Hi my name is James Arvanitakis and I'm the Dean of the Graduate Research School
here at Western Sydney University and this is one of our series of short videos
that we make I suppose to give tips to higher degree research students. So today's
tip is five mistakes that PhD students make. The first one is and it's
not a surprising one, is that basically students spend their first year not getting
into their research. Or as one of my colleagues once said "they just frig
around too much!"
Now everybody thinks "I've got three years" and they don't actually realise
that three years passes really really quickly and your first you in some ways
is your most important because you need to get that first year, you need to get that
framing right and it's actually in your first year to do that. So don't
waste your time thinking that some amazing idea is going to come to you. Start
reading and start writing, and writing is really important.
It's not something you save up to the end. It's something you should do straight
away.
That's the first tip. The second tip is that, and this is a really boring one, you
should keep on top of your administration. A lot of students forget to re-enrol. All of a
sudden they stop getting their emails. They stop getting information about
potential scholarships or opportunities that exist and they wonder
what's happened. And then they have to catch up and re-enrol and go through all that
paperwork. So stay on top of the administration, check your emails regularly,
make sure that you know what's going on because you don't want to miss
opportunities that may arise.
The third tip is, is that students don't career plan. Now we know today that fifty
percent of PhD students do not go into academia. What they actually do is they
do other things such as working as researchers in private
organisations, people do startups, they work for government in policy areas or United
Nations, World Bank and so on.
Now there's a lot of processes that you go through in your PhD, and generally a PhD
is about training you to be a world class researcher but doesn't actually
tell you how you should start thinking about your career. So one of the things to do
while you're doing your PhD, is start planning about what you want to do next.
Start thinking about well if you want to do something, say like getting into
policy work, what type of things you're going to publish, where you're going to
publish, what conferences you're going to go to. So start that career planning. This
is a really really important element that's actually missing from a lot of
people's PhDs. The fourth mistake that a lot of PhD students make is they cancel
meetings with supervisors. They kind of feel that they shouldn't, like "I haven't
done enough work so I'm just going to cancel your meeting with your supervisor"
Actually that's a big mistake to make and actually when you start cancelling
meetings a supervisor, or the Dean in this case me, get's really concerned about your
progress.
So what you're better off doing is if you've got a meeting coming up sending
some information to your supervisor about what you've been doing, even if
it's a couple of paragraphs. Just so they know the type of thing you're working on,
and you can actually then begin to have a meeting that's focused around the type
of work you're doing. So never cancel a meeting if you can avoid it. I mean if
something urgent comes up, sure, but generally try to avoid it and the best
thing to do, or what I always encourage my students to do is a few days before that meeting
send some writing about the type of work you're doing or a copy of your lab book
or something
so your supervisor knows what to talk to you about and actually then you can
begin to kind of formulate a more decent discussion. And I suppose the
fifth mistake that PhD students make is that they don't take decent notes during
their supervisory meetings. The time that you spend with your supervisor or your
supervisory panel is really important.
It's meant to guide you. You may know more about a topic than your supervisor
by the time you finish your PhD, but what they know a lot about is the process and
the way to frame an argument, and that's really important. So often when people,
when students meet with their supervisors they get caught up in the conversation
and they don't take detailed notes, so my recommendation to you is you always
bring some paper, take detailed notes, summarise them in an email to your
supervisor and make sure that you both agree on what you've discussed and which is
the way forward. So they're five mistakes that PhD students often make and I've offered
you five solutions on getting around them.
So I hope you enjoy the journey, it's an amazing process doing a PhD, so do
enjoy it and best of luck.