Your tips to succeed in doctoral program?

[hejduk]

Whether you're attending or getting ready to attend, what do you attribute doctoral success to? Study habits? Networking? Competent brown-nosing?

[Strangefox]

Whether you're attending or getting ready to attend, what do you attribute doctoral success to? Study habits? Networking? Competent brown-nosing?

Skills + determination + self-confidence.

[Behavioral]

I had great success in undergrad (few proceedings, posters, talks, etc.) by forcing myself to take well-deserved breaks after spending 40-60 hours in the lab some weeks. I'd drive out to San Francisco (from San Diego) and just get drunk with my professor or something. I learned from him that sometimes you need to really tune out research for a short while to let some ideas gel. It worked for me.

[InquilineKea]

Also, maybe resourcefulness matters more than people think? It's SO easy to do a project for 40-50 hours, and then realize that ALL your effort was useless because you didn't use the right technique, or you discovered that the python package you wanted to use couldn't actually do what you ultimately wanted to do, or some other reason. It takes a certain degree of resourcefulness to prevent this from happening.

Edited April 27, 2011 by InquilineKea

[Amalia222]

there is no substitute for hard work.

[fuzzylogician]

There's an active thread on Officially Grads that you may want to look at:

[nycrican2]

Whether you're attending or getting ready to attend, what do you attribute doctoral success to? Study habits? Networking? Competent brown-nosing?

Cancel all leisure and weekend activities with friends and plan vacations between semesters. Especially if you are working and attending school at the same time. By the way, doctoral work involves very little studying as far as memorizing material and parroting it back. This is very low level academic work.

Instead, it involves lots of reading in academic research journals, comparing and contrasting, questioning assumptions and using critical thinking skills to create literature reviews of academic journal articles, academic book reviews written through the lens of theoretical frameworks and annotated bibiographies in which journal articles are synthesized, analyzed and critiqued in no less that 150 words each. Well, at least these are some of the assignments that I have gotten so far. The purpose is to prepare the student for the doctoral dissertation/project stage.

Hope that this helps.

[hejduk]

Cancel all leisure and weekend activities with friends and plan vacations between semesters. Especially if you are working and attending school at the same time.

Definitely agree with taking vacations during semester breaks or summer. But cancel all leisure and wkend activities? How do you stay sane, and have something during the week to look forward to? I think studying is the main reason you're there, but I think people need to have social activities and "rewards" to look forward to!

Edited April 30, 2011 by hejduk

[nycrican2]

Definitely agree with taking vacations during semester breaks or summer. But cancel all leisure and wkend activities? How do you stay sane, and have something during the week to look forward to? I think studying is the main reason you're there, but I think people need to have social activities and "rewards" to look forward to!

Well, you can plan perhaps to go out to eat and occasionally see a movie. But other than that, you will spend most of your weekends on your computer doing research in the online university library, reading and/or writing. I have not seen the sunshine on the weekends for a long time. Then again, I do work full time as college faculty during the workweek with the exception of the summer months. This has been my experience since I started my doctorate last July. However, it has been worth it so far.