Monday, 21 October 2013

Week 1: PhD endeavour



There are many people who decide to  continue their education to get a  PhD degree. 
Give us a few tips how to accomplish this goal.   What do you do to reach your goal? Do you have any strategy? Do you share literature with your group mates?  Where do you look for it? What about time-management? 

8 comments:

  1. My plan is to read all assigned lectures, enlarge my knowledge by participating in seminars and different projects. In general the PhD sudies in my opinion depends on spending a lot of time reading and discussing other people ideas and then confronting them with my view of the problems. Since I am just beginner on this road :) I will appreciate any advise and help :)

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  2. Well, this is very tricky question for this moment. But because i am also just beginner so will be better if i don't give any advice cuz i don't want to be pert in this part of my career, maybe later after 1-2years ;) Imho time-management is so difficult. BTW i will hope to meet soon my group mate and now i wish good luck 4everyone from our/my group in PhD studies.

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  3. About tips I have to warn you because not all bloggers know me - if you don't want to become a student forever (like me) you should probably do everything in an opposite way than written bellow :-).

    For reaching my goal I try to study more. Actually I think that managing my time is the most important to me (I'm lazy person with a big mess in my life ;-)) so I started to do it in three aspects:
    1. At the beginning of every semester I do a list of things planned to do. Next I divide my time for doing everything from my list. Some points from my list aren't finished at the end of semester (probably my list is always too long) but I think that this situation is better than not starting realizing some points at all.
    2. I introduce time management for activities not connected with my PhD. I'm hope that it allows me to save more time for PhD activities.
    3. I limit time spent for unnecessary things not connected with PhD. I don't have any problems to resign from things which I don't like (i.e. cleaning my house or gardening :-)) but of course I have a problem with resigning from things which I like.

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  4. I guess it's true that PhD degrees are becoming more common nowadays, although I'm not sure there's a significant increase as a percentage of people who pursue a Master's degree.
    Continuing your Master's thesis might be the quickest and safest way to get a PhD degree. Of course in that case, your Master's thesis must be sufficiently advanced and suitable for a PhD, which requires some forethought. But it gives you momentum to keep working and build on your area of research.
    Another good way is to take part in a research project. If it is innovative enough, there might be a topic for a PhD. This gives you a chance to work with more accomplished researchers.
    As for time-management, to me, the main difficulty is that it's such a distant, long-term goal. I prefer working on problems at hand which don't require that much planning. Breaking down goals into smaller tasks seems like an obvious solution as Grzegorz pointed out. That would be my advice as well.

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  5. Writing a PhD is a much different task than writing any other university papers and the amount of work and research needed to create a meaningful outcome is far greater. I'm currently struggling with allocating enough time to get this research going... as time goes by the amount of responsibilities and work not connected with university life is growing in an astonishing way, and as much as I would like to pass them to someone else and have some additional time for my PhD, that is rarely possible. On the other hand some of us have wrote that they are achieving this, so I'm leaning towards thinking that effective time management and pulling out sufficient time for my PhD is not my strongest feature.
    But going back to the question - I do think that setting up personal goals for each semester is a good idea to get the train rolling. Working/learning with others also works for me, but unfortunately not many people doing PhD in IT tend to be open and like to meet in a group for some stimulating work sessions. Maybe you guys have different experience?

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  6. My plan for reach PhD is very simply.
    That plan is base on systematic work and list of that that I need to do.
    I plan that list that that I need to do during each semester and try to realized it.
    Because of my job it is very difficult to work on that task during the week that's why I realized that task on the weekends and so far it works fine.

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  7. I have been doctoral student for a year, therefore I don't know how the full process of science on doctoral studies goes. However I know that there is a very high level of education therefore a lot of time has to been devoted to learning. The learning on doctoral studies is very extensive. The learning consists of reading, doing analysis, problem solving and responding to a variety of our questions. We exchange our views during the group meetings, and then create reports. We are in the process of creating a new publication. It's very useful for doctoral studies to have a command of English. We analyse and exchange our considerations, opinions and views on different subjects set by other doctoral students. Do I have my own strategy for learning? I don't have one. I have just been realising the plan agreed with my supervisor. I am devoting more time for learning, and diferent research.

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  8. Despite I am on third year I'm not feeling like giving anyone advice how should he/she accomplish it (mainly because of progress...). I am one of those of us who try to bring together commercial work and studies but it is not easy. The strategy I took is to participate in as many as possible interesting projects which may (or may not :) ) give me in the end materials sufficient to write my own thesis.

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