I'm about to start the PhD phase of my degree and I feel completely lost. I've been trying to find stuff on the internet on how to be successful in the PhD but haven't found much (I may be looking at the wrong things). These are kind of the main questions I have right now. I will also accept literally any and all advice about the PhD.
1. Looking back on your PhD experience, what are some things you wish you could have done differently?
2. What tips do you have for making sure a student gets the most out of lab?
3. How many research articles were you reading in a day and how do you remember it all????
4. Give me any other organization tips you have.
5. Did you try to continue your clinical skills (ex: shadowing, volunteering at a clinic, etc) or is this just a waste of time?
1. I would do some rudimentary self-directed management training, in particular in skills involving negotiation, project management, human resource management, budget management, etc. You can do this by reading some relevant course textbooks from MBA schools or read some self-help business books. Scientific projects should have a start and a finish, milestones and timelines.
2. Ditto. See above. Most important skill is probably how to work with difficult to work with people so that they 1) like you (maybe) 2) help you accomplish your goals. Technical skills are secondary and commoditized--of course, it's always useful to have some core technical skillset that's valuable, but nobody can do everything.
3. Waste of time. Read papers around your project. I don't remember literally a single paper from PhD that I read. Reading papers is a task-specific skill. While senior PIs often appear to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the literature, what it is is that they refer to papers they read for specific purposes (e.g. writing a grant, writing another paper, reviews, presentations, etc), and when you do that repeatedly you automatically remember them. I wouldn't bother reading papers from journals regularly.
4. Have meetings regularly, and always have a (preferably written down) agenda prior to each meeting, and always take notes ("minutes") during the meeting. Now, this might seem pedantic and suffocating for a "brainstorm" session during a science meeting, and is somewhat unusual in basic science (but much more common in say clinical research), you'll thank me later for this tip. People (including you) won't remember what they said and what ideas you came up with. This is in particular super useful for meetings with collaborators. As a graduate student, you need to meet with your PI at minimum once a week, because you are not skilled enough to come up with your own to-do list for anything longer than 1 week. Always set deadlines for each task you do and aim to set it such that you should be able to do it without problems. However, it's unavoidable you misestimate how much it takes for certain tasks, but keep a tally of this kind of scenario you'll have a better sense of the amount of time it takes you to do things.
5. waste of time.
