The basic principles every PhD student needs to know

so when i started my phd it felt like a success just to be accepted it felt like i had this opportunity to do much better than i had as an undergraduate to show what i was really capable of and you know it felt fantastic just to have that so i started with all these high hopes and high expectations but it wasn't long before i discovered that it's much easier to get into a phd program than it is to complete one and i ended up in my third year basically burned out incredibly stressed depressed overwhelmed and on the verge on the verge of quitting now when i spoke to people about this they told me it's okay don't worry it's normal everybody goes through this it's just part of the phd process just keep going and it'll be okay don't worry this is just what a phd is and so i kept going but things didn't get any better it was only when i made fundamental changes to the way that i was approaching the work that things started to change i'll talk a little bit more about those later on but we have this problem where overwhelming phd stress is so common that many people assume that it's both inevitable and necessary so you just ignore the problem right you just carry on going because it's normal it'll be okay but the problem is that stress okay some stress can be useful a little bit of stress can help you to focus but overwhelming stress it limits your ability to think to learn and to solve difficult problems and for phd students or researchers that's kind of a problem to illustrate this point really simple example if you imagine you have to take a flight and let's say the public transport is on strike so there's loads of traffic it's going to be difficult to get there maybe you've had a fight with your partner because you haven't packed in time and then there's all this stuff and you're running around the house and then you're looking for your keys you know where are my keys i'm late i'm late i'm late my partner's shouting at me where are my keys and you realize they've been in your hand for the last five minutes and that's a really simple example of how stress can make you stupid right so we have this situation where we accept that for phd students who have to operate on the limit of human knowledge that stress is okay but you know we're human and stress can limit our ability in so many ways now if this happens occasionally it's not a big deal right life kind of goes up and down you will have moments where you're overwhelmed but when it's normal when it's your everyday experience over time that builds up and it can lead to just crippling self-doubt and in some cases quite serious quite serious depression so i don't think that we should accept that this is just the way a phd is i think we can do better so i think that over overwhelming stress is a warning sign that something is wrong not with you but with the way that you're approaching the work so the question is why is it that so many phd students suffer from this overwhelming stress and what can we do about it so to address this i want to go even more fundamental and ask the question what is a phd anyway what is it fundamentally what are we trying to achieve so does anybody want to volunteer an answer what is what is the purpose of a phd yep okay to become an independent researcher that's pretty good anyone else okay so this is pretty common i've given this talk a lot of a lot of times we have a what we have like 60 70 people in the room and it's very rare that people say oh yeah i know what a phd is and have a really confident answer so if you're dedicating three four five years of your life to this thing you need to have a really really clear idea of what it is so this is a list of just some of the answers that i've been that i've been given before becoming an independent researcher is it's up there with the best of them some of them that i've that i've seen are a little bit a little bit less clear one really common one phd is an original contribution to the body of knowledge which again is pretty it's pretty good there's an element of truth to that some people say it's the culmination of a lifetime of study some people use metaphors like a phd as a marathon not a sprint some people say it's the work you'll be remembered for um one person in one talk said it's like a driving license for research so kind of similar to that answer we had today some people will say well it's just the natural next step in my education for some people it's a way of avoiding major life decisions and one time somebody told me that phd means that you're the world's leading expert in your field if that's true i'm gonna give mine back because that's certainly certainly not not the level that i reached now all of these answers or most of them they have an element of truth to them but they're kind of like working around the issue none of them are really really clear about what you need to do and how you need to approach it so we can put in a lot of work without really knowing you know what what the purpose is so let's re-examine this so some people say that phd is like the culmination of the education system and in some ways this is true it's kind of the highest common qualification that you can that you can get there's a problem with thinking of it this way okay so if you think of it like a like a pyramid where you have primary education secondary education your undergraduate degree and then at each level some people leave some people move up so that so you get the best people the people who've done the best at these lower levels moving on to a phd okay the problem with this is that in almost every respect it's completely different to everything that you've done before so here i'm using undergraduate to just describe anything you know pre-post-graduate so it could be primary education it could be all the way up to to master's degree in some cases but there's a consistency to the system so you have a clearly defined syllabus so somebody stands at the front of the room they tell you a bunch of information which has clear boundaries around it okay in a phd you don't have that there might be certain core concepts but there's no boundary around what you need to know at undergraduate level you're dealing with well-established knowledge you're dealing with things which have been tested which have been accepted by your academic field and a phd you're dealing with cutting-edge research which might be contradictory might be ideas that people haven't quite accepted things that haven't quite been fully fully tested you might be dealing with things where there's people just arguing all the time about what is what is absolutely the case at undergraduate level you have a clear timetable down to the level of an individual hour you need to be in this place at this time and i will teach you this a phd you might have a submission deadline like once a year and that's it or you might meet your supervisor once a month but on a day-to-day basis on an hour by hour basis it's up to you to decide what you do at undergraduate level you have a cumulative grade so you can screw up one exam and make up for it later in a phd you have one exam and it's pass or fail pretty much and so you can see how there are all these differences where it's not just different it's the complete opposite of everything that you had to deal with before okay another quick example um at undergraduate level you have local competition so to be the best in your class you just have to beat the other 30 or so or 100 people in your in your class at phd level you're competing globally you're competing against other people in your in your field okay and i'll come back to that point a little bit later so what we can derive from this is that you get to the phd level by being really good at all the stuff on the left but when you get to phd level everything changes so the skills that got you this far are not the same skills that help you to succeed right so you can be working really really really really hard but using the old skills okay and that's only going to lead to stress so you have this situation um you have all of these different skills uh all of these ways in which your your previous skills are not going to help you but then nobody really tells you what's required and you're mostly left to figure it out on your own so let's redefine it i think that a phd level is not the pinnacle of the education system but it's the entry qualification to the world of professional academia it's the bottom of the pyramid it's not the top okay so this is where you develop your basic skills which you can then take on um if you carry on in academia to you know do world-changing world-changing research okay so people put a lot of pressure on themselves to be the best whereas actually you're a beginner okay and you need to work on those fundamentals so the aim of a phd is to develop and then demonstrate the skills of a professional academic researcher what does this mean it basically means that you have to produce work of a publishable standard which is a pretty high bar but it's different depending on what field you're working in so the standard you have to reach is set by the field relative to what already exists in the field and then it's judged by other academics in the field okay so what you have to achieve very much depends on what is already there so you need to not only know the literature to know what's been done but then also develop a level of skill which is competitive with some of that work okay and where that where that cutting edge currently is currently is right now which is quite a high bar to reach but it is doable okay so there are basically three main objectives i'm just going to focus on the first two so first getting to know the literature then developing these professional level academic research skills and then demonstrating that knowledge and skill through your project and then through the writing i'm not going to talk about writing we can come to it in the q a just because it's too big a topic but i'm happy to answer questions about it uh later on okay so how do we do this how do we build this expertise this knowledge of this literature and the research skill does anybody have any answers this is what you're going to have to do so you need to know does anybody have an answer about how you actually get better at something practice okay yeah any videos read okay okay so again you know there's not many confident answers we've had two answers which are pretty good both of those things are essential but how you practice and how you read makes a big difference so just doing something again and again and again doesn't necessarily make you better so if you think about how many people have driving licenses they drive every single day but they don't necessarily get better they're not all lewis hamilton they're not all world-class drivers you know despite spending thousands of hours potentially driving okay because what happens is that you repeat the same habits so doing something again and again doesn't necessarily make you better there are ways to practice which are more effective than others and these are the kind of things that you need to know because you're setting your own timetable and you're deciding what you need to do okay reading obviously also very very important but how you read is crucial and i'll come to that i'll come to that shortly so one of the ways that people think of learning or developing skill is in terms of stress as stress being essential to learning okay you need to push past your limit in order to grow kind of like weightlifting okay you need to lift heavier weights in order to get stronger this is again sort of almost true but not quite right so stick with the with the weightlifting analogy so if you go to the gym you start weightlifting you want to get stronger first day you lift a certain weight next day you go back you try and lift a little bit more and then the next day or a few days later you try and lift a little bit more and this will work for a while you will get stronger for sure you know just from doing something new just from increasing the load but what will happen is you'll get stronger you'll get stronger and then you'll reach a plateau okay and you can try and lift more weight and it just doesn't happen and the reason is that it's not just about increasing the load because the amount that you can lift the amount that you can do depends on technique it depends on skill and if you increase the load to a particular point you've reached a point where the limiting factor is the skill so all you're trying to do is increase the weight but it's not helping because you're not addressing the fundamental problem okay and all you're doing is putting more stress on yourself and what will probably happen is you actually get weaker or you get injured okay so um this is a really really really crucial principle so i'm going to spend a little bit a little bit more time so coming back to that that metaphor ph.d is a marathon not a sprint we have the same idea so some of you may know a few months ago um eliot kim chogy became the first person to run her sub two hour marathon he didn't do this by just running marathons again and again and again as hard as he could until he got faster if he'd done that he'd have just broken himself okay he wouldn't be you know the world-class or world's best marathon runner that he is what people like that do whether it's weight lifters whether it's marathon runners whether it's professional athletes or whether it's top level academics they spend more time working on the fundamentals than they do at the edge so in the case of a marathon runner they don't spend all their time running marathons what they do is they spend time working on technique working on strength working on flexibility working on nutrition working on psychology working on all of these different things the preparation which they then test by going to the edge okay so the bulk of the time is spent on the component parts not on the big performance like the you know the big the big competition okay same thing applies in education so most of the education system is set up in a particular way where you take a module as part of a course then you take an exam you pass the exam and then you move on to the next thing okay so we we lift the weight and then we increase the weight once you've succeeded okay but this can leave big holes in your knowledge so let's say you take the exam at the end of module one and you get a really good score so you score like 80 right you're probably near the top of the class that means that 20 of the material you don't know in the 80 there's no guarantee that you'll remember all of that 80 okay so 20 you don't know but that 20 might be really important you move on then to the next module which maybe builds upon those previous principles but 20 is missing but we're adding more we're adding more i spent a lot of time in university and i don't remember a single time when anybody said you need to go back and learn that fundamental thing before we teach you this as long as you've got a passing grade you can do the next thing and what i found was i just got overloaded i found ways to pass the exams but those fundamentals were weak and that's what limited me okay so whether it's weightlifting marathon running or academia the fundamentals are what everything is built upon okay and if you've got any gaps they get exposed when you go to the edge so the limit is not where you grow it's where you test yourself it's where you test your preparation it's where you test the skills that you've already established already established so what you need to do if you want to improve your skill is to back off from the limit and focus on the component parts that form the foundation of your skills okay so let's apply this to the first of those fundamental aims getting to know the literature okay so this is coming back to that issue of that issue of reading so most students don't know at least initially how to approach the literature because we've been trained through undergraduate exams where you have a certain syllabus and you have to know as much as possible of that syllabus and if you miss something then you you're kind of penalized for that okay so you approach the literature you do a quick search and you find 10 000 results for a particular thing and you think how am i going to learn all of this how can i possibly absorb all of this information and so what i get is questions like how can i read more how can i read faster how can i take notes that encompass all of this all of this information because people are trying to approach it like an undergraduate exam but it doesn't work because we're just piling on too much load we're piling on too much weight so the aim is not to learn everything but to identify the fundamentals which we can then use to build kind of a solid knowledge of the literature or apply it to our to our research so what you need to do instead of trying to read more instead of trying to read faster and straight instead of trying to you know increase that load is to try to select individual papers that help you to achieve a specific aim so if you can identify common concepts okay this helps to reduce the load a little bit so if you take a random sample of a thousand papers throughout those thousand papers if they're related in some way they will have a limited number of common concepts that run through them so if you can identify and understand those common concepts then you have a foundation for understanding all of those all of those other ones right or sorry all of the papers if you don't then reading more is not going to help especially because generally speaking academic papers are not written to teach right they're written with the assumption that you already have those that shared shared kind of common knowledge so by spending time focused on the on the shared concept on the fundamentals once you've got that then you can accelerate then you can add more papers right because you've got the foundation to do it okay in addition to common concepts they're also common techniques it's the same kind of idea and then you also have major breakthroughs so again if we take this random selection of say a thousand papers the majority of them are not going to be that important okay in the sense that they won't have had much influence on the field okay collectively they're important but individually they might not have had that much influence but there might be a handful like one or two or three which have fundamentally changed the way that everybody thinks about that kind of problem okay so what happens is every so often you have a new discovery a new theory and your invention that changes the way that we approach things fundamentally then this kind of sends these shock waves throughout the literature right and other people respond to it taking those new innovations and then applying them to special cases or testing little details ironing out the kinks right so that incremental work is essential but in order to understand it you need to understand the breakthrough initially it gives you a foundation for understanding everything else everything else that followed okay in addition to that um you also need to understand the current current trends in the literature what are the kinds of things that people are doing what are the kinds of things that people are working on so you get this kind of context which maybe doesn't need to be as detailed but once you sort of know the landscape then if you decide okay i really need to sharpen up my knowledge of the literature in this particular area if you've got these four aspects you can then do that really quickly you can go through a hundred papers and get a sense of okay this is really important this is really important but you can't do that without the foundation okay so you need to slow down identify these component parts work on them until you've mastered them then you can speed up right don't worry about the speed of reading first because all you're going to do is stress yourself out there's one other thing that you need to know that doesn't fit into these into these categories and that's basically anything which is directly relevant to your research so kind of your direct competition so there might be papers which are which are really crucial to you but they're not major breakthroughs okay um so anything which is kind of they're doing something similar but in a different context you really really need to know those you need to know those papers as well okay um so they don't necessarily serve as a foundation for everything else but they're very very relevant for you okay so when you break the literature down in this way it becomes a lot a lot easier to do but you've got to back off from the edge you've got to slow down in order to do it okay uh taking the same idea and applying it to your basic research skills so one of the problems that people often face is they want to get results immediately okay because you start a phd you want to impress your supervisor you want to get good results you want to do world-class world-changing research and so that's what you do you aim high right but if you focus on results before skills then all you're going to be is frustrated so your initial goal is to just get really really really good at the techniques that you're doing and develop robust and reliable processes which you could then apply to interesting problems now it's just a matter of finding something interesting to work on and and doing it diligently so how you develop those skills it's not just practice what you have to do is break down the process and practice test refine and repeat every individual part so if for example if you're doing say some kind of um massive survey right um some some kind of quantitative research and you go out and you get you know 10 000 responses right so you guys huge amount of data okay if you do that on that large scale the results that you get are going to be limited by the quality of the processes that you follow and if you start with that massive data set it's going to be incredibly hard to find any problems right if this if something goes wrong how do you even how do you even find it so what you need to do is start on a small scale identify every single step practice it test it and refine it until you're really really really good then you can go out and get you know your your your data set of 10 000 10 000 people having gone through that having gone through that process so when you break it down into individual component parts you will face problems you will face difficulties okay it could be something as simple as you know if you have a survey and um you know one of the questions is ambiguous right that can be quite a tricky problem to solve you know take some take some thought but if you slow down narrow your focus and stay with it it becomes solvable relative relatively easily if you don't do that then you're always going to be limited on that larger scale by those by those smaller things okay so slow down focus on the component parts and you will go faster in the long run okay so it's difficult to do it takes time but you know you know you're not here to avoid difficulty right but we want to make sure that these difficulties that you face are actually actually solvable um this is the way to do it there's one more piece to this which is to ask for help so i'm saying that you need to be really good at every part of the process because any weakness in the chain is going to affect the whole but you don't have to be brilliant at everything you know everybody has certain strengths and weaknesses and one of the reasons why universities or organizations like insight exist is to bring together people with different expertise different strengths different skills and so it's really important to get to know other people and what they do so when you're facing a problem and you know that person down the corridor that person that i met at the conference in galway who's working on this thing you can ask them right and usually people are pretty happy to be approached as an expert and and asked how to how to do things okay so collaboration is really really crucial and building up a network where you can call on people is also also an essential skill you don't have to do it all on your own this is another thing that kind of relates to the way the education system is set up you know from an early age in school you're told that copying from your neighbor or asking your neighbor what the answer is is cheating right we need to let go of that and think well okay that person knows let's just ask them you know you don't have to do it all on your own it's not an entirely individual pursuit okay so let's say you do all this perfectly you really take on board all of these all of these principles things are still going to go wrong it's the nature of research that you're trying things which haven't been done before and you know you're pushing up against not only your own limits but the limits of what anybody anybody knows in some cases and if you're doing something ambitious things will go wrong right how you respond to that is crucial right you can never plan everything perfectly that no mistakes happen so how you respond when things go wrong is crucial in my case in my phd i didn't handle this well so just to go back to my own to my own story a little bit so i was working on an instrument development project it was this kind of machine that was supposed to combine all of these different all of these different techniques and various phd students had worked on it over a course of several years so there was this kind of frankenstein's monster of a of a machine which wasn't very reliable and i my job was basically to try and to try and to try and get it working and so it broke down constantly right it was not just kind of it wasn't just kind of like the the final experiments it was like the basic functioning of the machine you know the basic things just didn't work most of the time so it's incredibly frustrating and incredibly slow progress and in some cases i would go into work in the morning i would break something and so my productivity was negative i would have been better off not going into work because i'd be like two or three days behind as a result of what of of what i'd done and i developed this habit when these things went wrong of checking email as a way of kind of avoiding the problem you know checking email was kind of like an anesthetic that was easily justifiable to sort of avoid avoid the problem but then there was one day when i was i was working in the lab i was working with these optical fibers and anyone who's worked with optical fibers before knows that you know one of the useful things about them is they're flexible right you take these glass fibers and because of the plastic coating you can bend them around corners what i had to do for reasons i won't go into is remove the plastic coating from these fibers which would leave a strand of glass maybe two inches long about the thickness of a human hair so they were obviously incredibly incredibly fragile and there are various processing processing steps so things would break so i'd make them in batches and hopefully some of them would survive long enough it was about a two or three day process to prepare these things so i was near the end of this process i had this batch that i've been working on for a couple of days i was moving them from one part of the lab to the other and i dropped them and as far as i know those fibers are still on the floor of that lab because impossible to ever find once they go and typically my response would have been to check email to find a way of avoiding the problem you know just as a break right but that time not only did i break the fibers but something something inside me broke as well and i swore loudly stormed out of the lab stormed out of the building because i just had enough nothing was working i was i was putting in so many hours and it just didn't seem to matter what i did i wasn't making progress so what was the point so i walked across campus not knowing where i was going not knowing if even if i was going to go back found a bench next to the lake um really nice spot sat down just to just to think i thought i i can't take this anymore you know why am i doing this why am i putting myself through this you know it's just not gonna work why keep going and i thought about it for a little while and i thought well okay if i quit it's not gonna be great but it's you know my day-to-day life isn't great anyway i'm super stressed i would have to explain to my supervisor but he would he would understand i think he's seen what i've been going through i'd have to explain to my family to my friends and people would be disappointed but they'd be okay i thought well okay i need to find a job well you know i'll find something i'll survive i'll be okay you know it's not the worst thing that can happen so i thought well actually you know quitting it's not as bad not as bad as maybe i maybe i thought but then i thought well okay there's still a couple of things i can try with the experiments so why don't i try those things and then if they don't work then i'll quit and i'll be okay with that i just want to give it one last shot make sure i've didn't done everything i can but if i'm gonna try those things and that's going to decide whether or not i'll stay i need to be sure that i've absolutely given it my best shot and i knew that i'd been kind of rushing things i knew that i've been kind of undermining myself in some ways so i decided i'm going to just do this as carefully as i possibly can i'm going to be absolutely meticulous in every single step of this process so i kind of calmed myself i went back to the lab cleaned up started again and just did everything really really slowly with ridiculous attention to detail i did it as slowly as i possibly could and things started to work i thought now i can't quit so but it taught me something that you know i've been so pressured to get results i've been so focused on getting results that i was undermining myself right i was so worried about the end result that i was making failure more likely and all i needed to do was slow down and that was it so you know things started to turn around i kept up this habit i slowed down i did things carefully i got a couple of publications which was enough to write write up my thesis and then wrote my thesis in just three months and passed my viva with with zero corrections so the turnaround from being on the verge of quitting forever to that was remarkable there were three basic things that i changed so first of all as i said i focused on just doing each component part as carefully as possible not trying to go fast not trying to worry about the about the end result just doing each part as carefully as i could second i stopped checking email whenever when whenever things went wrong and then later when i started writing my thesis i got rid of my internet connection completely just a quick question actually how many people check email before getting out of bed every day there's always like this slow ripple of honesty that goes through the audience how many people have checked email while i've been speaking [Laughter] it's okay i'm not offended okay so here's the thing email is so easy and so easily justifiable and it's kind of the default that we go to it's the default habit that we do without thinking whenever there's a moment of discomfort and the problem is it then leads into distraction because you've got other people's information coming in and then you forget what you were doing right you forget why you even checked email in the first place there might not have even been a reason there might not have been a conscious thought it just happened right and the thing is that when you're in when you're doing research you're going to face those moments of discomfort where you don't know what to do and if the first thing you do if your first instinct the first instinct when you wake up is to check email that's what you're going to do when you face a problem in your research and then you have no chance because you're not focusing on the problem in front of you and you know there's no way you can solve it so that was another key absolutely key thing um not having the internet while i was writing meant that if i faced any kind of block i could just stay with it instead of reaching reaching for email that was a real really crucial thing and finally i stopped worrying about the end results not just individual experiments but i stopped caring what the examiners thought so you know i mentioned i wasn't the best student as an undergraduate so there were gaps in my knowledge there were some quite big and embarrassing gaps in my knowledge as a physicist which i'd never never gone back and addressed and i always worried throughout my phd what if the examiner you know asks me some basic undergraduate physics thing that i can't answer right i was always worried about that what if they asked me something that you know that that's um what if they point out some some mistake in my research um you know even if it's not that fundamental and i just decided to stop caring about that and focus on what i could control right and that kind of took the pressure off and i could just do what i did and that came across in the writing is much more confident and then the examiners really liked it in the end so by not worrying about it i actually made it um by not worrying about failure i made failure less likely so this brings me to the point of confidence which i think is crucial confidence doesn't come from knowing exactly how things will work out when you're doing research you never know the answer unless you're doing like something really boring right if you're doing exciting important work you don't know if it's gonna work so you can't base your confidence on that you can't base your confidence on being certain that you're going to pass your phd confidence comes from accepting the risk and doing it anyway giving it your best shot and saying you know what i don't know what the examiner is going to think but i can cope with whatever happens right i might fail my phd but i can i can deal with that it's not going to be the worst thing that happens and that just frees you up to do the kind of work that you need to do okay okay so we'll get into the into the q a and we can dive a little bit deeper into any of these concepts or or cover any of the things that i haven't haven't already covered but i just want to finish one final tip so i've mentioned the importance of asking for help knowing what other people are doing this builds on on the points that professor o'connor made made earlier about networking key to networking is to not worry about yourself and what you do but just be interested in what other people do if you want people to be interested in you be interested in them and they will naturally naturally start asking questions okay it's it's i was going to make this point about the about the um professional network but it's already already been made both of my postdoc contracts came about through people i knew okay i applied for stuff that was that was advertised um but everything came through came through people i knew um that is probably just as important as all the skills you develop is the network that you that you build so i'll finish on that on that note and we'll get into the into the q a these are some typical things that come up pretty often but you can ask me about about anything else anything else as well so that's it from me any questions [Applause] [Music] as well sure so what should be students be requesting acquiring demanding for supervisors i ask in the knowledge of some of my own team or in the audience okay okay i think i think the first thing to say is that supervisors are in a really difficult position because just like phd students get to be phd students by being really good at undergraduate level supervisors become supervisors by being generally speaking good at research nobody teaches them how to supervise you maybe have i mean how much training do you have like an afternoon if you're lucky right and so you you're put in this position where you're responsible for this big chunk of these people's lives and some people do it well some people do it badly and that makes them it makes a huge huge huge difference [Music] what um my general tip for phd students is be really careful about who you work with in the first place um because the basic attitude of the supervisor can be quite different some people um i was very lucky in terms of my supervisor because he was very much a facilitator right his job was to was to help me achieve the standard or help his students achieve their standard and he would do anything you know to help out other supervisors see themselves as kind of a barrier like you have to meet my standard before i'll even speak to you in some cases um so that choice of supervisor is on the choice i'll make this a more general point the choice of who you work with at any stage of your career is probably more important than what you do um you know so choose someone you you can work with um as but you know for a lot of people you know you're already with somebody so you know it might be too late in terms of what you should what you should ask for i think the first thing is to be open about what you don't know because a lot of students will have this kind of imposter syndrome right so you know what you don't know and you don't want to show it you want to show you want to impress your supervisor and so a lot of students are very reluctant to say that they're to say that they're struggling so that would be that would be one thing the other thing would be to try to get feedback as early in the process as possible so in some cases i'll use writing as a writing as an example it applies to research as well in some cases what happens is the supervisor will give feedback on the thesis once there's an entire draft either of a chapter or or or the whole thesis when you've got an entire draft it's very hard to make any adjustment to the basic writing skill right so this is like i'll go back to the weightlifting analogy you know you're lifting as much as you possibly can and then somebody says oh adjust this but you're already under too much load right there's just too much to take in right if you look at a short piece of writing you know and in some cases it could be a page right you know if you've read a lot of academic work you know if it's on the right track or not and you know that um people tend to be fairly consistent because if the first page is bad the rest of it is going to be bad so if you can identify what they need to change on a small section of writing and teach them the principle behind it and often it will be things like you're just trying to communicate too much i don't know what you're trying to say simplify it right you teach them that principle then they can apply it to the next 10 pages and then they can apply to the next hundred right so so it's getting feedback as early in in the cycle as possible it saves work for the supervisor as well because you don't have 200 pages to correct um and same same idea applies with research you know so test it on a small scale get feedback um and definitely don't let your defense be the first time you get feedback because that's a recipe for the disaster hi thanks so much for your talk you mentioned the imposter syndrome which i think is okay so if you think about what an imposter is an impostor is somebody who is pretending to be something else right and so if you feel like an imposter you try and and it's basically because you feel like you don't have the knowledge or the skill or you don't deserve to be there then as an imposter you try to hide it right so you try to you try to show how good you are or you just avoid getting feedback right and so it means that when you face some kind of problem you don't ask anybody because that means admitting that you don't know that thing right so when i was a phd student and i was i was kind of thinking oh what if somebody find finds out what if somebody asked me to recite the laws of thermo thermodynamics which is like first year undergraduate physics and you know like i could kind of muddle my with my my way through but it's kind of kind of embarrassing right if i hide that then i don't fix it instead what i could have done and say you know what i've kind of forgotten a lot of stuff do you mind if i sit in on one of these first year first year lectures and i guarantee my supervisor would have loved that right you know because it's a great attitude to have um so it's it's really just being being being open about it and and addressing addressing those problems if you see a weakness go and go and ask for help that is that is really it um there might still be a psychological barrier to it but it means that you know if you out yourself it means that nobody nobody can find you out right so you completely avoid that problem so i i like in academia one of the keys that you've mentioned is don't focus so much on the results and focus on the process and developing your skills but uh in a way the way our coding is being structured at least now i feel is my thoughts we are guided towards these results that we hear about these in results science especially we need to be publishing papers and it's so kind of in a way every two or three months or something people are just publishing publishing and there's obviously this pressure so it's a question so my question would be it's a it's a fundamental thing in academia that might be a problem and that's why we're getting phds with all this distress because that's how i think [Music] yeah so you do of course of course you need the end result right that needs to be there so i gave the example of like world-class marathon runners right they still have to go out and do the do the competition of course right um so you and you and i also said you need to produce work of a publishable of a publishable standard and you will have heard the phrase publish publish or perish right it's fundamental right if you don't publish you're going to be out of a job pretty pretty soon right the question is how you get to that publication so if your focus is just on i need to have this publication in three months like no matter what and you take the easiest route to that publication then you can probably find something that hasn't been done before and you can get it in a journal but is it really worthwhile interesting work okay and the problem then that you have is you're then competing against everybody else who's just trying to churn out papers as fast as possible without doing interesting work so you can't differentiate yourself in that way right so when it comes to review maybe you've got 100 papers but somebody else has got 150. it's like i need another 100 and i need another 50. that's not why we're doing this we're doing this to actually make some kind of difference and make some make some good discoveries so it's finding that balance of yes you need to publish but you also need to find difficult worthwhile problems to to to work on so what i would say is is take the pressure off a little bit in terms of that end result and try and find try and find an interesting problem and then break it down and focus on the component parts and what you probably find is one of those component parts maybe that has a spin-off publication because you find an interesting way to do something right so the um so often in these big discoveries it'll be some step in the process which is kind of which is kind of key and then you know you get a publication of that and then you know you then also get you know the big publication of something which is um something which is potentially game changing right if you look at any of the kind of um nobel prize winners um um my favorite example is always richard feynman um because you know because i'm a physicist um now he's known for all sorts of all sorts of different things but some of the things that he used to do would be like go back to basic algebra and re-prove why why one plus one equals two right so as like probably the best physicist of the latter of the 20th century right so he was doing that stuff on a on a basic level but also doing this amazing kind of world-changing world-changing result research at the same time and he published you know tons and tons and tons of papers um so it's it's it's having that balance of you know backing you know backing off from that need to just produce produce produce produce um but then what you find is that by doing that and focusing on these on these smaller steps right you actually produce more and better work anyway um one book that i would recommend reading um is deep work by cal newport um he's a he's a computer scientist um and he also talks about ways of of generating more higher quality papers as well um i just read it a couple of weeks ago it's it's excellent so i reckon i'd recommend that okay okay so it's just a small question i know you said you won't talk a lot about academic party sure phd student and as far as the talk with other people finishing their phd there's kind of two approaches for writing pieces which may be challenging i don't start writing from the first year small pieces and then gather it all together or just wait till the third year and then start rushing right so i couldn't make my mind which one would be the best is there an approach or is it depends on the person i think to some extent it depends it depends on the person i think there is some value to practicing writing early but specifically seeing it as practice and not trying to write entire thesis chapters i know there are some people who say well if you write a chapter per semester then you know after a couple years a year you have your full thesis i've never seen that work um because for example if you write a literature review in your first year by the time you reach your final year you should be able to write a much better literature review so you're going to have to rewrite it anyway but what it depends upon is basic writing skill so if you if you try and write everything at the end and you don't know how to construct a a coherent argument then it's going to be incredibly stressful but the same applies if you start in your first year and you just start writing bits you know practice isn't enough you need to know the principles of principles of structure right so at whatever point you start you need to have you need to have that skill [Music] i'll give you one principle because i know we don't we don't have much time um which i think makes a massive massive difference to writing i'll give you two i'll give you two um first of all um narrow the scope so one of the big problems people have with writing is they just know too much about their particular subject and then they're trying to show the examiner how much they know right you've got to abandon that way of thinking and try and focus on a limited number of ideas select from your body of knowledge what you want to what you want to communicate um the more you try and cram in the the more confusing it gets right it becomes counterproductive so you've got to select so then what you can do is start practicing writing with with a fairly simple concept you focus on one concept right one idea one theory or one technique that you want to write about then there's a structure that you can follow that works for pretty much anything and that is to start with a situation then describe a problem and then you can describe either a solution or different ways people have approached the problem so let's say you're writing about a it could be a theory or it could be a technique and before the invention of that technique or before the development of that theory there was a problem that existed so how do we measure x right and that problem was important because measuring x is necessary in order to do some other things then you can say um [Music] then you can present a solution right so in 1973 this person developed this technique where the key insight was this so the the description of the technique fits into the context of that original problem it's a response to that original problem then that technique it has some kind of effect on the field right so i mentioned before about that you have these groundbreaking discoveries and then you have incremental work that follows so that technique you could say um this then spawned a number of different variations ranging from this to this to this or you could say this then became the standard technique for doing this until the development of some other technique right or you could say this became the standard technique however there was a problem in that it was limited to these circumstances so there we have a situation a problem that a um you know a situation a problem which is like how do we measure this thing we have a response to it but then there's another problem that comes along and then another technique maybe responds to that problem so everything is framed as a response to whatever came whatever came before and then you have a narrative okay it could also be in terms of a theory someone proposes this theory um but then other people respond and say well hang on there's a problem with this and then something else develops and you get it you get a debate right so if you can think of things in terms of situations or problems that arise from situations and then responses that can kind of structure your structure your writing and then you have this kind of scaffold to hang the ideas off and if you can do that then you can write about anything but it takes practice okay okay we've got time for one more sure what i see a lot it's just like i was just like phd needs to be all only my work like no one should be around it either because people will steal it or just because like they should not help me otherwise it cannot be my thesis so what you see like people actually isolate themselves yeah yeah that issue of you know maybe someone or someone will steal my work i mean it it happens you know i've known i've i've known it happened to people um and it's horrible right and and it's really it's really scary [Music] but it doesn't happen that often it's not the default and the greater risk is you just isolate yourself to such an extent that first of all you know isolation is horrible and you get really lonely and it's a long time to spend just on your own and it's you know why put yourself through that but also you miss out on so many opportunities to make your work better so maybe nobody steals your work but your work isn't worth stealing anyway because you've done it on your own so in my case i was again i was really lucky and that you know being an experimental physicist you know you can't do it at home and they won't leave you alone because the equipment might cost half a million half a million euros and you know they're not going to let you do it unless you know they kind of know what you're doing right so so it just wasn't an option to completely isolate yourself so so and also there was kind of um quite a sociable atmosphere so there was coffee breaks every day and you know everybody basically knew what everyone else was working working on at least within our research group i think there could have been more between research groups certainly but at least within our research group it was it was pretty good and that not only made it a nicer place to work but it also meant that i found out about things that i never would have looked for right so you know people working on these all sorts of obscure things you just hear about stuff and then you never know what how that's going to be relevant later on um there's one guy who's working on this kind of computer modeling which seemed to be completely removed from from what i did but actually in my final year i ended up using some of his code because i discovered something that was that was sort of sort of related um so so you know my phd was much better as a as a as a result um also in terms of my knowledge of the of the literature um there were things that i never would have again never would have searched for and there were also times when people would say oh i heard you i know you're working on this i just found this paper you know it might be it might be relevant right all kinds of sort of unintended unintended things so yes it is a risk that some people might steal some of your work or steal the idea um but i think it's a greater risk to to completely completely isolate isolate yourself i think it depends very much on the on the on the context so if you meet somebody at a conference for the first time and they seem a little bit too interested you know maybe back off but generally speaking you know i would say you know talk about you know talk about what you're doing most people aren't going to steal it because they've got enough and they've got enough on their on their on their plate um [Music] and also you know if you're if you're if you're good then if someone if you just say hey i'm working on this you know if you've been working on it for three years and they can publish faster than you in three months you know there's a there's a problem there right so just get rid get really good at what you do be open with people and it shouldn't be too much of a problem um i'll add one more thing let's say somebody does steal your idea and they scoop you if you've got a solid set of research skills which you've built up it's not that difficult to switch and find something else um you know you can um in the final stages of your phd if you're good you know you can say okay fine i've been scooped let's go in this direction and if you've got the skills you can you can do something you can do things relatively relatively quickly the skills your safety net not isolation sure so i can't hear you very well because the microphone's not not working and maybe maybe swap mics and then you might you know so in terms of how the group can help individual individual students now it's a really it's a really really good question because it depends so much on the group on the group dynamics i think that's one simple thing is just um having time where people are just talking right um in as i mentioned in my own research group there were coffee breaks well this is in was in the whole physics department there were coffee breaks every day but people would just people would just talk so that avoided that kind of that kind of issue issue of isolation um doesn't necessarily deal with all of the stress but i think that's i think that's a crucial a crucial part of it um just having some kind of um some kind of inter interaction um when i did my first um postdoc contract in france my boss wouldn't let me go start work until we'd had a coffee together right so we were discussing stuff all that's all all the time um and that was that was um really really important and also um everybody in the research group went for lunch together right and nobody ever ate lunch at their at their at their desks um and that social interaction that that communication i think was i think was was was really key um it's difficult to change a group dynamic though if you're already if you're already in it you can't be responsible for what other people what other people do um so often a lot of the responsibility for managing the stress will come down will come down on on the individual so there are various things that you can that you can do i'd say initially to take the edge off the stress um it's really just slowing you know initially slowing down and i would say giving yourself a little bit of time and space to think in my case um towards the end of my phd what i was doing was when i when i hit a problem instead of checking email i would just take a walk to give myself time to time to think and i would just go back when i was when i was ready so the stress level would come down and then i was but i was still engaged engaged with the with the problem um so that that habit worked quite work quite well um there are other things you can do like meditation to take the stress off but if you're not addressing the things you do in your work then that's not really going not really going to to help that much you know you'll feel good for 10 minutes and then you know you go you go straight back straight back into it so it's an interesting question about what the what the group can do i probably need to think about it a little bit more um but i would say i would say just that group interaction where people are talking and doing that on a daily on a daily basis and then going and you know then going back to your work i think if i was going to say one thing it would probably probably be that but i might have a different answer if i think about it a little bit more [Music] would you like to speak further on the importance of other things during your phd you tend to do your phd in the vacuum and i don't remind you mine i've read a lot i have papers and i forgot to read novels and do things that i used to always do when i was younger like read books and go to the cinema you know just take time out to be yourself and i think you you can forget to do that during your phd it's really important to do that because thinking in other ways helps you to think within your phd as well yeah absolutely um yeah i think i think to some extent you've you've answered your own question um i absolutely agree that you need that you need that downtime um if you're constantly pushing pushing pushing working harder harder harder harder harder then it ends up being counter being counterproductive you know when people don't know what to do or what to change in their process the most obvious thing is just to work more but there's a limit to what you can what you can do with that but then people push on that limit and start having less sleep and as soon as you start doing that then everything falls apart because sleep is like really really fundamental um [Music] so i would say in order for that stuff to compete with the phd it needs to come first so if you treat it like oh i'll do that if i get enough work done you know i'll i'll you know go out for dinner with a friend or i'll do exercise or you know cook myself a healthy meal or whatever you know if that depends on getting enough done work done first it'll always be pushed out of the way because there's always more work that you could that you could do um so in order for that stuff to compete it has to be like absolutely ring fenced you know i do this right this is a fixed part of my routine and the phd fits fits around it in my case um so i i used to be a competitive martial artist and i was actually teaching at the um at the university club so i had that commitment three times a week i was teaching and then i was i was doing my own training like competing and stuff at the weekends and i found that as soon as i stepped on the mat i stopped thinking about the phd and that was really really crucial to have something else it's not just important to it it kind of gives the brain a little bit of a break and sometimes when you're doing other things that's when you solve problems so it's not only useful for that but also just on a personal level it means that you know if your phd goes horribly wrong you know let's say it goes as badly as you can imagine right and you just you just fail you've still got other things in your life right you've got those social connections to fall back on right if all you've got is your phd for four years and then that goes wrong that's a really bad place to be so yeah yeah i absolutely agree that stuff needs to be in there and it needs to be it needs to be the first thing that goes in your timetable and it needs to be done like no matter what it's a commitment commitment to do that um even if it's just like a yoga class once a week or something it needs to be in there and it's it's non-negotiable anymore thank you

Channel: James Hayton PhD

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Id: VrMwAOtB9S4

Length: 69min 14sec (4154 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 17 2021