These slides provide some guidance to the prospective PhD students. The content reflects my personal experiences together with useful feedbacks I received from my colleagues/friends.

1. Being a PhD Student:
Experiences and Challenges
Faegheh Hasibi
March 16, 2016

2. PhD machine

3. PhD machine

4. You are the engine
Take the responsibility and
carry on

5. Research process
Read Experiment
Publish Networking

6. Time (#semester)
Reading,confusion
Start early …
Do not waste time in
early years
Find your research topic
M. Shokouhi. “Recipes for PhD”, http://www.slideshare.net/shokouhi1/recipes-for-phd

7. Research topic
• Find a common ground between
you and your supervisor’s interest
• Not too mature area
• Not too immature area
• Trendy area
M. Shokouhi. “Recipes for PhD”, http://www.slideshare.net/shokouhi1/recipes-for-phd

8. Reading

9. Read high quality papers
• Read papers from top venues in your field
• Read papers of top researchers in your field
• Follow the citations and read the related papers
Write a summary for each paper
M. Shokouhi. “Recipes for PhD”, http://www.slideshare.net/shokouhi1/recipes-for-phd

10. Use a reference manager
Only for writing in
Latex/Word
Reading, annotating,
sharing, organizing

11. Experimenting

12. Experiments
• Start with easy and incremental ones
• Be accurate and avoid making careless mistakes
• Create reliable and reproducible results

13. Document
Document
Document
Document
Document
• Keep a log of all results you get
• Write neat and documented code
Ben Hamner
When you write code, keep in
mind that
you're collaborating with your future self.

14. Back up
• Use a version control tool
• Bitbucket/ Github are your friends

15. Publishing

16. Publishing
• Start publishing early
• Target a conference
• Now you have a deadline!
• Plan ahead
• Last minute papers are more likely to be rejected

17. Writing style
Take papers from the past years …, and “copy”
• It is not about plagiarism
• Quality papers are similar in their
writing style, structure,
terminology, methodology, …
✗
S. Lia-Jonassen. “Ten things I wish I knew before starting on a PhD”, http://s-j.github.io/ten-things-i-wish-i-knew-before-starting-on-a-phd/

18. Be persistent and keep pushing!
Paper acceptance factors
Low acceptance rates ~20%
33%
33%
33%
Novelty Presentation Luck
S. Lia-Jonassen. “Ten things I wish I knew before starting on a PhD”, http://s-j.github.io/ten-things-i-wish-i-knew-before-starting-on-a-phd/

19. Networking

20. At your group
• Join the coffee breaks
• Talk about your research with your colleages

21. At the conferences
• Mingle with other PhD students (future colleagues)
• Do not be shy
• Help others to network and get helped!
• Talk to professors

22. Research visit
• Choose the right time to go abroad
• Early: Spending time on learning
• Late: Focus on publishing

23. Find a research group
• Ask your supervisor
• Meet at a conference
• Apply for an internship
• e.g., Microsoft, Google, …

24. To make it productive…
• Go with a clear plan
• Keep in touch beforehand
• Discuss about the plan/paper ideas

25. Research process
Read Experiment
Publish Networking

27. General advices

28. Meetings
• Have an agenda for the meeting
• What you did since the last meeting
• Questions you would like to discuss
• Take note of all the next action items
• Keep minutes of all the meetings

29. Research-related activities
• Become a reviewer
• Mentor master students
• If possible, do some teaching

30. Keep an eye out!
• Attend NTNU courses
• https://innsida.ntnu.no/kurs
• Attend summer schools
• Learning, networking, fun
• Find the news channel
• Twitter, Mailing list, …

31. Life “outside” PhD
Being in the same group is more than
being in the same mailing list!
Photos by Jan R. Benetka