Welcome to the PhD Dojo!This week, I'm starting a series on tools and strategies to make the best out of your PhD experience. Today – Things I would have loved to know when I started my PhD and that would have saved me a lot of headaches.Below, you'll find the full, edited to be read, transcript of the live taping of this episode.
VIDEO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h24keeOwgRE?sub_confirmation=1
FULL TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Today's episode is: "First Year PhD – Avoiding the Pitfalls".[00:00:05] In a space mission, there is one countdown, one launch, one destination, and no place for error or that. Grad studies are less like a rocket launch and more like an expedition into uncharted territories. As such graduate studies are a forgiving endeavor where you have ample opportunity to reassess and reorient along the way. So what I'm seeing is, as a PhD student, you are an external. And what's the first thing that an Explorer does when setting up for an expedition today, what they do is that they plan, they trace a plan for their expedition.[00:00:56] And this is the tip that I'm going to share today. Tracing a plan for your PhD is a very important strategy from the outset, to help you have the best experience, at least for that first year where you're going to be in a new environment, you're going to meet new people. You're going to be learning a new culture, depending on the, the lab you're you're in or the country you're moving to. So having some sort of a plan is going to help you in the long term. So my first piece of advice there is: spend enough time at the beginning because you can fall into the trap of hitting the ground running and starting whatever experiments or projects that are proposed to you without sitting down and planning.[00:01:52] What I'm asking you to do is to, to take all of that in, and then create a plan. And be as granular as possible. Write short, medium and long-term goals for yourself. One of the things that I know I didn't do at the beginning of my PhD was to – first, put this down on paper and second, the long-term plans and, or long-term objectives or goals, I didn't think of them. Why they are important is because they are going kind of to dictate the other decisions that you're going to make along the way, versus if you don't plan ahead, you can fall into different rabbit holes, lose time. And we all know that time is finite, funding is finite, and so, why the planning is important is because of all of these reasons. You need to optimize the time that you're going to spend during your PhD and some, some places it's three years and there, the time constraint is even, it's even more critical, let's say. Some, some places like here, here in Canada, for example, you can go to six years or even more, depending, and depending also on the domain you are, you are.[00:03:10] But besides the time there's the money issue. So, if you're able to spend that first week, those first two weeks planning, setting goals, sitting with your supervisor and having them help you set goals, such as when, when an article could be published a book chapter, things like that, that is going to help you immensely. Of course, when you're going to sit down and write down that first plan, it's going to be the ideal. You're going to learn and people who've gone through the process, know that things don't go. Ideally there's snacks. There's a, there's a different obstacles that you hit. There's a hypothesis that simply don't work and. The next thing after having a plan is backup plans. You need to have backup plans and nice suggest even if possible, because you might, and this is what happened to me.[00:04:20] You might be attracted to from the outset to a higher risk, maybe higher gain, but higher risk project, but it's high risk. And you want to have a lower risk projects, lower hanging fruit that you can fall back on, if there's a problem with that project, which happens to a lot of us and we're first year PhD ...