This post contains advices for PhD students/candidates on their journey to obtain the diploma. Most of those advices are from RedNote/RedBook/Xiao Hong Shu/小红书, which is a social media site that mixes the styles of Instagram, Twitter in China. I think they are so good and should be shared across the Internet. I would add the reference and link to the original post for each and every paragraph. I also asked the authors for permission to translate and post the contents.
Currently, I’m still trying to reorganize the post so that similar advices should be grouped together, thus each paragraph from the same section may be orginated from different authors.
The Big Picture
1️⃣ Treat your PhD like a job. Don’t expect your advisor to have a high tolerance for mistakes, and don’t expect colleagues to help you like classmates would. Everyone is busy – advisors securing funding, colleagues with their own projects – each with their own pressures.1
2️⃣ You are the primary person responsible for your research project. Whether you proposed it yourself or your advisor assigned it to you, you must take responsibility. If progress is slow, you should be more anxious about it than anyone else. In the short term, your project’s progress affects your advisor’s opinion of you and your self-assessment; in the long term, it affects your graduation, job prospects, and other important aspects.1
3️⃣ You must have the ability to solve problems independently. When I first started my PhD, there were two senior students in the lab, and when I encountered research problems, my advisor would tell me to seek their help. This created a dependency that slowed my growth. So, don’t rely on others; solve your own problems.
4️⃣ Master the fundamental knowledge in your research area. For PhD students without a background in their current field, it’s best to take time to thoroughly study the basic courses in your current specialty. This knowledge is the foundation of your PhD.1
5️⃣ Prioritize your tasks. Naturally, urgent and important tasks deserve higher priority. Staying up late to meet deadlines is truly painful.1
6️⃣ Have the determination to tackle a problem to the end. When working on a project, some problems cannot be bypassed; if you can’t solve them, the entire project cannot progress. You need the determination to tackle problems head-on. First, understand what’s causing the problem. My senior often said that identifying the source of a problem is equivalent to solving 80% of it. But many times, we can’t find the source, so we can only use the brute-force approach: trial and error. My experience shows that as long as you’re willing to persist, most problems can be solved.1
Workflow
7️⃣ Ensure you have plenty of input from your field. Articles, lectures, and papers published by senior members of your group are all very useful sources of information for research. Many PhD students struggle to find ideas for their research, and I’ve experienced this phase too. I believe the main reason was that I had accumulated too little knowledge. “Even the best cook can’t make a meal without rice.” No one’s ideas come from nowhere; most are improvements based on others’ work. Additionally, reading a large number of papers can help you understand the urgent problems in your field, which may become breakthrough directions for your research.1
Connections
8️⃣ Expand your circle of friends. Setting aside emotional needs, the PhD stage is a good period to build connections. You’ll meet students from different specialties, many of whom, like you, are PhD students. These people will enter different industries in the future and become part of your social resources.1
Implementation
As you can see, there are lots of bullets for advices, how you could be able to instill or let those sink in to your daily life? Perhaps you need to design some habits from them. I know this is not going to be easy, but to really make them natural to you, certain habits should be built.
Tribute
I want to thank the following people for allowing me to translate and repost their contents: 刘博说博,
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