Always prepare for the worst.
The ancients said: everything is established in advance, and it is abolished if it is not planned. A little foresight in the early days may help you avoid some disasters during your graduate school. Spit if you want (cynicism). Suppose the experiment you designed falls through, and one of your tutors not only doesn't support your research plan, but also scoffs. Then, I suggest you consider changing the subject quickly.
No one will take care of you
In reality, some professors will take care of you, while others will not. Most professors probably want to take care of you, but they are too busy, which means they can't actually help you, because they don't have extra time to take care of you. Therefore, you must rely on yourself completely, and you'd better get used to it. When I say this, there are two main meanings:
You'd better decide your research project as soon as possible. You need to earn your degree yourself. Your tutor will guide you and help you solve the problems of postgraduate training and experimental funds to some extent, but the tutor will not tell you what to do next-these things are entirely up to you. If you need guidance, ask your tutor-it's their duty.
If you are going to learn other people's knowledge and skills, you must take the initiative to find him/her, because they will not take the initiative to find you.
You must know the importance of your research work.
When you are new here, you should read the literature extensively and think deeply in the first year. At first, you may think that these papers are all nonsense, but later, you will gradually realize that they are not. If you can't understand something in the literature, please don't be depressed-in fact, it's not your fault, but the author's problem, because he didn't explain the paper clearly enough.
If an authoritative person tells you that you didn't go to class and collect data, you will accomplish nothing. Please tell them that your research will be fruitful in the future. If they are still stubborn, please let them go, because you know best the importance of your research. Oh, my god
This stage will be more painful, and even make people feel like years, because you will be extremely anxious because your research is stagnant. At this time, you need to keep asking yourself: What am I doing now? Calm down, because this stage is very important for your personal career development, and it is also a critical period for generating new ideas. At this point, you should think carefully about what elements an important scientific problem should consist of. This decision must be made by yourself for two reasons:
First of all, if the problem you are studying is given to you by others, you will feel that the "ownership" of this problem does not belong to you, but that others are asking you to do it. So you won't take the initiative to study the problem, defend it, fight for it, or even get beautiful results;
Secondly, your research work during your doctoral period will affect your future development. As for which field you plan to study in the future and fight for it all your life, you have to make this decision independently.
Deciding your research direction after careful consideration is also very important for the development of science. You can open up a whole new research field based on a research point. Please remember: if you don't know why you are doing this research, what's the point of starting to collect data blindly?
Psychological problems are the biggest obstacle.
In the early stage of postgraduate career, we must begin to cultivate tough psychological quality to avoid being disturbed by various setbacks in the later stage. If you let your guard down, unexpected pressures from schoolwork, teaching and language will keep you busy, just like a docile macromolecule being pushed around to do chaotic Brownian motion. Here, there are some things to pay attention to:
(1) You have to think carefully about the research you will do during your doctoral period and convince you to fight for it all your life. No matter how hard you try, it's hard for you to bypass the research you did during your Ph.D. Everyone is the same about this, because it stems from the openness of research work. You need to learn how to judge the "quality" of a thesis topic. Papers usually get better and better, which encourages you to revise them endlessly.
You have to understand that you can't write a "perfect" paper. Just like anything else, there will always be flaws in the paper. Calm down, arrange your time, money and energy reasonably, and try your best to revise the paper to the best.
You can finish other scheduled study tasks during your doctoral period in advance, which will relieve the pressure of writing a thesis a little. Please complete the required course credits as soon as possible and complete the corresponding exams. This will not only clear the obstacles before you start preparing your dissertation, but also increase your confidence and make you feel that I have done a good job after successfully completing these learning tasks.
(2) respectful behavior will not have excellent performance. Expect and urge others to treat you like colleagues. Publishing a paper is a hard goal that you must achieve in your doctoral career, and the attitude of colleagues or collaborators is sometimes very uncertain. If you act like a colleague, others will treat you as a colleague.
(3) Being a graduate student can affect your future development, but this is only one of the ways you can choose at present. If there is a better opportunity, you can consider temporarily giving up graduate school. The following three situations may be worth a try:
First of all, an opportunity that really excites you may appear in front of you, and this opportunity is more creative and challenging than anything you did during your graduate school. When you have enough time to prove that giving up graduate school is a good choice, give up graduate school for the time being. Such opportunities include an African field work project unrelated to your doctoral program, a software development contract, an opportunity to work as an assistant in the science and technology decision-making department of the capital, or an intern reporter in a mainstream newspaper/magazine.
Secondly, only graduate students who pay attention to these opportunities at the same time during their graduate studies are truly independent graduate students. If you think that graduate school is the only way out of life, then your mentality will become unstable, and you will gradually feel a little depressed, even lose confidence, and it is difficult to reach your best state;
Finally, if graduate school really doesn't suit you, then choosing to continue graduate school will hurt yourself, and even you will lose many other job opportunities. Besides being a scientist, there are actually many interesting things worth doing in your life, or you may be better at finding a job in the labor market than being a scientist. If you really don't like doing scientific research, maybe you should try something else. However, never act rashly. This is a very serious decision. Before making a final decision, be sure to communicate your thoughts with the relevant person in charge of the college and a good teacher.
Avoid classes-classes are usually inefficient.
If you are already familiar with your research field, take as few additional courses as possible. This suggestion seems a bit contradictory to the last one, but it actually makes sense. At present, you should learn how to think about your doctoral program. This requires you to take the initiative, rather than passively attending classes and mechanically repeating.
To learn to think, you need two things: first, you have to have enough time; Secondly, you need to have one-on-one conversations with people who know more about scientific issues than you do.
Classes may actually get in the way. If you are motivated, reading seminars is more efficient and enlightening than attending classes. It is usually a good idea to organize several colleagues to discuss a topic of common interest and invite one or two teachers who are also interested in this topic. Teachers are generally willing to attend such seminars. After all, they are also interested in the topic under discussion, so they will like your idea. This discussion will also accumulate some credibility for the teachers who teach this course, and they don't have to do any work. Why not do it?
Of course, these "skipping classes" suggestions are not applicable to some courses that introduce professional skills, such as electron microscopy imaging, histology, scuba diving and so on.
Write a research plan and ask for advice from peers.
The research plan has many functions:
(1) Summarize the documents read in the past year and think about it. By combing these documents and ideas, further stimulate your new ideas;
(2) Prove that you can use your time reasonably through a systematic summary (concrete demonstration), thus showing that you can study consciously.
(3) so that others can help you with their hands. It is quite complicated to communicate the thoughts in your heart directly, because the thoughts in your heart will be quite trivial and unorganized. Only after careful arrangement and organization into a concise document can it be circulated among peers for their review opinions. Colleagues can only give some concrete and constructive suggestions after reading your research plan.
(4) You, including others, need to practice your writing skills.
(5) It is very important to find scientific questions that satisfy you. You need to show your colleagues that you have a certain degree of understanding of this problem, and strive for your support and help. Among them, a research plan is put forward, and the method to achieve this goal is:
A) Briefly state your research plan, which can be a scientific question or a hypothesis.
B) Point out why this assumption is important from an academic point of view, not from your personal point of view. Also, point out how common this hypothesis is in your research field.
C) Use detailed literature review to confirm point (b) above.
D) Break down your scientific problem into a series of small problems, and then solve these small problems one by one. When designing experiments, observation or analysis, you will rule out some unreasonable alternative results one by one. You need to sort out these results and start solving these problems. Turn a big problem into a series of small problems, and you can clearly know what to do next, thus reducing your confusion when you first face a big problem. You can know which steps of the problem are more difficult or difficult, and you can list the priorities of each step. When you encounter some temporarily difficult steps, you can immediately start to do other things first.
(6) List the key steps that may appear in your experiment and have a devastating impact on the whole experiment, and then list other alternative experiments of these key steps in turn. In case these key steps really go wrong, there are alternative experiments to remedy them.
(7) It may be a good idea to design two or three experiments and conduct them at the same time to determine which experiment is most likely to succeed. When verifying your idea, two or three models may have similar explanatory power, but in practice, some inappropriate models will be gradually excluded. When designing experiments, "preparing for a rainy day" is always more effective than "mending after it is too late".
(8) Choose a deadline for the oral report of your doctoral thesis, and then reasonably arrange the time period from today to the scheduled deadline. After setting a deadline for yourself, you will feel at home and have a sense of urgency. Don't panic for a while-after spending some time in this state of mind, this sense of urgency will be stronger.
(9) After reading the literature, arrange two to three weeks to write a research plan, and try to let more colleagues review your research plan to get as many comments as possible. I hope their feedback will be helpful, and then you can seriously revise it.
(10) When all these steps are completed, in fact, the introduction of your doctoral thesis is almost finished. At this time, it may be less than a year to a year and a half before you enter school.