I finished my PhD several years ago, and I got some tips according to my own experience and life-long reflection. I hope these suggestions may benefit your PhD and help you better prepare yourself for your future research. Note that it may not apply to everyone or every research area, as I may put some of my own bias into my research area (mainly software engineering). I summarise my suggestions in several bullet points, but their order is of no meaning, but when I come up with this suggestion when writing this guide.
It is always good to carry out the literature review. But different from reading without thinking, it would be great if you could bring your own questions when reading the paper e.g., what is the limitation of this paper, can that approach help solve my issues? This also applies to your postgraduate courses i.e., whether the approach taught in the lecture can be used in my current research? BTW, please read as many papers as possible (especially in your beginning days) to 1) understand the state-of-the-art, and 2) get familiar with the academic writing.
You can have 1) an abstract long-term plan (3-6 months) about your research and 2) a detailed daily plan (6 hours). During my PhD, I always spent the morning in reading papers, afternoon in writing code, and the evening for writing research papers. Note that in the morning, I also have a very detailed list of TODOs to finish in the afternoon and evening to avoid the potential waste of time.
Similar to 20 PERCENT PROJECT in Google (to spend 20 percent of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google), you are suggested to have 10% time to work on some side projects. For example, I learnt web development, data visualization, data crawling, etc, which are not directly relevant to my research during my PhD. But these skills broaden my horizon and benefit my future research.
You do not have to follow your supervisor's instructions, as you are working as collaborators. Feel free to express your disagreement in the meeting. But rather than direct rejection without solid reasons, I suggest you to prepare some evidence (e.g., experiment results, other research papers) to convince your supervisors.
Your supervisor is very busy in research, teaching, service and may supervise a dozen PhD students. Therefore, you may never get the call if you do not push them :-).
Sharing your research with a broader audience can make you more visible in your field. Greater visibility will enhance your reputation and the impact of your research, which benefit your future job seeking. Sharing your research with a broader audience can make you more visible in your field. Greater visibility will enhance your reputation and the impact of your research, which is increasingly important in obtaining extramural funding. Please build your own personal academic website (e.g., GitHub Pages) and share your research in social media such as Twitter, WeChat, etc.
Do not always stay in your comfort zone. If you are bored, you can try some new topic in your research, and even your environment to excite yourself. For example, I may go to my office, library, and open space for doing works. I keep that habit even when I am already a faculty.
As an old saying in Chinese "学而不思则罔 思而不学则殆" (Leaning without thinking leads to confusion; thinking without learning ends in danger), strike a balance between thinking and doing. It is good to have complete thinking before taking action, but not endless consideration, especially when you are just a junior student. So please set a time limit for thinking and then begin doing the job. You may figure out the best solution during the hands-on job.
Discussing with different people can always bring some new ideas or refine your thinking. So please take any opportunity to discuss, especially with people from other areas, as a breakthrough in one area may come from inspiration from another area.
To make your research more practical, please make it as a tool (e.g., website, mobile app) for wider audience. Those practice tools not only improve your reputation, but also benefit your future jobs in the industry.
It is very likely to be stuck in one project, so I always have multiple ideas and several projects on the list. Once I am stuck in one project, I will begin other projects. After that, I return to that project with fresh minds, and the previous bottleneck can always be easily fixed.
Research papers are too formal to understand easily. As software engineering is quite practical, you can always follow some informal documents like blogs (e..g, Google AI, Stack Overflow), tutorial and trending repositories (e.g., GitHub). Authors of those documents tend to make it easy to understand, even for outsiders.
Try to be kind to your collaborators, especially to the junior students (e.g., fresh PhD, FYP). Note that you were also inexperienced in the past, and they need time to grow up.
Like what I reflect in this document, please always reflect during your PhD. It is OK to fail, but reflecting on the failure helps you become a mature researcher in the future.
- THE PH.D. GRIND by Philip Guo