large component of the day-to-day work you will be doing will be coding and will likely be one of the most important skills for future employers, so learning to do this well early on and continuing to actively improve during your programme will serve you well. There are many many courses out there for learning your terminal and every programming language, but one course I think that should be mandatory is the missing semester course from MIT/; this course covers using the command line, using your editor efficiently, and gives a good overview of how you can make your workflow more efficient and your life easier. My undergraduate programme covered a wide range of physics topics very well, but a lot of what I learnt about the command line and the surrounding ecosystem came from outside my course, so this would have really helped early in my PhD. Something essential that is covered in that course is version control using Git, a tool that is ubiquitous across any role that involves programming and something that will make controlling the code (and manuscripts) you write a lot easier. This can be skipped in undergraduate courses but is a skill everyone wishes they had learnt earlier.

Choose the best tools for the job

You will also need to choose what IDE and reference manager you will be using. Spending a bit of time choosing which of these you prefer can be worth it, given how much time you will be spending using them. For IDEs, pycharm or VSCode are popular choices for a reason, and the reference manager Zotero allows article organisation, sharing across devices, and automatic extraction of information, making it a useful tool.

Leverage the past experiences of others

Do also ask older students (who will be a great source of information) what tools they’ve found to be useful and what resources they’ve found useful for learning programming - people who have recently walked the path you’re on will know best.

Don’t compare yourself against other people

Comparison is always the thief of joy, and never more so than during a PhD. In one sentence: do not compare your progress, skills, or achievements to others in your group or anyone else doing a PhD. This will simply make you unhappy as you form a habit of picking apart everything that hasn’t gone amazingly. In addition, it is an objectively terrible metric to measure your progress against. There are several reasons for why this simply isn’t a good measure of how you’re progressing, but what’s key to remember is that the structure from the undergrad degree where everyone takes the same lectures and exams at the same time is no longer there. First, your colleagues will have come from different universities, which may have focussed more or less on skills like programming, or may have specialised in your particular PhD field, meaning everyone is at a different starting point. Second, everyone’s project is different - some might be more theoretical, some might be part of a larger collaboration, while some may focus on one specific device; everyone’s PhD project is unique. Thirdly, there are simply some things that will be outside your control. This will include experiment scheduling, the work of collaborators, and academic politics.

Focus on your own path

Concentrate on the things that you can control day-to-day and don’t feel that your colleague’s breakthrough, publication, or talk is a sign you’re falling behind or that you’re not cut out for things. Celebrate each and every milestone, as minor as they may be, and, whatever pace you’re moving at, give yourself credit for every step you move forward.

Treat it like a job

Doing a PhD is full of contradictions: you’re still a student, but getting paid; you have lots of work to be doing, but often no defined working hours; you’re still learning, but considered an expert in your field. While you might not ever have flexibility like this again in your career, treating your PhD like a job with a regular 9-5 job, with clearly defined boundaries between work and time off, is likely the best to do for your productivity and well being. Waking up at the same every day will help you control your energy levels while giving you time to turn off from work. Keeping the work-life boundary is also important and going into your office and not checking emails when at home will be a key part of this. Finally, you’ll still have peers who want to head out throughout the week, so it’s up to you to enjoy yourself while balancing where your energy goes.

Engage with your department and community effectively

Interact with everyone

There will likely be no other point in your life that you’re in an environment with such smart and hard-working people who are the top experts in your field. Get to know them and their experiences and learn everything you can from them. Part of this is going into the office, chatting during coffee breaks and lunch and being genuinely interested in their research. Additionally, if there are internal presentations or reading groups, do go to those, make your own contributions, and if you don’t have these, make a proposal to senior members of your department about what they could look like and why you should have them. Older students are great sources of information and being able to passively pick up advice from them is invaluable, but this will often only happen if you see them in-person.

Keep communication with your supervisor strong

Supervisors have vastly different rhythms for communicating with their students and especially for those that are hands off, flying under the radar can easily happen. My suggestion to avoid this is to communicate regularly and in-detail with them so anything that’s a problem is highlighted as early as possible, and they have a clear view of how your research is going. One way of doing this might be a weekly email that describes what you did that week, what you found out, what you found challenging, and anything that you think is an issue. As well as making sure your supervisor is abreast of everything happening in your research, it means that you will get the satisfaction of seeing your work progress week-to-week and have a record of everything you’ve achieved.

Keep non-PhD interests

Like the muscles in your body, your brain needs to relax every so often or it will begin to be strained. Making time for your non-PhD interests from week-to-week is a great way of doing this and not letting your PhD work consume your thoughts and identity. Additionally, make sure part of this non-PhD time is dedicated to physical activity, be it team sports, the gym, or walking.

People will not understand what you’re doing or why you’re doing it

You will likely get a wide variety of reactions whenever you tell people that you’re doing a PhD. Some will proclaim you a genius for starting a programme (which you should still be proud of), while some will be suggesting you’re putting off the world of work, or lying in bed all day. Both ends of this spectrum of this reaction can exacerbate imposter syndrome - it can be common to not feel as smart as others might describe you and you also might feel that you indeed haven’t made much progress in things. It can be frustrating and lonely that others don’t understand the nature of the challenges a PhD entails, and describing these challenges can be difficult in itself. But the truth is that very few people will understand the nature of your work, or your exact experience going through it, as, by its very nature, you are covering uncharted territory. So learn to shrug off the sceptics and accept the faith that people have in your ability, and learn your one sentence lay-person description of your work that doesn’t exact capture what you’re doing, but is close enough and sounds a little bit interesting: “I’m doing experiments to help find out where all the elements in our Galaxy come from”.

Nailing the landing is difficult, if not impossible

Plan for the future

While it may seem like a lifetime away whenever you begin your programme, your PhD studies will come to an end at some point. The end of the PhD will quite often require some multi-tasking: wrapping up final data analysis, applying for new roles, and of course, writing your thesis. This is inevitably a difficult time, but there are some steps you can take to try to make this time as straightforward as possible.

Career preparation

The foremost tip I would have is to give some thought to next career steps in your career early on in your PhD, possibly as early as your second year. Don’t worry if you don’t know immediately what it is you want to and it’s perfectly fine to change your mind, but the earlier you think about this, the earlier you can take steps to make the end of your PhD easier. Take an industry placement if you can: this will give you exposure to the world outside academia, providing you with new contacts and skills, and something to differentiate your CV.

Coding skills for industry

For anyone planning to get a job in industry after their PhD, the one bit of definite advice I would give would be: learn to code and learn to code well. This will be very likely what you will be doing in industry, so the sooner you get better at it, the sooner you can market your skills well. Also think about the programming language that you’ve used in your PhD; if it is a proprietary language or one that’s quite niche to academia, consider investing time in learning a more common language, or advertising the general programming skills you’ve acquired (object-oriented programming, multi-core programming). Also remember that recruiters and employers will often not speak the same language as you - having a well-cited paper is impressive and a strong marker of success in academia, but describing the more practical results of code you wrote or actions you took will land more strongly with employers. Also remember that you have acquired a lot of skills in your PhD, by working in a team, presenting and justifying results, and managing your own time, but making sure these are communicated in a way that industry can interpret them is essential to making an impact in the job market.

Writing your thesis

I also need to echo what many more have said on having perfection as the enemy of done when it comes to writing a PhD thesis. It is natural to feel attached to the quality of this book you have written, after all it is a culmination of many years of work and learning. However, it is worth bearing in mind that it is a means to an end: a document to show your assessors that you have done novel research and are deserving of your degree. As the saying goes, “There is no such thing as a perfect thesis, only a done thesis”. In addition, the writing of your thesis will take at least twice as long as you think, no matter how you go about it, which is something to bear in mind whenever you are planning when to start writing and when to tell an employer you can start.

Leaving your programme is not the end of the world

Finally, I want to say that if you do decide that you do leave your PhD programme for whatever reason, you are no way in the slightest a failure and this does not define your worth or success. The truth is, in general, no one cares a huge deal if you have a PhD or not. When you start a job, you are known by your job title, not the letters before or after your name. Leaving a PhD can often be the correct decision; in the end we have to weigh up the rewards and efforts of every endeavour in life, and if the scales tilt in the negative direction, then it simply isn’t worth persisting. If you feel like people will be disappointed in you for quitting, then doing a PhD to impress them wasn’t the correct choice in the first place. For an employment perspective, you still have each and every one of the skills you developed over the course of your PhD. Having the final degree certificate doesn’t make a difference in how well you undertake your next role.

Conclusion

These were some of my thoughts I had when reflecting back on my PhD experience. Hopefully they ring true for some others and are useful to those starting or mid-way through their PhD journeys. Overall, remember that everyone’s PhD journey is unique and not comparable to others, make sure you have a life and interests outside your PhD, think (but don’t worry) about the future, learn to code, and accept your thesis may not be the immaculate masterpiece you set out to create (and that’s perfectly fine).