The PhD life is interesting. You start off in a world knowing very little and are constantly warned about how much harder it will get.
No one really prepares you for how the 1st year of a PhD goes. So let me be the one to give you the low-down, on things you should aim to accomplish in your 1st year.
Disclaimer: PhDs vary greatly by topic and supervisor. You don’t have to do all these things in the 1st year. It’s more of a guide to help you approach the PhD.
1. Organise regular meetings with your supervisor
Your supervisor will truly make or break your PhD experience. One of the ways to make (tehe) full use of your supervisor, is to meet with them often.
You want to make sure you’re aligned on expectations and deliverables, as well as getting regular feedback from your supervisor on your work.
In your first meeting, you should discuss the following:
- What are their preferred methods of communication? Email? Teams?
- Do they prefer in-person meetings or online meetings?
- How do they want you to feedback your work?
- What are their specific goals and plans for your PhD?
- Do they have specific papers for you to start reading?
I encourage setting up weekly or biweekly meetings in your calendar at the same time each week. I do this with my supervisor, and it helps to have that hour block to share what I’ve done and if I need any help.
2. Setup a second brain
I think all forms of being organised as a PhD student (emails, meetings etc) can be distilled to having a second brain.
A second brain is basically a collection of your knowledge organised in some kind of system. This is great in general, but amazing for PhD students, especially when it comes to writing the thesis at the end. Being able to access your knowledge over the past 3 years without having to recall from memory or fight through thousands of Word docs is a major dub.
There’s a few systems that help with building second brains, such as Notion, OneNote or Obsidian.
I’m personally a big fan of Obsidian, and I use it daily for my PhD work. It helps me organise the following:
- Meeting notes
- Research notes
- Daily logs
- Academic paper writing
Below is how I’ve organised my first project into separate files. Obsidian is really great for breaking down academic papers into separate sections.
I originally started my second brain with OneNote and it was great for a bit. I became quite wary of how my data was being stored there, and I didn’t like how hard it was to export the data.
As a tech nerd, I prefer local solutions with open-source file types. Obsidian fitted me perfectly. Obsidian uses Markdown files, which are used widely in GitHub repos etc. It’s great for exporting the data elsewhere.
Other people use Notion, and I love Notion and also tried that but I found Notion quite clunky and annoying to use without heavy customisation.
I recommend experimenting with different platforms and seeing what you like. It’s best to set this up as soon as you can, so that you can focus more on using the tool rather than getting sucked into the customisation side of things (cough Notion cough).
3. Read relevant literature
Reading literature is essential to any researcher’s career journey. For 1st year PhD students, it’s arguably the skill you will spend a lot of time on.
Most PhD students get most of their thesis done in the 2nd and 3rd year, with the 1st year reserved for understanding the domain and finding research gaps. It’s definitely something you want to get good at soon, as it’s fundamental to your PhD progress.
The best places to find papers is on Google Scholar, and controversially, Perplexity.
AI in academic is a grey area, but I find that Perplexity’s Pro Search is great for finding papers on very specific things.
The main approach with reading papers is:
- Start with the abstract
- Then read the methodology
- Then read the conclusion
This may vary depending on what you’re aiming to get from the paper. Sometimes the introduction is useful, other times you want to understand the results.
4. Write your literature review
If there’s only one thing you write in your 1st year, let it be your literature review. It’s arguably the foundational element to your thesis, and it’s so important to get it done sooner rather than later.
One of the biggest things that makes the thesis writing process so draining, is having so much to write in generally, so little time. At my university, they encourage PhD students to get their literature review done in the 1st year, to make the thesis writing process easier.
It also helps you establish yourself in the domain, and it means that you can do step 3 with purpose. It’s a lot easier to read papers when you know you have to write about them later.
The main thing with this is to focus on building a skeletal approach to your PhD. You want to cover the overall topics that form your PhD rather than going too specific in one topic. Focus on building a narrative and finding out the common things papers talk about. You should also aim to address any research gaps that your PhD could solve.
Over the next 2-3 years you will build upon your literature review. The version you write in 1st year isn’t going to be the version you submit at the end. But it will give you a strong springboard.
As I’m writing this post, my literature review is around 4k words, and it’s currently getting comments from my supervisors. It’s mostly cohesive and covers the main elements of my PhD well enough for me to update it every now and then. For context, in a thesis, a literature review can be anything from 8k-10k words. Getting that 4k done now will help so much in 3rd year.
5. Attend a conference
I attended my first academic conference 2 months into my PhD. I was pretty nervous and basically had no research or anything to show.
But I had a really fun time at the conference and got to speak to some amazing people. I learnt more about my domain and got to meet people doing very similar research to me.
In 1st year you probably won’t have a project to share in a conference. But I think it’s still worth attending them and building yourself an identity in academia.
Even if it’s a conference in your university or like a small-seminar sorta thing, it’s worth attending now, whilst stakes are pretty low.
It will feel quite scary. But with practice you will get there and you will feel more confident in conference. It’s generally good to attend a conference before submitting a paper or abstract for one. It can help you know how conferences work and whether you want to become an academic.
6. Document your progress
I briefly mentioned in step 2 that I include daily logs in my second brain. Daily logs is something that I got from a 3rd year PhD student.
Documenting what you do each day can help a lot with tracking your progress, and also noting down any issues you’re facing.
A great example is if you’re working on a coding script, and you encounter a bug and document how you fixed it, future you could run into the same bug and all they have to do, is search through the logs to find how you did it.
I find that I don’t end my work days saying I didn’t do anything, cause I’ve actively written down what I’ve done each day. Even if it was just one task, that one task can be quite important.
It helps to not view the PhD in the number of tasks you complete in a day. Cause realistically, there will be days you do a lot, and days where you do little. The PhD is a marathon, not a sprint.
7. Find achievable research projects
I went into my PhD thinking that I was going to start with a mobile app project. Mobile app development is one of my top skills, so I was pretty confident.
Imagine my shock when my supervisor suggests building a data model. When I first heard this, I thought I would never be able to do that. I knew a decent amount about databases but I had never created my own one before.
Fast-forward to now, and that data model is complete. I’ve presented it to an audience and I plan to share it to my institution as well as presenting it in a conference.
There’s 2 lessons here. One, trust your supervisor as they do know what they are talking about. Two, find the easy wins. One of the main reasons my supervisor recommended this project to me is because he felt I could get it done quickly and have it as a quick win for the PhD.
I didn’t see it as that at the time, but looking back, I got the project done quite swiftly and now that’s probably going to be a chapter of my thesis. Which is insane. Having a research project complete in your 1st year is not that common. But if you can pull it off, it will really set you up for the rest of the PhD.
8. Prepare for academia and industry
We know that PhDs are essential for academic careers. What may be less known, is that getting an academic job with a PhD is like finding a needle in a haystack. With the competition for lectureship roles that typically offer permanent jobs, it’s quite the mission to find and secure a permanent role in academia.
That’s not to put you off academia, but rather to make you aware of the game. Like corporate, everything is a game. And it can be in your favour to prepare for an academic and an industry role.
This is easier for some careers than others. I’ve got a masters in computer science and a decent amount of industry experience in software engineering. If I didn’t get an academic role, I probably wouldn’t struggle to get an industry one.
It’s important to be able to translate your PhD work into something that industry people will like. My data model is something that fits nicely into my software engineering experience, and it would be enough to get me any data-related role. Many data science roles look highly upon PhD students as they know they are good with dealing with vast amounts of data.
For you it could be looking at consulting. That’s also very viable as a PhD student. Or project management, being able to organise your time is very transferable in a project management career. The main thing is to have a rough idea what you could do in industry and have something prepared for that.
On the flip side, prepare for academia as well! Having papers submitted to journals helps a lot there, as well as presenting at conferences. Don’t lock yourself out of either option, as the world can change a lot in 3 years.
9. Engage in hobbies outside of academia
Do not do your PhD, and nothing else. You will go insane.
I know I did. I didn’t really have a lot of hobbies outside of the PhD until I started creating content and exploring with musical theatre. It drove me insane, only having the PhD as like a thing that I do.
I think sometimes people act like PhDs are the only thing you can do. Like those 3 years are only for the PhD, and you can’t live life during it.
I disagree so so much. Life shouldn’t end because you’re doing a PhD, if anything it should continue and flourish.
Whilst I’ve been a PhD student, I’ve also been:
- Trying out new restaurants
- Exploring new areas
- Learning Spanish
- Creating silly videos online
- Writing online
- Singing in a concert
And I plan to do so much more!
One thing about this life, is that it’s so short. Yes, get the PhD, but don’t let that be the only thing you get in the next 3-4 years.
10. Consider sharing your journey online
Honestly speaking, not enough PhD students document their journey online.
I’ve searched up PhD student content on YouTube so many times, and I haven’t found anything special that I would enjoy watching.
I’m tempted to become the change I want to see, and become a YouTuber documenting my PhD life and my thoughts on everything. Soon come.
For now, I think every PhD student would benefit greatly from writing about their PhD experience online. Whether it’s through a newsletter like Substack or on a blog, it’s so so worth it.
I’ve found a lot of people who enjoy what I’m sharing. I’ve created a wide range of videos on the PhD process and honestly, I’ve gotten so many comments on videos and things to talk about I don’t even know where to begin!
From a 1st year PhD student to another 1st year PhD student, we need more people like us online talking about our experience and sharing our journey. So many people want to do a PhD, but end up finding generally negative content around it or just hearing the exact same things.
Let’s be the change.
Let’s be honest about what the PhD is actually about, the lows and highs and everything in-between.