After almost 5 years, I am finally done with grad school! I just started a postdoc, so this is probably a good time to look back. Two friends recently asked me what my “grad school story” was. What had I learned during my PhD, apart from the obvious technical and academic skills? What were the things I wish I’d known before I started. It got me thinking: what would I tell myself if I got to go back in time? Here is what I came up with:
Take breaks
When I started grad school, I believed exhaustion, all-nighters, and 14h-days were hallmarks of a good grad student. Well, turns out they are not! I worked 12-14h every day, 8h on weekends. After 3 months, I was tired all the time and got sick on a biweekly basis (flu, stomach bugs, etc.). After 6 months, I was burned out, deeply unhappy, constantly sick, and seriously considered quitting. Worst of all: my productivity had constantly decreased. It was time to rethink my believes.
Grudgingly, I learned to accept those limitations. I concentrated productive work (coding, writing) in my peak hours, and used the rest for “busy work” (reading, setting up experiments). Good time management is one of the key skills to learn in your PhD, and one of those they never teach you. It is simply impossible to produce quality work without taking a break every now and then. I have heard estimates that you can only be really productive for 6 hours each day.
The most important part of that were the breaks! I exercised, walked, had lunch with friends, read the newspaper. I was still thinking about my work. But getting some distance from it helped me see errors I overlooked when working constantly. Cutting back on my hours not only made me happier and healthier, it also made me more productive.
It also helped me to set myself an end time. I had some of my most productive times when I was dependent on a shuttle service and could only work until 5pm. I made every minute count, and went home in the evening without regrets. I got a lot done. Working 14 hours straight did not accomplish half as much―and felt a lot worse.
Know your advisor
When I started out in grad school, I thought of my advisor as this superhuman being who knows everything. Apparently, I am not alone. This honeymoon period can last a while. Inevitably, though, everyone reaches a point where they disagree with their advisor. It can be a bit of a shock to learn that advisors are only human, too.
At the end of the day, though, it is good to remember that an advisor is the person who keeps you in business. They speak up for you in quals and screenings, vouch for you academically, introduce you to the right people, and help pay your tuition, travel expenses, and conference fees. They are busy people, and it is not their job to hold your hand, nor help you with the daily nitty-gritty. They have, however, spent a lot of time in the field and can help you find the right direction. It is up to you what you make of it, though. I know some people who have been discouraged by their advisor to pursue a project, only to find a paper on it at the next conference.
It helps to know what their strengths are and benefit from them, and find somebody else for the things they cannot teach you. The latter are often hands-on solutions and technical issues. Most of their hands-on experience is several years old and might be outdated, especially in a fast-paced field like computer science. That’s what fellow grad students are for….
It is your job to keep your advisor happy. Do the project work, help with classes, and listen to their counseling. But decide for yourself what applies to you. Part of your PhD is becoming your own researcher.
Talk to people
Even though it often felt like it, it was important for me to realize that I was not alone in the PhD! I was surrounded by other grad students and researchers, either directly or in my general community. When I started, I was lacking many of the computer science skills my peers had. I had the choice to either envy them or learn from them. The latter worked much better. I have learned more from water cooler talks and by asking colleagues than I have from most classes. I also learned a ton from collaborating on papers, and it’s less work for everyone. Internships and visits are a another great way to meet other people and get exposed to new ideas. I went to IBM and CMU, both for 3 months, and came back invigorated and full of new ideas and impressions.
Learning how to talk to people also means giving good presentations. We need to share our ideas to get plenty of feedback. It helped me to find out how others perceived my research and to check whether that’s what I wanted to convey. If they didn’t get it, I reminded myself that it was probably my fault for not explaining it well enough: the audience is always right. This is especially true when talking to non-scientist friends: if I could explain it to them, I knew I had gotten to the core of the problem (this is sometimes also called the elevator pitch: can you explain your work to someone in the time you spent together on an elevator?). It’s difficult, but it helped me to think outside the box: there is always something in your work that relates to people’s everyday experience (even if it is remote). I think it also helps with writing papers―if you can explain what your work is about in a few simple sentences, people will be more willing to read your paper. Even scientists like a simple explanation better than a convoluted one.
The more specialized my work got, the more important I found it to keep an open mind in general. I found that somebody who works on something completely different can often offer an objective view or an alternative approach to the problem. I made it a point to go to talks outside my area, read papers on related topics and general science. What others do can be as interesting as your own work (but don’t fall into the trap thinking what you do is less interesting than everybody else’s work). Also, it helped me overcome the misconception that being opinionated is equivalent to being smart. It’s an easy mistake to make, but it’s still wrong. And yes, I did it, and I’m not proud.
Last but not least, keeping an open mind helped me to learn other things as well. Even though I felt challenged with all the demands of my research, I found that over time, my mind got used to challenges. It made it easier to pick up some new non-scientific skills along the way (I learned dancing, cooking, and how to ride a motorcycle), and I’m glad I did (again: it helps to take a break sometimes).
It is impossible to be a good researcher when you never leave your room.
Get a hammer
In fact, get a whole toolbox! Early on, I was told to find an approach, algorithm, data set, resource, or other method that I liked. For me, this was the EM algorithm: I love how you can solve a circular problem (if I knew X, I could solve Y, and vice versa) by just starting out somewhere and then refining your model step by step. It’s similar to how children learn about the world, and it can help with a range of problems.
Once I had that, I started looking for problems I could solve with it. I applied it to problems you cannot solve with it. That helped me understand why it works for some and not others. I learned a lot both about the problem and my hammer. It also expanded my technical expertise and helped me produce results more efficiently (and thus write more papers).
It’s important not to get too hung up on one thing, though! Not everything is a nail, and nobody likes a zealous one-trick pony. While it sometimes seems that academia rewards single-mindedness, it often leads those people down a path of no return when the paradigm shifts or their technique becomes obsolete. I learned to accept the limitations and explored alternatives.
I tried to put as many things in my toolbox as possible, and to learn when to use them. This is an immensely fun part of the PhD, and I don’t even think I’m done yet.
Enjoy!
This is probably the most important point. When I was so fed up with the program that I considered quitting, I paused and thought about why I put myself through this. Why did I do a PhD? And for whom? I realized that I was not in it for my advisor, for my family, or society as a whole, I wasn’t doing this for others―I was doing this only for myself. Because it is what I always wanted to do! If I didn’t become the next superstar in my field, so what? I was in it because I loved it. Not every second of it, for sure, but as a whole: that was enough to make those difficult times pale to insignificance in the grand scheme of things. Around that time, I went to a talk by Tom Mitchell, on how to predict what people had read by looking at their brain images, and I remember walking out thinking “There are so many more cool things I haven’t even started on, I can’t possibly quit now” (this is another reason why it is good to keep an open mind and check out other fields).
When you’re in a PhD program, you are doing something very few people get the chance to do: you are at the cutting edge of research and work with interesting people on cool problems every day. Everybody gets down once in a while, and pretty much everybody considered quitting at some point. It’s good to remember what you’re excited about. And that you have every right to be excited!
So that’s it. This is what got me through my PhD. If I had to do it all over again, this is what I would focus on.
There are of course other good documents out there on how to make it through grad school, one of the better ones is this one by Hanna Wallach and Mark Dredze. Check it out.