Hi! I’m Nathan. Hope this little Grad School Survival guide helps :)

Check out my other work at Nathanlaundry.com
The TLDR on how to survive your master’s/phd

Priortize your research, not your grades
Listen to your advisors but know when to take the lead
Don’t read too much (there is a sweet spot)
Learn by problem-solving
Don’t leave all your writing to the end

As I approach the end of my first year as a graduate student, I’ve begun to look forward; crafting a path towards a successful thesis and setting up for my PhD. The thing about this kind of reflection is it brings about some alarming realizations. Some of those realizations include: “oh dear lord, I don’t know what I’m doing”, “what the heck do I do next?”, and “I don’t even know, what I don’t know.” To remedy this situation, I’ve done what any good academic would do — research.

I’m also diving into blogging, if this post wasn’t evidence enough for that, so I decided to start by searching for other computer science research bloggers. Lucky for me, and I suppose unsurprisingly, academics love writing about their thoughts. I found and curated a wealth of advice from Harvard professors and Microsoft’s research division alike, on how to succeed doing research.

So here’s how this is going to play out; I’m going to sum up 5 recurring themes I found on how to do a successful PhD, then give my plans on how to incorporate that advice into my academic journey. Make no mistake, I’m not an expert. I hope to learn openly and vulnerably so you, my readers, can incorporate what leads to triumph and avoid my mistakes.

As a quick aside, I’ll leave links to the blogs that inspired me at the bottom of this post. Referencing is important.
5 Tips on how to succeed in your PhD — from the experts

1. Your grades and classes don’t matter; your research does.

The same message repeated in a variety of colourful ways all coming down to this: do research, everything else is superfluous. Everything, including your classes. Still transitioning out of my undergraduate mindset, this was quite a shock to my system. The rationale behind this is, your job as a graduate student is straightforward: to learn how to do effective research and prove it to others by producing some. It’s that simple. Your grades, your courses, your qualifications, they’re useful too, but they’re not the focus. Instead, think of them as tools to teach you how to do better research or the tools you need to do that research. The phrase “Don’t let school get in the way of your education” was evoked and I think it sums this up nicely.
2. Listen to your advisors … just not too much

This comes down to timing. When we first begin our adventure into academia, we know very little; as I mentioned earlier, we don’t even know what we don’t know. What are the conferences in our field we should watch out for? Do I need ethics approval for the kind of research I’m doing, if so how and when do I get it? What is a reasonably sized research question for my thesis?

When we can’t answer these fundamental questions, it’s time to listen and follow. Schedule consistent meetings with your supervisor and advisory committee. When you get them into a room, listen to their advice, take quality notes, and put that advice into action. Soak up all the expertise you don’t have and lean on the people who are there to help you. This isn’t to say don’t be proactive, we’ll get to that later, but at this stage, we’re likely better off taking directions than giving them.

What I find most interesting is the timing of the control flip. Most professors noted there should be a point in your degree when you’ve listened, explored, and absorbed enough that you can answer the core questions of how to produce effective research. You should know the common tools and solutions in your niche, understand the open problems in your field, and be able to match time frames to projects. Matt Might Director of the Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute at UAB, noted that by the end of your third year, you should know more about your topic than your advisor. At this point the dynamic shifts, and it’s time to take the reins. Matt called it “going rogue” but many others have described this switch in leadership.
3. Use your Curiosity, don’t let it use you

If you’re like me, curiosity is a big part of what drew you into academia. Curiosity is a powerful source of passion and drive, but the world of academia is vast and filled with wonderous tangents. We just don’t have time for them all.

This brings me to the piece of advice that shocked me most: don’t read too much. Of course, reading is a core part of our academic pursuits, so how do we know when it’s too much? Three key indicators of reading too much are: when reading leads to feeling like there are no problems left to solve, when reading about tangential research is taking time away from producing your research, and when your desire to read everything prevents you from beginning the problem-solving process.

It seemed to me, the experts were pointing out a sweet spot. Somewhere between reading so little that you have no idea what’s going on, and reading so much you never have the time nor the confidence to do your own research. Between these two extremes lies the goldilocks zone — niche expertise. Mat Might stated that to defend your thesis at the end of your third year you’d only need to have read between 50 and 150 papers on the topic. For context, over 3 years, that’s less than one paper a week. Before you go chucking your reading list out the window, a quick disclaimer: I imagine “read” here means in-depth, annotated, summarized, contemplated, and incorporated into your own work. This does not mean skimming 50 papers by the end of third year.
4. Exploring via Problem-Solving

Tying into the notion of the reading sweet spot is learning by problem-solving. The advice I found leads to this process: read enough to identify an open problem you find interesting, begin trying to solve it, direct further reading through the lens of potential solutions. In this way, we practice active research and take steps away from rampant curiosity. We begin with the intention to learn just enough to answer the research question.

Matt Welsh likened research projects to a dark forest; there’s only so much you can learn from the outside. His advice, like many others, is to “dive in”. By actively trying to solve a problem, you learn not only what tools exist to solve it, but how to use them, their limitations, and what else they can be used for. As new problems and questions arise during active research, you carve a trail through the literature that leads you to what you really need to know.
5. Write Consistently

The writing process is iterative. Start early, write often, revise regularly.

The first course I took as a graduate student required me to write 4 blog posts. We were instructed to write about anything that interested us in the field of computer science and to cite what we found. Looking back I think the goal of this was more to establish the habit of curating, recording, and sharing ideas than to learn about the topics we chose. That’s why we write consistently, to establish the habit.

As we’re starting our graduate studies we may not have much to share, but we can certainly curate and record. From learning how and where to find good articles and papers, to taking notes and summarizing what we found, we can begin building good research habits. Collect and curate for long enough and the ideas begin to swirl in your head, starting the formation of your own. Record those too. Write them down and nurture them. By building up a catalogue full of ideas and writing to pull from, when it finally comes down to writing your thesis or your next paper, there will be no need to start from a blank page.
How I’m Taking this Advice

Now, it’s one thing to gather and summarize advice, it’s a whole other thing to follow it. To ensure that I take these tips to heart, and, hopefully, to help you decide how you might start to do so as well, I’ll be listing my gameplan for following this advice in my doctoral pursuits.
Overcoming the Undergraduate Mindset: Producing Research, not Grades

For a long time, my identity, my idea of how to measure success, my value as a person was tied to my grades. I’m sure you’ve heard this story before, academic perfectionism is not a rare plight. My chase for every stray percentage point opened a lot of doors for me. It lead to some scholarships, helped me get into my Master’s program, and bolstered my self-esteem. With grades having been core to my vision of self and a gateway to success, letting go and reprioritizing has been a deeply introspective and time-consuming task.

Why am I telling you this oddly personal story? Because I think I won’t be alone in the shock and fear of letting go of my grades. So, cheers to the academic perfectionists. Here’s how I plan on handling this mindset shift.

Kill n birds with x stones where x < n

You’ve heard “kill two birds with one stone”, we can abstract that. I believe that work and learning should never be single use. As I take courses, I tie every class deliverable into a project I’m working on outside of class, making that course-work “work” for me twice. By doing this I accomplish three things: I get to do research first and foremost by tailoring course deliverables to my projects, I get to succeed academically by actively engaging in the course material, and I get to change my mindset to focus on research and curiosity, not grades.

Some examples of how I tailor my course-work to projects I’m working on:

Project: Reducing quality of service harms for people of colour by improving the accuracy of facial recognition software
Course: Big Data→ analyzing facial recognition datasets and their representation of demographics
Course: Neural Networks → analyzing and designing cascaded convolutional neural networks for facial recognition systems
Project: A framework for features in video games leading to long term loyal player bases
Course: Human Computer Interaction → Exploring qualitative analysis techniques and how people interact with online communities
Project (and thesis): Developing an ontology for introductory assignment descriptions
Course: Technical Communications → Tailor all writing and presenting to my thesis topics. Forces me to develop my ideas sooner, present them, and conduct literature reviews (see my previous blog Breaking Down the Literature Review).

Using My Curiosity and Exploring via Problem-Solving

In Matt’s first year of his PhD, he took courses from every department. He learned about linguistics, philosophy, economics … none of it related to his doctoral work. It cost him an extra year. To me, this sounds like a blissful year. That’s why I know I have to take action now to hone my focus around my research.

I used to wander into packed lecture halls, sneak into the back, and just listen. Everything was so new, and I was devoted to soaking up every drop of knowledge I could. Toward the end of my undergraduate, however, I felt my education growing stale. I wanted desperately to put what I’d learned into action, so I sought out research and project-focused courses. My master’s degree has made learning feel fresh again and it’s sparked my desire to chase down every lead. I know, if I’m not careful, I could lose a year to my many curiosities too.

To tackle this, I’m taking Cal Newport’s advice — work on three projects at a time. Having three projects sets me up to learn by solving problems, gives me ample opportunity to tailor my course-work, and enables me to satisfy but focus my curiosity on tangible work.

Selecting the right projects becomes the next step. I choose projects based on three criteria: does it align with my values?, does it interest me?, do I get to work with people who are smarter (or more knowledgeable) than I am? To this end, I choose research that could improve lives, satisfy my curiosities, and that my friends and colleagues are also interested in. This keeps me excited to work on my research day in and day out.
Writing Regularly

The final step on my list is to ensure I’m writing regularly. As a computer science student fresh out of highschool I was terrified of writing throughout my undergraduate. Highschool English had beaten the desire to write out of me with incessant mediocre essay prompts and a bizarre rule that forbade the use of a dictionary or thesaurus; god forbid I attempt to grow my vocabulary and improve my spelling.

As a researcher, I can’t be afraid of writing. I know I have to take action to reclaim my writing and improve my skills. For that reason, I’m committing to three things: a blog post every week on my experiences as a computer science graduate student, writing detailed notes on the papers I read and the ideas I have, and drafting papers as I do the research. The blog get’s me writing casually and regularly to confront my anxieties. Keeping detailed notes helps me engage with papers that I read and makes me less reliant on my faulty memory(more on my note-taking system another time). Lastly, writing my research as I go ensures that I never start from a blank page once data collection is done.
Wrapping up

As I move forward through my career as an academic, I hope to look back on this post, noting how it helped me grow and maybe laughing at how naive I was about a few things. Either way, I’m taking steps to improve, and if I have to take 2 steps back every 3 steps forward to recalibrate, at least I’ll be in motion.

To the authors and researchers I’ve cited — thank you! Sharing your advice for all us young graduate students to see is an invaluable resource and a wonderful demonstration of generosity. If you see this, don’t hesitate to reach out.

If you liked this post, check out my last one on Breaking down the Literature Review

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Cheers,
Nathan Laundry

January 28th, 2023

Other stuff you might enjoy:

How to use Notion to plan your weekly todos as a grad student https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3uJuab3YVc

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References

Matt Might’s “10 easy ways to fail a Ph.D.”

Matt Might’s “The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.”

Cal Newport’s “Some Thoughts on Grad School”

Rob J Hyndman’s “How to fail a PhD”

John Regehr’s “You Might as Well Be a Grat Copy Editor”