Research is hard! If you’re working on anything modest, chances are it’s already been done. If you’re trying to make a real difference in your field of research, you’ll most likely fail and then fail again. However, allowing failure to affect you personally and getting overly depressed is not a smart decision. Instead, you can adopt some graduate student skills to help you deal with your frustrations.
When you finish college, you are entering into a much harsher world. Some students do not fully prepare for the psychological and financial changes that will follow.
So, It’s always better to know where to look and what changes you should make in your life as a graduate student to be more productive and, most importantly, “stress-free”. Some of these graduate student skills will help you to get the best out of your degree.
Communicating with your academic supervisor
It is arguably more of a need when pursuing a doctorate than a Master’s degree, but it is a vital graduate student skill to master.
My supervisor deserves a lot of credit for being so organized and concerned about my success, but here’s what I could have done differently as a mature student to make our interactions more effective.
- Establishing engagement standards in advance and maintaining them; for example, keep efficient communication when writing emails. Do not wait more than 24 hours to reply to an email.
- Try to meet your supervisor in person at least every two weeks. Some of the issues can not be resolved via email, so you have to be productive to meet your supervisor in person and clarify everything as they come.
- Seek feedback on your work frequently; it helps you to keep things in perspective.
Time management skills
It’s challenging to manage a social life while reading literature, working on your thesis research, taking classes, teaching. However, it is as important to have a good social life so you won’t get fed up halfway through your graduate studies, and that is why time management is one of the top graduate student skills.
When you’re doing research, you’re usually left to your own ways to find things out. When procrastination sets in, you must carefully manage your work-time to avoid wasting so much time. It would be best to keep your professional and personal lives separate; for some researchers, the PhD can quickly become their entire existence, as they are constantly working.
According to a recent mental health survey, more than 38% of academics felt overwhelmed by their work So, it’d always be a good idea to find your people and some hobbies outside of your research.
Knowing when to stop
This is what my advisor humorously calls to as graduate student syndrome: the urge to read a broader and more distantly relevant collection of literature before beginning a project or writing a paper, often to an excessive degree.
When someone is just starting their degree, this behaviour is more common and predictable. Maintaining a positive relationship with your supervisor is the best way to resolve the problem.
We enjoy learning new things and have a strong desire to understand how things work together, which is why we are graduate students in the first place. However, we must put the literature aside and begin our tests at some time.
Knowing when to stop reading and start working is vital to academic productivity, even if you don’t feel like you understand “everything” (because you’ll never have time to read everything).
Having a well-defined goal in terms of research.
It’s not surprising that not having a goal will make your confidence level go pretty low over the years of your research, and it shouldn’t be. First and foremost, it’s better to start with a specific goal though it should not be much narrow. Because research is always a non-linear leaning process. You dont know where you will end up.
But, as a rule of thumb, it’d be better to know what skills you should gain out of your degree to get ready for the next level. Not only does it help you do better in graduate school, but it’ll also help you to make better connections with your peers. Developing a long-term goal takes time and proper thinking, so it is labelled as one of essential graduate student skills. So, there’s nothing wrong with investing time to come up with a reasonable goal.
Most graduate students have little to no idea what they want to do when they finish their degrees. They didn’t have any plans before starting their PhDs either. I barely meet PhD students at academic conferences who know exactly what they want to do after graduation. And those that identified their objectives early on have a notable competitive advantage over others.
Presentation skills
The stereotypical agreement on a researcher’s ability to present is not pleasant. Most people believe that academics struggle to deliver a good presentation, which is not an incorrect claim. This may happen when researchers are more concerned with conducting research than presenting it. It is just as essential to present and publish research as it is to conduct it. Because there’s no point in doing research if you can’t communicate what you’ve discovered. Nobody benefits from not-published research.
Academic conferences are important venues for academics to share ideas and critique one another’s work. The goal of a presentation should be to convey a message and have people remember your work. Instead, most PhD candidates (and most academics) simply read a constant flow of text and large equations without providing the audience with a “take-home” message. That should not be the case.
Understanding the audience is the most critical aspect of any presentation. You should arrange your presentation to focus on the audience and allow you to “transfer your knowledge” to someone else.
Social skills
The majority of people who went to graduate school were top of their class, extremely intelligent, and not particularly gregarious. Many people select research because they believe it does not necessitate much interaction. However, to be successful in academics, you must be sociable, create connections and a network, and be charming and well-liked.
Final words
The majority of students have all of the necessary graduate student skills to succeed; otherwise, they would not be accepted into the program in the first place.
A certain level of motivation is required to read the literature, participate in projects, seek assistance from classmates, instructors, and teaching assistants, and work diligently.
Also, rather than assuming that something is impossible or difficult right away, it is important to study, put ideas on paper, seek advice from advisors, or get your hands dirty.
It’s important to fail now and then, and most smart graduate students learn things the hard way in their first year.
Images Courtesy – School photo created by freepic.diller – www.freepik.com ,Certificate vector created by pch.vector – www.freepik.com
