Grad studies IV: The PhD timeline

The New Year’s just round the corner. Less than a week remains for 2008 to draw to an end. Today is Christmas night and probably a good time for a little bit of rumination and planning. Long time back I thought I would put up a series of articles on grad studies. Well, this post will have part of that too. Let me put down my thoughts about the PhD timeline. We shall start right at the beginning of a PhD program (ruminations, eh!), and go all the way till end (now, that’s planning, since I am only mid-way through). 

Roughly, a PhD program can be broken into 6 stages. The first stage is when the starry eyed kid enters a new department and a lifestyle (well, not always a new department, but a new lifestyle nonetheless – you start footing your bills, or at least most of the bills – all the while saving cash for beer and such stuff while earning basically peanuts). Fortunately, this stage has something in common with undergrad programs – namely, coursework. (Aside: many universities, especially in some European countries don’t require the students to take courses. However, in a large number of them, the students are “advised” to audit relevant advanced courses). A large chunk of the first year of graduate studies is spent doing coursework. The remainder of the time is best utilized in looking around for interesting research groups and topics. It is a very good idea to attend as many seminars as possible (I would say it’s a cardinal sin to miss any seminar, especially if it is given by a department faculty in at least the first semester). In all probability, the student will hardly be able to comprehend everything being said in the seminar. If you get 25% of the stuff being talked about you are doing just great. Attending a variety of seminars right at the beginning will help gain perspective as well as to zone in on a particular research group(s). Of course if you are one of those lucky (?) chaps who join as a RA committed to a certain group, then you can jump into the second stage of PhD concurrently while doing your coursework. 

The second stage is that of literature review. This is where you really start sinking your teeth into research. Basically, you bring yourself up to speed with what has happened in your field and what is happening. Science, humanities, engineering etc are ancients. People have studied these subjects and their sub-specialization for ages. So how do you compress the knowledge of few decades into one short 4 month semester? Thankfully, you can turn to review journals. Yes, the best way to get started on a literature review is review journals. Talk to the senior grad students and your advisors and make a list of the top review journals in your field. If they can mention a paper relevant to your research, that’s even better. Search the review journals for your research area. When you read the review paper, be sure to follow up with the cross-references that seem interesting. Review papers could be 40-100 pages long. By the time you are done with the paper, and some of the cross-references, probably 3 weeks or so have already passed. But the important thing is that now you probably have a not-so-shaky base in your field. So start searching for research papers in your field.  For a more detailed approach towards literature review, check my previous post. It’s a good idea to meet up with your advisor at least once every two weeks or so. The professors can more often than not, provide you with valuable leads and keywords for literature search. 

The third stage is when you set up a research problem. This is a tricky one. We don’t want a “percentage” problem which is not glamorous or spectacular in the least, but then they are the ones that can be relied upon to get decent results. We would like to have a challenging problem, but then it might take us a whole lot longer than we had bargained for to get a PhD. So there’s a fine line to be walked. Personally, I tried to get around it by phrasing the problem in two levels. On one level, I will be tackling a “percentage” problem, which should give me enough fodder to publish 3-4 solid, if not spectacular, papers. On another level, by tweaking the percentage problem a little bit, I can actually end up with a very interesting and challenging Multiscale problem. So, I spend a part of my time tackling the problem that is likely to give me solid results, and screw around the rest of time on the tough stuff. Usually, most universities require a written thesis proposal. Writing a good proposal at this stage can turn out to be helpful since this forces you to get your thoughts in order. (I will probably have a post later on about research proposals too). Unfortunately, in many cases, since the student is actually hired for a specific project of a faculty member, he/she normally does not have to spend much time fixing a problem. IMHO, trying to hone in on a research problem is a valuable experience, one that every PhD student should go through. In case you are one of the lucky chaps who gets a degree of freedom to frame his/her own problem, then it’s a good idea to meet up with your advisors at least once a week, may be even twice. Utilize the experience of faculty members to bounce ideas off them. I was lucky enough to be given a lot of freedom in framing my problem. And meeting my guides about once/twice a week helped. I was having 10 new ideas a week, and was soon finding out that 11 of them were rotten after talking it through with them – until I was finally able to crystallize my thoughts to carve out a couple of research problems. (BTW, it helps to have advisors who are always willing to spare time for the student, especially at this stage). 

The fourth stage is when you finally start doing the “real deal”, i.e. start setting up the actual experiments or simulations. Now, this is perhaps the stage that is the most frustrating (damn! I am in this stage right now). This is when you make instrument set ups / write codes for the problem you try to simulate. Most of the time, you end up encountering some drawback or other. And unless the drawbacks are successfully countered, there is no question of proceeding further. Hopeless as the stage may be, this is probably the most important stage of PhD – this is where you burn your hands and learn the nitty gritties of research. Once again, meeting once a week formally (and may be once more informally) with advisors help. It is also of immense help if the students develop some good people skills and start getting along nicely with the technicians and junior scientists. These are the people who provide the max help in fixing the niggling problems/making samples etc. (I also find it soothing to have a few gallons of coffee close at hand ;)

Congratulations. Having made past the fourth stage, you reach the fifth stage. The experimental set up is ready. The code seems to work well. You have a clear cut problem and line of action. Go ahead, get results. Analyze them, and write them up. Soon, publications will start to flow in (For grad students in most fields, 3-4 papers in 18 months is good enough to be considered as “flowing in”). This is the stage where max results can be obtained with minimum effort. Naturally, now with everything falling in to place slowly, like a jigsaw puzzle, its time to start feeling more and more confidence. Visits to advisor’s office are likely to reduce in frequency. However, the meetings will probably be much more intense and fruitful. Time to start hunting jobs / post doc positions. Thank god that you made a list of stalwarts in your field. If it’s a post doc you want, you already know whom to sound out. 

The sixth and last stage is the thesis writing stage. Now, I have already written a master’s thesis although I am still years away from writing a PhD thesis. My experience is that initially, thesis writing is a pleasurable activity. However, as you progress through the chapters you might start feeling a bit irate. It helps if you have already written up papers, since in such cases, thesis writing is a lot more about re-organizing stuff already written up rather than type in everything from scratch. This is also a good time to tie up the loose ends that become apparent only after you try writing up your work as a entirety (rather than in form of piecemeal papers). Following up those loose ends as much as is practically feasible would definitely add to quality of the thesis. It might even add another paper to the publications kitty. Once the thesis is written, its time to submit and defend the thesis, and yes, finally, throw a nice party J. 

A realistic timeline for a 5 year PhD would be to spend the first year on coursework, deciding a broad research area and find an appropriate research group and advisor in the department. The first half of second year (i.e. 3rd semester) can be devoted for litertature review. The second half (i.e. 4th semester) can be spent preparing for the comprehensive exams and research proposal. In fact, often the 2^nd stage (literature review) and 3^rd stage (problem definition and research proposal) overlap. The next 15 months or so (i.e. 3^rd year and a part of 4^th year) would be taken up with getting the stuff right – i.e. making the experimental set ups/coding. The next 15 months (remaining part of 4^th year and half of 5^th year) would involve doing the actual experiments and analyzing results. The last 6 months can be spent in writing up the thesis, following up loose ends and job/post-doc hunting.

Now of course, PhDs may have different duration too. In the process, no doubts you will end up re-evaluating a lot of stuff ;).

Grad studies III: Doing a literature review

When starting on a PhD program, or when jumping into a new field, one of the first steps would be to do a literature search. In my opinion, the best way to do a literature review is to actually read a literature review. Simple, right? So, if you are a new grad student, seek out older grad students / faculty and talk to them. Make a list of review journals in your field. Then methodically comb them volume by volume. Get the most recent review article and read it carefully. Watch out for the cross-references, and track down the ones that you might think are interesting. A good review paper is 40-100 pages long. So, take your time to read it, and then again re-read it (along with the cross-referenced papers that seem interesting to you). By the time you are done, you probably have a fairly decent idea of your field; at least decent enough for you to take the next step, the next step being seeking and reading research articles in your field. 

Now, at this stage, take some time out to find out about bibliographic programs that are available to you. Archiving the papers you read right from the start will save you lots of time later on, especially when you write research papers of your own. Personally, I find Endnote quite useful. But then, it is not free software. If your research group or library has a license, well and good. Otherwise, look for alternatives. And if you don’t have access to bibliographic software, you can still use good old Microsoft tools. In absence of softwares, to create a simple bibliographic file, simply open a Word document and create 3 columns. Each row is one record. The first column is the paper title. The second one has the author name and the third one has the keywords. If you have this information down, you can easily search for what you want later on. 

Anyway, let’s move on to actually searching the papers. How do you search? Simple enough – use a search engine. For science and engineering, useful search engines are SciFinder scholar (this is not a freeware though), scirus, engineering village and google scholar. My favorites are the ScFinder scholar and scirus. In addition to using search engines, there is another method that I have found useful which is sort of the opposite of looking up references – i.e. look at citations. Use any good citation database (Web of Science works well for me, since that is what our university subscribes to. Scopus is good too). Once you find a paper of interest, look up the citation database to find out papers that have cited this paper you were interested in. Chances are, a fair amount of the papers citing the paper of your interest will also have information of interest to you. Apart from this, it is also useful to open a new email account and subscribe to email alerts from a number of top journals in your field. It takes less than 5 minutes to scan through the table of contents in the email alerts, and is a good way of staying updated. 

So much about searching papers. Once you have found a paper, how do you read it? While I said one should read the review paper (referred to above) very carefully, I think how one reads the subsequent papers is quite different. Don’t read the whole paper at first! No, your time is too precious. First read the title. If you find it interesting, proceed to the abstract, otherwise dump the paper. Still interested? Proceed to the conclusions. Still liking it? Good for you. Now, read through the paper starting at introduction, all the way through to the results and discussions segment. 

There, you have it. Few simple principles, but fairly effective.