Taking a PhD is about defining yourself as an independent researcher, becoming a field expert and evolving as a person. A journey, with lots of pitfalls and setbacks, sometimes exciting and pleasant, sometimes exhausting and seemly impossible, mostly unplanned and completely unknown beforehand, but hopefully bringing you to the right place at the right time (that is your defense). At least, this is what my PhD was like. Below, I have written down ten things that I have learned mostly by trying and failing and then doing the opposite and nailing it. I hope some of these tips will be useful to the PhD students out there and perhaps make their journeys a little bit more straightforward.
So here it goes:
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Taking a PhD is not the same as being a student
Getting a PhD is not about learning, but about finding things out on your own. Therefore, it does not really help to take any courses, even the mandatory ones (apart from just getting them off your requirements list). There are also no curriculum and no final exam. And most importantly, every minute counts, so spend it by doing actual research.
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Prepare to fail a lot and even to fail completely
Good conferences have acceptance rates below 20%, which means that your paper is very likely to be rejected. Perhaps with a harsh criticism from an arrogant reviewer who thinks he is clever and funny. But hey, that is his job and a paper does not define you as a person anyway. So be thankful, use the feedback for improvement, resubmit, learn from it and move on.
There is also a risk that your idea turns out not being novel or your experiments will show no advantage over the baseline. This happens a lot, but instead of losing it – learn from this, try to think of more contributions to convince the reader (that is the reviewer) that you work is worth knowing.
Finally, you may fail completely – get bored, do a startup, run out of time, or a hundred of other things. This happens a lot and so it may to happen to you. Accept the possibility but know that focus and dedication will get you to the finish line.
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Start publishing and going to conferences early
It is funny, but for most PhD’s the number of papers per year seems to grow exponentially. This means that you can easily double the number of papers by publishing your first paper one year earlier. Well, the catch is that your first paper will most likely be rejected. Nevertheless, in the worst case you will learn something from this, and in the best case you will go somewhere exotic, warm and nice, get some drinks and have some fun.
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Find the conferences you want to go to and read the best papers from the past two or three years …, and copy that
Firstly, I am not talking about plagiarism – that will not get you anywhere good. Nevertheless, most of quality papers from the same conferences turn out being shockingly similar in their writing style, structure, terminology, methodology, data sets, etc. Copying that will get you quite far – if it looks like a good paper and sounds like a good paper, it must be a good paper!
Secondly, this will give you some understanding of what is the interest area of the conference, what is hot and what you can try to improve, and of course what makes a paper really good.
Finally, it is just so much more convenient to read a well-written related work section instead of digging up all scrap from the last ten years in the research field.
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Success is 30% novelty, 30% presentation and 30% luck
You do not need a brilliant idea nor solve all the problems at once. However, you must show that your contributions are new and significant in one way or another, submit before the deadline, cross your fingers and start working on the next thing.
Moreover, novelty is so important that some of the researchers I know have spent a lot of time looking for problems with a minimum or no previous work, and then writing a paper focusing on the novelty of the problem instead of the complexity of the solution. The biggest win of this approach is that in the next few years other researchers will use this work as a seemly naive baseline and therefore generate tons of citations.
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Minimize all programming, backup daily, and use version control, unit tests, checkstyle/findbugs/etc.
Writing the most advanced code ever will not get you anywhere and only take the precious time from achieving your actual goal. However, it also sucks having to redo all your experiments due to a bug or not being able to remember when this or that part was added/changed and why.
The best approach to research is actually this. First, find the conference you want to submit to – this will give you a deadline, the number of pages, etc. Then, find what would be a suitable idea and plan the evaluation. The best researchers I know will also write the whole paper apart from the experimental results at this point. Only then, implement the whole framework and do the experiments.
Of course, as mentioned in the point two, your method may not beat the baseline. In that case, find out why it does not work, tackle that issue and add this to your contribution list. Lather, rinse and repeat…
A version control system such as Git is a great tool for organizing your work (including your writing) and tracking your progress. With good commit messages you will able to find when any given part has been changed or what you did on any given day, in addition to keeping all possible versions of your work backed-up and neatly organized. Unit tests and code analysis tools will allow you to modify any part of your code without worrying about a newly introduced bug, thus keeping you more focused towards the deadline.
Documenting your code and making it reusable as much as you can will speed-up your future work. However, it is also a highly time consuming task, thus you need to find the right balance. Consider also uploading your code to GitHub, thus letting others to learn and reuse.
Finally, log everything you can from every experiment, not just the very minimum you wanted to present, because this will give you a future opportunity to extend your work without having to redo all the experiments.
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Collaborate and go abroad early
I know the feeling: your supervisor is too busy, none of your family members and friends understands your work, all reviewers are against you, it takes a hell lot of time to publish a paper and none of your ideas seem to work. So what to do?
– Collaborate! Talk to your fellows, even if they are working in completely different fields. Go to their presentations, get them into some kind of discussion, even if they look very annoyed and ask you to leave – oddly enough, this may result in a great paper! Find another institution that is doing great in your field and go there even without a pay. Find mentors, work with them and learn, and ask for more work after you get back!
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Become a reviewer
As mentioned before, publishing a paper is primarily about convincing the reviewers that your work is great. For that you need to understand what makes a paper great, and the best approach for that is obviously reviewing other people’s papers.
Of course, you can review any paper you find, but being a reviewer at a conference has a nice bonus – that is access to the not yet published work, which means you will know what are the topics the researchers out there are working on right now. And even better, you can help them to improve their work, which will bring you a great amount of professional satisfaction and self-realization.
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Keep calm and carry on
You time is limited, most of the PhD programs are over three years – that is more than a thousand days even subtracted vacations and days off. So in the beginning it sounds like an infinite amount of time, but suddenly you find out that a half of that time has gone and you haven’t gotten anywhere. You slip into a state where you cannot think about work when you are there and you cannot think about anything else but work when doing anything else…
– Ok, think this: Eventually it will work out. If not, there will be something else. One way or another, in five years from now you will be in a completely different state and none of this will matter at all. In fact, you will look back and remember only the best parts – that is the exotic places, banquets and drinks.
For now, just focus on the small things – writing a good paragraph, finding a clever way to present a result, typing another block of code, running another experiment, enjoying the paper you read, etc. Whatever you do right now – focus only on this, and afterwards leave your work at the office.
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Enjoy your spare time, meet new people and friends
Most PhD students struggle with loneliness. In fact, it is the greatest challenge you will encounter and the exact thing that turns your brain into a stressed monkey. So join a Judo club – some of those guys may become your best friends forever, and getting smashed against a mat for an hour and a half will surely keep you away from overestimating the importance of your research troubles. In fact, any other sport will do.
Go out, meet a friend, have a drink and enjoy being single and young (that is the loud music and the smell of perfume and sweat). And surely talk to that beautiful girl that looks like Scarlet Johansson – little do you know, a few years later she will be your wife, and you will be sitting there 4 AM in the morning glued to an attention sick little baby that for some odd reason does not want to sleep, so tired that all the all–nighters and deadlines you pulled through your PhD sound like eight hours of the good old sleep. Or maybe not at all – she will just roll her eyes and leave, but take a chance anyway!