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10 ways to make your PhD experience easier and more enjoyable

After two and a half years at work on my PhD, Ive had my share of lessons and revelations. Whether you are
considering a PhD, or feel like you could get more from your program, here are a few tips. While some of them may
seem obvious, its easy to overlook them while caught up in the daily grind.

1. PhD work doesnt have to be isolating if you give yourself a voice.

After permanently joining a lab, I realized that the laboratory atmosphere can seem rather isolating sometimes. There
are days when Im working in the lab for many hours without saying more than a hello to other graduate students. Or I
might be focused on getting a computer simulation up and running and completely forget that there are others around
me. Everyone has their own projects to get done, and sometimes I feel as though everyone is in their own little world.
Especially if you arent collaborating with anyone on a project, you get the feeling that you are on your own to succeed
or fail.
However, despite this feeling, you are never really alone. Although you (hopefully) have the largest say on what you
want to do in your research, your advisor, professors, post-docs and fellow graduate students are available to bounce
ideas off of and give their own advice. Beyond that, people are often looking for collaborators to play off each others
strengths. Someone might be an expert in preparing a sample and another in characterizing it. Another person might
be able to run a simulation to test what conditions you should use to optimize your experiment. But you have to take
the initiative and cannot expect others to know if you want help or guidance. Talk to your lab-mates, send emails to
others working on related projects, and schedule meetings with a plan of what you want to discuss. Graduate school
will only seem isolating if you isolate yourself.

2. Know your areas of strength and weakness; you may already be the most
knowledgeable about topic X in your lab group.
When you join a lab, you might assume that everyone else must be more knowledgeable about every topic in your
field after all, theyve been working for at least a year more than you. This assumption about scientific and research
knowledge couldnt be further from the truth. Of course, your lab-mates will know more about the projects they work
on every day. But any given research area is expansive, and any one persons research must inevitably be fairly
narrow. Your lab mates cannot possibly know everything. Your research project will have its own set of challenges
some will overlap with your lab-mates challenges, but some might be completely new. You will have to spend some
time on your own trying to solve them. After all, getting a PhD means becoming an expert in your specific area of
research.
Most of the graduate students and postdocs that have been part of my lab have physics and electrical engineering
backgrounds. The experiments we do, however, involve many chemical procedures. I remember asking chemistry
questions to a fellow lab-mate one time. He stated that chemistry wasnt really his area, and all he had to go on was
the procedure that had been done previously in related experiments. It was then that I realized my five semesters of
chemistry as an undergraduate placed me in a more knowledgeable position than many others. As a result, I am very
thankful that my undergraduate institution allowed me to take a variety of science (and non-science) courses. Given
the interdisciplinary nature of most research these days, knowledge of a breadth of scientific topics is extremely
beneficial.

3. Know which environments strengthen your focus and which distract you.
Getting work done in the lab with others around can be extremely difficult for some, like myself, while others are only
productive if they surround themselves with people working. If you are easily distracted, work at different hours from
your lab-mates, especially if you need to work in your office. Though I sometimes find it difficult to do so, if I can get to
the lab at 8 am or even earlier, I will get a lot done before anyone else even arrives. One of the benefits of working in
the context of a PhD is that your hours tend to be very flexible; use this to your advantage, as the chances of having
such an opportunity in a permanent job are unlikely. Also, people use laboratory equipment less at odd hours, so you
can often get work done in half the time as is typical. Remember: Strive to work efficiently instead of just working long
hours.

4. Take the right courses to complement your research.

While completing homework, exams, papers and projects was your primary job during your undergraduate education,
coursework is a means to an end in a PhD program. There are a few required courses but lots of flexibility for the
other ones, depending on the program. In retrospect, I should have taken more courses that would have directly
helped me with my research. Instead, I took a number of courses where the materials overlapped significantly, and
therefore gained only one course worth of knowledge from taking two or three courses.
Make sure your courses complement the research you plan to work on. Talk to graduate students who took the course
previously and find out which professor they had. More than anything else, the professor will dictate which topics are
covered and at what pace. What is their area of expertise? Do they work on experiment or theory primarily? This could
be an opportunity to get to know a professor working on similar research topics. Lastly, its impossible to master all the
material presented in a course in one semester. Focus on what gives you the most benefit and do not worry about the
remainder too much.

5. Regularly look through journal articles in your field for ideas and inspiration.
When figuring out how to start a new project or troubleshoot a problem, the first thing you will probably do after initial
consideration is to discuss the issue with your advisor or a fellow graduate student. Yet, dont expect them to have all

the answers, or even any answers.

There are so many journals out there (and they are ever multiplying), and you cannot expect your advisor, professors,
postdocs or other graduate students to know everything dozens of new articles relevant to your field might come out
every year. First, figure out which journals are likely to have the most relevant research to you and organize them,
whether via bookmarks or a content aggregator. (I use Mendeley.) Pick a time every week to skim through the
headlines to see if anything is worth a closer look. Also, when reading any journal article, dont assume everything
written is correct or appropriate for your own work. See if what the researchers propose seems reasonable, especially
based on your own experience.

6. You will make seemingly silly mistakes but they are part of the learning curve.
Just recently I was trying to etch a pattern of square pillars on a diamond sample, and due to a misunderstanding, I
thought I had cracked a layer of masking material necessary to make the pattern. I was back to square one. But after
talking to a former graduate student about my problem, I realized that I was looking at a residual chemical on my
surface and not cracks. Another time, I naively exposed a photo-sensitive compound to the wrong type of light by
placing it under a microscope without a filter. In yet another instance, I tried to remove a sample from a piece of tape
with tweezers and scratched off a coating I had previously layered on back to the beginning.
When you start working in the lab, even if you have prior experience, you will inevitably be learning (or even
developing) new techniques, simulations or programming code as part of your work. Expect to make seemingly silly
mistakes and often. If you dont have a thick skin, you should develop one soon, whether in trying to make a
pattern on a sample or debugging code. Research is a marathon, not a sprint. If you get frustrated at every little thing,
youll want to give up after a month. Even after two and a half years, if I am learning something new, my first instinct is
to throw up my hands and give up. But then I take a deep breath, write down notes for next time, and try again.
The first time you do something, it might take a few hours to get everything right. The next time, maybe only an hour
and a half. Then an hour. Eventually, you will have developed muscle memory (or pattern recognition) and an intuition
about what could be causing problems and how to move forward. The learning curve is exponential, and before long,
you will be teaching others your methods (see tip 2). You will make seemingly silly mistakes to start, but fear not. The
only way to learn is to do something repeatedly; you will eventually develop a sixth sense about these things.

7. Observe others doing techniques you need to learn; then try them yourself.
In conjunction with tip 6, if your fellow students do techniques you must learn, ask them if you can follow along and
watch them work, or even do some of the steps yourself. This is a very effective way to learn a technique; simply
being taught how to use a machine will not be that useful as there are many intricacies depending on the material or
technique used.
For example, I work with a lot of fabrication equipment in a cleanroom we must be trained by staff on everything
before being able to use it. But your desired settings might not be what others typically use, or you may discover a
way of using the equipment that gives a new result that will help you out. Once youve watched others perform a
technique a few times, try it yourself. Spend ample time and pay attention as you do each step this will help with
muscle memory and in not forgetting subtleties to the technique. You will make mistakes, but they will exponentially
decrease the more times you perform the technique. It had been months since I used the machine that makes
patterns on my samples. The first time I used it again, I spent about two hours moving knobs to remind myself what
everything did. The second time I used it, I spent maybe an hour. The third time, a half hour.

8. Keep a well-maintained lab notebook.

This one may seem obvious, but you would be surprised how often I hear something along the lines of, Now where
did I write down the parameters to use for this experiment? Keep a dated, detailed and legible lab notebook thats

easy to flip through if you need to remind yourself of something or for preparing to write up an analysis, paper or
dissertation. How much detail is somewhat subjective, but if theres a parameter you could possibly alter in the future
or might just be pertinent information to explain results, write it down. You can never get in trouble for writing too much
information.
As an alternative, some people are now using digital lab notebooks. You can use a tablet with a stylus to write on a
digital page so that its very similar to hard copy, or even use a note-taking program like Evernote that syncs to the
cloud. People will often summarize their data in Powerpoint slides for better visualization. This can allow you to
keyword search or sort notes by date and topic, for example. If you do choose to go digital though, make sure you
backup the information every day to the cloud and a physical backup drive. You never want to be the person who
loses a years worth of data in the blink of an eye. It might also be a good idea to print hard copies of your notes and
put them together in a notebook for future reference.

9. Your research will evolve; dont be afraid to change topics or research groups.
For the first year and a half working in my lab, I was working on plasmonics, trying to develop new methods to use
metal nanostructures to control and manipulate light. But after some difficulty determining a research direction and
attending a big conference in the field, I decided that this research wasnt for me, and I switched to work on diamond.
While this might seem like a rather big change, it turns out that a technique I was using in the plasmonics work was
actually transferrable to the diamond work. In addition, I had been helping an older graduate student with another
project in diamond while still doing my plasmonics work. So the transition ended up being gradual.
The research you work on for 4+ years will inevitably evolve and change. Do not be afraid to move into a different
area of research there may be more overlap than it seems. However, if you have been working on a single area for
at last 2 years and do a very significant change to a completely unrelated topic, expect to be in your program for an
extra year or two, especially if you have to learn new techniques, software or theory. If you truly feel you do not belong
in your current research group, be honest with your advisor about your feelings and whether it may be necessary to
switch groups this will save both you and your advisor a longer-term struggle. I know a good number of fellow
graduate students at Harvard who switched groups after 1, 2 or even 3 years, and though they may take a bit longer
to graduate, they are happy with their new groups and research.

10. Separate work and play and alwaysleave time for (non-PhD) fun.
Its 9pm. You are reading a book or watching a movie. And yet in the back of your head, you cant help but wonder,
Should I be working on that simulation from last week? Or I could be in the lab getting that experiment done. Or
reading that other journal article or textbook. Its hard to get rid of these thoughts, especially if you arent efficient
during your workday (working on code for 10 minutes, then skimming a web comic or blog, etc.). But its thoughts like
these that can make 4 (or more) years of your life miserable.
Separate work and play (though you may consider some parts of your PhD play). Set a schedule that you can actually
keep, work for the hours you plan to, and then put away your work. When you let the two overlap, your work and
happiness suffer. It may be difficult to separate these when you are also taking courses with strict deadlines, forcing
you to work odd hours to get homework done. But once you are doing research full-time, design a schedule for
yourself know what hours you work most efficiently and where (see tip 3). Plan out your time if at all possible to
minimize crunch time deadlines (journal article drafts, conference abstracts, posters, presentations) your work will
improve significantly if you arent panicking at the last minute.
In short, leave time for your hobbies (I do a lot of swing dancing and hiking when its warm enough). This will allow
you to take a step back from your research and approach it from a new angle every week (or even every day).
Leaving time for (non-PhD) fun will turn a seemingly unending struggle into a steady push towards success, with
smaller victories and pleasures along the way!

A PhD comic strip

A good comic strip about the PhD life is Piled High and Deeper (PhD) by Jorge Cham, who has a PhD in mechanical
engineering from Stanford University and was a researcher at Caltech. But dont let your own life become like this
strip, or else run far, far away!

Elsevier Connect Contributor

Andy Greenspon (@andyman344) is a third-year PhD student in Applied Physics in
the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences . Prior to that, he worked in
the Space Research and Exploration group at the Johns Hopkins University Applied
Physics Laboratory (APL) for a year. He grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, and
received a BA in physics from Amherst College.
He currently spends his research time chemically modifying diamond surfaces and
fabricating nanostructures out of diamond in order to alter the optical and magnetic
properties of point defects in these diamonds. Studying these defects can provide a
better understanding of how to create qubits for hypothetical future quantum
information processing, and may find application in magnetic field sensing on the
nanoscale.
His broader interests include science communication and public policy, especially with
regard to saving scientific research funding and promoting a more scientifically
informed public. He would like to help engage the public in a closer examination of scientific claims made by
corporations, politicians and the media.