#scientist shitpost

First and foremost: DO NOT attend a grad school that is not paying you to be there. At minimum your tuition should be covered. Universities run on the un- and underpaid labor of undergraduate and graduate students. Often times a (STEM) professor will have students operating lab equipment and processing data that they then take and present as their own. This is generally considered acceptable practice, but mostly depends on your funding source. I, personally, am self funded, meaning that my paycheck comes from grants that I proposed for and submitted for me. Many graduate students are funded by their supervisor, who will have them working on projects that aren't necessarily their own. As a warning to students in this situation, you will still be expected to manage your own projects on top of this outside work. Being a TA is also a way you might be funded, and it's my opinion that everyone should do that for at least a year.

Optimize your working hours, working location, and workstations for you. There is a balance between the expectations of your supervisor, your funding source, and your own preferences. For me, this means using the pomodoro method when I'm having a hard time staying focused, working from home on the days I'm planning to write to reduce the likelihood of being interrupted and voluntold for tasks, taking an actual lunch break, and having all the amenities of my desk at home also in my office.

Citation manager. I use Zotero and have made it a point to religiously utilize the folders and tag function. I use folders to group by project, and subfolders for individual pieces of writing for a project and tags to group by subject matter

DON'T let the first powerpoint you make be one for a committee meeting or another important presentation. Build a slide library of things like introductory material and figures of your own data. Take photos of any instrumentation you use, of the places/things you're studying. When you have this already set up, making a presentation takes maybe half an hour, and you get a ton of practice making slides

KEEP TO A CONSISTENT POWERPOINT THEME! Having slideshows that are formatted identically makes you memorable AND makes the scavenging through your old presentations to make a new one much easier.

Your powerpoint theme should be uncluttered (should not visually detract from the information you're trying to present)

MAKE YOUR FIGURES IN THE SAME SOFTWARE (when possible). Having more consistency just adds to making your stuff nice to look at.

There will eventually be a point in grad school where you're freed from the responsibility of taking classes (usually the third year in a USA 5-year PhD program). If you were spending 3-5 hours per week in class, try to still spend 3-5 hours interacting with literature (either papers or grad-level textbooks).

A lot of supervisors say a good rule of thumb is reading one paper every day, but I've found that's a wildly loose guideline. Here's what I did: I was given a set of papers that were seminal to my subject matter. I then took their citations and started reading those as well. You can (and should) also do this with any papers your supervisor publishes.

Google Scholar is a good way to find papers, but doesn't let you sort by number of citations. Beware bad papers.

Snacks are crucial. So is exercise. Sometimes a break should be a five minute jog around the building and a granola bar.

Come up with some sort of literature note taking method. I built myself a template for each of the types of papers I am reading (for example: literature review vs method development vs field study) that helps me extract the most relevant information for MY purposes. If you really like powerpoints, you can do this in there (good for Ctrl+F later on), but mine is pen/paper because I remember stuff I've physically written down better.

Steal figures you like from other people's papers for comparative or introductory purposes during presentations (cite them on the slide, obviously). Add them to your slide library.

If you use excel for your figures, we shouldn't be able to tell. You can build figure templates. Do that.

Defeat imposter syndrome by remembering that you don't actually have to be extremely smart to get a PhD (or a masters degree). You mostly just have to be stubborn. (One of my housemates is the stupidest person I've ever met and she somehow got into grad school. That said, she's not very stubborn, so she's having a really bad time.)

Set up weekly meetings with your supervisor. This will ensure you have accountability for your progress, and time to address any roadblocks, ideas, personality clashes, and equipment malfunctions in person. If your supervisor is stubbornly unavailable, see if one of your committee members might be willing to step up. Take notes at those meetings. Not everything you talk about you'll be able to address immediately, so it's good to have a record of what you talked about.

Try not to let problems remain unaddressed for more than a week. (If you can resolve them within that first week, too, that's also ideal.) For example, we've been trying to delineate lake catchments in a place that's so flat there's not really any true catchments to delineate. It took nearly 9 weeks of bringing it up at the weekly meeting for us to finally realize we'd been trying to answer the question the wrong way.

If you're moving away from your undergrad field of study, I recommend reading some undergrad material for your new field of study within your first semester. Or, if you know what you're doing that far in advance, the year or summer before you start your program. I moved from analytical chemistry to biogeochemistry, and there were terms and concepts from microbial ecology, limnology, hydrology, oceanography, geology, and ecosystem science that I just wasn't aware of. Make flashcards for all those words you don't know, it helps. If you like digital flashcards, use studylib (dot) net, it's like quizlet but has no ads :)

Speaking of ads, I highly recommend switching to Firefox. Here's posts where other people have more eloquently put why this is a good idea and their favorite extensions (if someone asks, I'll share mine): 1 2 3

To avoid google's shitty AI overview: use https://udm14(dot)com/ instead of google(dot)com. They're the same thing, the UDM14 addon to the URL yeets the AI overview into the void, never to be seen again.

Some supervisors will not give you hints for anything. This can be frustrating, but what they're trying to do is get you to answer your own questions. ("It wouldn't be research if we knew the answer," I was recently told, by someone who definitely knew the answer)

Always be on the lookout for funding opportunities. These can be for stipends, lab consumables, payment for an undergraduate assistant, or travel for conferences or field work. The more of this you can bring in on your own, the less dependent you are on the whims of your supervisor for opportunities.