Ask HN: What does your day look like as a PhD student?
HNers who are doing PhD,
1. What is your topic of research?
2. Is it different from your undergrad and/or masters field of study?
3. How do you spend a typical day?
4. What is the most useful skill that you have learnt or regularly use in your life as a researcher?
Comments
I did a phd in cognitive neuroscience. It was similar-ish to my undergrad.
Early in the program, days were fairly structured: a typical day had classes/homework, maybe meeting with an advisor, read some the foundational "classic" papers, and maybe collect/analyze data.
Later in the program, the structure disappeared. You might have a meeting or two, but the rest of the time you need to figure out what to do. Should I write something? Apply for something? Which papers/journals are worth reading to stay up to date? When should I stop playing with new analyses and start writing up some findings? The hardest part of the PhD was dealing with this lack of structure and the most useful skills you work on are self-discipline and time management.
I didn't learn self-discipline and time management very well and it really took a toll. There was a constant drone of "I should be working right now" so I took a laptop and stack of papers with me everywhere. But I rarely did much work, so I ended up a) never truly disconnecting from work and b) piling on extra layers of guilt because I was not working.
Thanks for this comment. I too often feel that I'm truly never disconnected from work related thoughts and hence feel rusty or not fresh enough to attack a problem. Do you have any suggestions to deal with that effectively?
when you go to grad school, you've elected to move yourself to a new place and surround yourself with a social circle defined by your shared research interests. everything in your life will somehow connect back to work, so doing work (or thinking about work) will easily become all consuming. Disconnecting will be hard because you have to decide how to fill that non-work/research vaccuum and will often default to just doing more work because it's familiar.
So, for me, disconnecting didn't work when it was seen as "pushing away work" to do something else -- it had to be that my focus was "pulled into something non-work". The hard part is finding a non-work thing that naturally pulls your focus away from work (especially on a grad-student budget).
i finished my phd quite a few years ago. My topic started out as signal processing applied to speech, but morphed into signal processing applied to bioinformatics because it was easier to publish.
it was an extension of undergrad, electronics engineering.
a day was either reading papers or writing matlab code, or waiting for matlab code to finish running. Pretty much everything was either reading research or working on future research. If I tried 20 ideas, one might work well enough to get a paper out of. Then a whole lot of testing to flesh it out, then writing the paper and editing and typesetting a creating images.
I was in a lab so there were other people to talk to working on similar things, that helped a lot.
most useful skills i think are just the research process, how to go from undergrad to expert in a topic. how to interact with the academic community. I enjoyed the process of learning so much. Not so much the process of writing papers.
How often did you meet with your advisor, and how much help did you receive?
I wasnt the best at staying in contact. I could have met him every morning if i had my shit together, but i caught up with him once every week or 2 in practice. Most of the help early on was guidelines on papers to read, and topics to write a paper on. Towards the end it was much more me driving direction. Like i said the other people in the lab helped a lot especially discussing ideas and learning concepts. We had 'tutorials', where you present at a whiteboard to the 3 other people in the lab something you feel you understand e.g. pca or mfccs. That sort of thing was fun and good for understanding.
The thing to probably note is that the final thesis was supposed to be basically the published papers put together with a story linking them. That isnt how many labs do theses in other fields, but it worked in our field well enough. It gave a good deal of experience in writing papers, but also meant the thesis was basically all peer reviewed before you even submitted it, which made rejection extremely unlikely.