{"id":1800,"date":"2020-03-27T15:00:41","date_gmt":"2020-03-27T20:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jsg.utexas.edu\/science-yall\/?p=1800"},"modified":"2020-03-27T15:00:41","modified_gmt":"2020-03-27T20:00:41","slug":"six-things-that-will-happen-in-the-first-month-of-your-phd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jsg.utexas.edu\/science-yall\/six-things-that-will-happen-in-the-first-month-of-your-phd\/","title":{"rendered":"Six things that will happen in the first month of your PhD"},"content":{"rendered":"

Emily is a first-year PhD student from Wales, UK. Her research focuses on surface processes on Mars using remote sensing and analogue field sites on Earth. <\/em><\/p>\n

Starting a PhD is a daunting prospect. It\u2019s a looooooooong time, dedicated to the study a very specific topic. It\u2019s made even more daunting when moving to a new university, a new city, or new country! I didn\u2019t really know what to expect when I started, and I\u2019m still not sure what to expect next. I hope this reflection on my (recent!) experience will help inform anyone considering grad school, decidedly going in the fall, or even reflecting on their own experience.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. You\u2019re going to hate it but\u2026.<\/strong>
    \nThe first part of starting is a lot<\/u><\/em><\/strong> of admin. And if that sentence put you right off applying for a PhD, I get you. I really<\/em> get you. It\u2019s not been fun. Sorting everything out from how you\u2019ll get paid, to where your office is, to registering for classes, getting keys, navigating the maze-like corridors to find your office again, figuring out where to go when you lose your keys for the first time.I was fortunate to get to know plenty of the other grad students as they helped me along my way! The flux of admin tasks hasn\u2019t quite ended for me yet, but it has slowed so I can actually do.<\/li>\n
  2. Reading!<\/strong>
    \nIf you didn\u2019t already have a of knowledge about your particular field, you will soon(ish<\/em>). This doesn\u2019t mean reading everything<\/em> but it also won\u2019t be over in the first week, or month (trust me<\/em>). It never ends. I hear<\/em> honing this skill for efficiency early on can be of great advantage. I\u2019ve found it very useful to try and synthesize my understanding into a bullet-pointed review. This has helped me understand how the research in my field has developed over time, where it\u2019s currently headed, and what I could possibly do to contribute to that (to be decided, many months in the future).<\/li>\n
  3. Set some Goals<\/strong>
    \nAs far as I can tell, there\u2019s no due date for doing anything <\/em>in this I like to set my daily goals based on things I need to get achieved in a week and the free time I have each day, but everyone works differently.<\/li>\n
  4. *socialize* (too much).<\/strong>
    \nFriends > Science [Bamber, 2020]. Grad school is (so I\u2019ve heard) a long, often difficult, stressful, complicated process. There are going to be times you\u2019d like to burn down the lab and run away to a far-off remote island and run a dog rescue centre [anon, 2020]. You probably will have already received support from other grad students when you got lost on the 3rd<\/sup> floor and locked yourself out of the office. So, you should appreciate just how important these connections are! Most of the grads and postdocs around you will probably become your colleagues and contemporaries one day, and they have a wealth of knowledge you can tap into. You also need people to hang out with and explore the new city\/country you found yourself in. This may sound like one of the most daunting parts of the first few weeks, but honestly, it seems to me like most grad students are always looking for an excuse to procrastinate or after work. You should find yourself with no shortage of things to do and make the most of it! I bet grad school isn\u2019t all this rosy!<\/p>\n

    \"\"
    *socialize* If you\u2019re stuck for options, come join our newly formed trivia team!<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/li>\n
  5. Get Homesick, Decide to Quit, Find out your office-mate has a dog and pledge to stay forever.
    \n<\/strong>Moving across the Atlantic Ocean may be a bit of an extreme example, but I guess transitioning to \u201cgradulthood\u201d is still a change, whether you\u2019re coming straight from college, industry or family life. Change is always challenging, often in unexpected ways. This first month I\u2019ve had to navigate making friendships and professional connections, rent and furnish an apartment, figure out visas and health insurance, open a new bank account, and figure out a budget, far far away from my usual support network.. In my home country of Wales (UK) we have a word \u201cHiraeth<\/em>\u201d which loosely translates to missing home, but more than that, to missing an era or missing a thing or person that may not even exist anymore, without wishing for it to return to how it was. I have hiraeth<\/em> for simpler times, and I miss home, but I\u2019m also so excited to get on with cool science. My homesickness won\u2019t stop me doing my PhD, but I feel it is more challenging now than it will be a few months down the line. As I discover more amazing and exciting things about science, about this new city, and about the amazingly supportive people around me with dogs, that feeling is becoming more and more manageable as I settle into this fantastic new stage of my life!<\/p>\n

    \"\"
    My homesickness won\u2019t stop me doing my PhD, especially with these amazingly supportive people around me in the Planetary Surface Processes Group.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/li>\n
  6. Start some Science!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    \n<\/strong>Science. That\u2019s why I\u2019m here, right? Everyone comes into a PhD with a different level of experience. By my second week the excited rose-tint on the admin + reading combo quickly started to wear off. I\u2019m excited to announce that on my official 1 month anniversary at UT Austin, I began to zoom around potential study sites in ArcMap software and that excitement is still buzzing today, but I think it illustrates that getting your teeth into some science early on, helps remind you of your reasons for being at grad school. But science isn\u2019t my only reason. I also got involved in other aspects of academia that are important to me, such as outreach (e.g., writing this blog post and helping out at public events). The impression I get from my, albeit limited, experience, is that those motivations will be frequently called upon when faced with the mountains of admin, arduous reading, day-to-day monotony and homesickness\/hiraeth<\/em> that, unfortunately, accompany the science-y stuff.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Emily is a first-year PhD student from Wales, UK. Her research focuses on surface processes on Mars using remote sensing and analogue field sites on Earth. Starting a PhD is a daunting prospect. It\u2019s a looooooooong time, dedicated to the study a very specific topic. It\u2019s made even more daunting…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":247,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[15,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fun","category-life"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jsg.utexas.edu\/science-yall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jsg.utexas.edu\/science-yall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jsg.utexas.edu\/science-yall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsg.utexas.edu\/science-yall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/247"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsg.utexas.edu\/science-yall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1800"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsg.utexas.edu\/science-yall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1815,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsg.utexas.edu\/science-yall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800\/revisions\/1815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jsg.utexas.edu\/science-yall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsg.utexas.edu\/science-yall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsg.utexas.edu\/science-yall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}