As a Ph.D. student, you very often have to present what your research is about. Maybe you want to get quick feedback from a visiting professor. Or you need to give a talk at a conference or doctoral consortium. In this post, I go over a technique adapted from a large US research lab I once visited. I will walk you through its simple four- (or five-)part structure, including real examples from my own work.

One would think that research, as the pursuit of new knowledge, is mostly based upon curiosity. However, the daily grind of research life can erode that sense of excitement students have about delving into the unknown. In this post, I explore the role of curiosity in doctoral studies, and look at a few practices and tricks to keep the flame of curiosity alight (without burning the village!).

The to-do list is an essential staple of an organized, reliable doctoral student (or academic). Yet, have you ever looked at your task list and felt anxious, certain that you have too much to do and too little time? In this post, I review several routines that have helped me overcome this ubiquitous feeling. I have been working (in the industry and in academia) for about twenty years now. Yet, periodically, I look at my to-do list, or at the list of “projects I’m doing”, and I feel my heart rate rise.

This time I would like to turn the mike over to you, PhD students, and let you tell me what you want to hear about in this blog (I will do a separate one for supervisors and supervision later on). What would you like to know about doing a Ph.D., or being a (happier, more productive) PhD student?

In last week’s post, we established that dropping out of a Ph.D. (or thinking about it) is surprisingly common, and we saw demographic and socio-economic factors that seem related to doctoral attrition. In this post, I dive into another strand of research that relates doctoral dropout with a general theory of human motivation: self-determination theory. This research helps explain why you may persist and finish your doctorate (and even have fun doing it), despite having such socio-economic factors playing against you. Or vice-versa. The post also gleans practical advice from the literature on doctoral attrition, in the hope of helping students and supervisors avoid this common pitfall.

Aside from the fact that doing a Ph.D. seems to put you at a greater risk of being anxious or depressed than other occupations, some students may also face the question: will I ever finish my thesis at all? This post digs into research about doctoral attrition and completion, and what factors seem to make dropping out more likely. Do not give up!… unless you really want to.

The writing of a paper (or the dissertation itself) is often a long process, along which many decisions are made: should I send my ideas for feedback now, or generate more polished text? should I think of the target journal now or decide once I have the finished draft? et cetera. To finish this mini-series of posts on writing (why writing papers is hard, how I write papers, and the second part of that writing process), I review here the main principles and lessons that I have learned after more than 10 years of writing scientific papers. I hope they help you navigate these decisions if you are in doubt, or if you have to step out of the usual writing process due to unexpected events.

Writing a paper is one of the hardest, but most creative parts of a Ph.D. Very often, we do not know where to start, what to do at what point, or when to get feedback from our collaborators. In a previous post, I started describing in detail the process I normally follow to write my scientific papers. This post explains the rest of the process, from the outlining until you send your manuscript off to the journal/conference. One would think that this is straightforward, just scribbling and scribbling, right?

There is plenty of advice out there on how to write academic publications, from general stylistic tips to field-specific guides. Yet, I’ve found most of that advice tends to be abstract, or focused on the final product, never giving you a step-by-step account of the process. In this post, I share the writing process I find myself using after 70+ academic publications. This will give you an idea of where to start writing your paper (especially if you have never written one), and it will show you that all polished papers have humble (even crappy) origins. Kill perfectionism, and the dreaded “academic writer’s block” will eventually disappear.

Writing (papers or the dissertation itself) is one of the activities that many doctoral students hate the most. Why is this act of communication so difficult for us? As a prelude to my post on “how I write papers”, I expose some misconceptions we seem to have about scientific writing and what are good ways to learn it.

As a follow-up to the first post in this blog, I dig a little deeper in some of the research on anxiety and depression during doctoral studies, to find “risk factors” and “correlates” that seem to often come along these depressive symptoms. I hope that the awareness of these factors (from gender to other things you can actually change in your everyday life) will help you understand why some people struggle doing a PhD, while for others it seems a piece of cake. Change what you do and put the odds on your side!

Initially, I thought that I was doing this to help the PhD students around me (and others like them elsewhere) to pass through the dissertation process more effectively, with less stress. But at some point, I realized that other, more selfish, reasons were playing out as well. In this personal account I reflect on a chronic problem of academics and Ph.D. students alike, and how I face it through this blog.