THESE 6 SKILLS TO DEVELOP DURING YOUR DOCTORATE!

THESE 6 SKILLS TO DEVELOP DURING YOUR DOCTORATE!

As I often say, the doctorate is a marathon of several years during which you have to prove yourself as a researcher, you have to show that you can do quality research while being available for all kinds of projects. networking with people in your lab or outside.

You then spend several years working on a very specific subject, you eat, sleep, breathe your doctorate and you can sometimes feel that you are not developing other skills than knowing your research topic inside out. (which is already a good thing!) and write my essay.

In this article, I would like to recall all of those related skills that are essential for a successful Ph.D. and that you sometimes develop without really realizing it.

The idea here is to present each of these 6 skills and to explain how each of you can ensure that you develop them to get the most out of the doctoral experience.

1) Read and synthesize

During the first months of your doctorate, a large part of your research time will be allocated to reading and summarizing articles. The objective is then to have a good idea of ​​the state of the art to be able to define the research issues that would be the most relevant to develop.

During this reading and synthesis work, you will gradually develop your ability to identify within a paper, the most relevant information, the major contributions of the paper and write essay for me.

This literature review experience will also force you to know how to decipher in the blink of an eye the papers that may or may not be useful for your research and the most reliable sources.

Improve your spirit of synthesis: 

This synthetic skill comes with experience and with a gradual understanding of your topic. You will then understand how researchers in your field think and how the main concepts of your research subject interact with each other.

As I recommend in my article on the literature review, I think it is always useful to begin the work of synthesis of a subject by reading the surveys (review article) of the same subject.

When reading these surveys, the idea is to compare your understanding of the articles with the understanding of other researchers to check that you understand the essential points and that you are focusing your attention on the right things.

2) Write

One of the major skills that you will acquire during your time at university and more particularly during your doctorate, is your ability to structure your thinking and your communications & write my essay for me.

You will then learn how to put the elements of your research reports in the right order, correctly defining the main concepts as you go.

In scientific articles, you will also learn to put some storytelling around your research so that your article is more pleasant to read and that it “sells” better.

This writing ability will also be very useful to you during your grant applications, you will then learn to structure your thinking in a minimum of pages while having a strong and impactful speech, a whole program !!

Improve your writing 

First, copy the texts you like (on this subject, you can read the very nice book Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon).

I'm not talking about plagiarism here, but trying to identify the structures that appeal to you, the way the author brings it about, that degree of storytelling that makes everything clear and crystal clear.

You can do this by reading different theses in your field and asking your supervisors for reference theses that they consider to be well written.

Writing is also a habit to be acquired and therefore starting to write very early in your thesis will give you a lot of experience and therefore improve yourself.

Finally, you can ask your colleagues to send you their manuscripts (thesis or article) to take the corrector's position and to practice identifying the elements which make less sense, which is less clear in the text.

This will then allow you, during your next writing, to have the two visions (author and proofreader) which will allow you to create quality documents more easily.

3) Communicate orally

Another great skill that you will need to acquire during your doctorate is your ability to communicate orally. This skill will come in handy in many situations.

First of all, you will see that meetings with your research director are often rare and therefore the objective will then be to get as much information and ideas as possible from these moments spent together.

For this, you will have to do some preparatory work to know what you want to think about, but you will also have to develop an ability to find the right balance between describing your current problem well enough so that your supervisor can help you and can unblock you from your situation, all without getting lost in details that will waste precious meeting time.

This ability, during an oral presentation, to find the right level of detail between what you could say and what you say will be one of the pillars of your doctorate.

It will then be necessary to be very careful to take into account the level of competence of your audience, you will then have a different speech with your family than with the teachers in your lab.

So before any oral presentation, take the time to identify your audience, and depending on their level of knowledge, adjust the time you will spend introducing the problem, presenting your method, or even your results and essay writing service.

Linked to this audience, it is a whole work of scientific popularization of your research that will have to be built and improved throughout your doctoral years.

Finally, there is all the stage fright and stress of the oral presentation that you will have to work on during your thesis. You will then learn to make long presentations (40 minutes / 1 hour) or even several hours if you teach.

I know that for my part, the stress of the presentation stayed with me throughout my Ph.D., I felt that I improved over the years, but it remains something very unnatural to me. Managing stage fright can be complicated for some and it is one of the central points that you will have to train.

Improve your oral communication:

Again, training a lot. This may mean organizing a presentation of your work in front of your fellow doctoral students once every 4 months to have an acquired audience who will be free to tell you if something goes wrong.

On the other hand, it is also essential, during a conference, for example, to finish your slides several days in advance (and not the same morning on the plane as I was able to do ...) to have the time to prepare yourself, to know your slide sequences by heart and therefore to be completely at ease on D-day.

Being prepared, apart from the fact that your presentation will be more pleasant for your audience to follow, will also allow you to have more fun and better manage your time if you feel that you are going too fast for example. Well after, I realize that it is sometimes complicated to set up.

For example, I finished the slides for my thesis defense the day before my presentation and I trained from midnight to 3 am to support at 9 am… I knew that it was not the right thing to do, but in the end, it went well so it's okay ...

Another way to improve yourself would also be to record yourself (either just audio or video). It can be a little hard sometimes to hear yourself speak, but recording yourself will allow you to spot your language tics and spot the times when your speech is not very clear. Try at least once and you'll see!

4) be creative

Beyond all the skills I was able to mention previously, another is essential for a successful doctorate: your creativity!

You don't need to be a poet or a writer, but you will have to develop your creative side to be able to identify new lines of research and build research hypotheses that have not been (too) studied before.

At the doctorate, you have almost control over the direction of your research and to be able to take full advantage of this space, to work on your creativity, to try things, will allow you to do both a doctorate that is of interest. and which will allow you to make yourself known in your field, but above all, it will make you want to get up every morning, in a hurry to be able to answer all these questions that you have asked yourself!

From a more general point of view, by being creative in your doctorate, you will also go from the status of knowledge consumer (by reading articles, by participating in conferences), to the status of knowledge creators, and just that, it's already really cool!

You can then associate your name with discoveries, with advances in knowledge, and this for eternity! (In any case on Google Scholar…).

During my internship in the US, my research director told me that researchers were often the precursors of societal changes. Indeed, as a young researcher, you have the time to think deeply about your problem and to try to help the company to better understand your problem to improve things and potentially generate new avenues of reflection for them. people.

Even so, this skill of creativity is also a double-edged sword. You can then find yourself in the position of the blank page syndrome or spend 6 months working on a project to realize that in the end, the hypothesis was false and none of the results are publishable ...

Being aware of this reality can help you anticipate things and take a step back from your situation if something goes wrong. Then, you can only question your research hypotheses and no longer your doctorate or worse, you ...

Associated with your creativity, you will then have to develop a second ancillary skill, which is the capacity for resilience vis-à-vis the failures that you may encounter and your ability to perpetually question yourself to move forward as best you can in your thesis.

How to improve your creativity:

As Cal Newport explains in his book So Good They Can't Ignore You, to be creative and get things done, you will first need a lot of reading and understanding, you will have to arrive. at the “edge” of knowledge to be able to think about the problem as a whole and to be able to have interesting ideas.

We can then take the example of jazz. A good jazzman is a musician who excels in solos, who is capable of a wide range of musical variations and all that, with fascinating ease. To get to this level, he didn't just try to do solos, he worked on a huge repertoire of pieces of music to practice, and to make each note, each chord become an automatism.

It's that kind of holistic understanding of your problem that you need to aim for to have access to ideas that are truly worth exploring!

Finally, the creativity of your doctorate will come from the meetings, the discussions that you will have. To improve yourself, you will therefore have to dare to share your research and seek the opinion of your directors, colleagues, or other researchers to have feedback on your work and perhaps open up avenues of reflection that you do not. did not have access before ...

5) persevere

I spoke a little earlier about resilience and I think it is somewhat similar to this 5th skill that you will have to develop during your doctorate, your perseverance. As I often say, the doctorate is a marathon made up of small sprints, and your perseverance, your tenacity, and your ability to continue to advance on your doctorate every day are going to be essential skills for the success of your thesis.

Beyond the individual well-being that this feeling of feeling your thesis progressing can provide, seeing the results validate your hypotheses or the Holy Grail: receiving an email telling you that your paper has been accepted, I think that this competence of perseverance is a skill that will be truly valued no matter what path you take in the rest of your career and paper writing service.

The doctorate then becomes a field of experimentation, a way to take the time to try things, to analyze the way you work, and to improve your ability to continue your work no matter what the circumstances.

“One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time”

(“The Importance of Stupidity in Science” by Martin A Schwartz )

How to work on your perseverance:

A very good book to develop your perseverance is War of Art by Steven Pressfield (Art of War by Sun-Tzu is good too…).

Apart from the fact that this book is short and well written, it describes to you precisely this invisible force which assails you from the first minutes of the day, this force which makes sure that you have only one desire: to go. on Facebook or YouTube, chat with your colleagues or go bake a cake (covid's little treat!).

Understanding how this force works (Path of Least Resistance in the text), will allow you to realize that you are not lazy, just your body is trying to save its strength and tries to keep you in a way of life that is not lazy. do not ask him too much effort (like watching a new episode of Casa del Papel for example…).

By becoming aware of all this, you will be more able to motivate yourself and "force" yourself every day to advance a little more on your doctorate, to read this paper, make these article corrections, and put it all together. end, you will be able to advance your research and you will achieve the goals you have set for yourself!

This psychological work on perseverance will also come by discussing with those around you about their ways of working or by reading and working on your impostor syndrome if certain situations are complicated for you to manage.

Finally, remember that you are unique and your Ph.D. too, you don't need to compare yourself to others and the goal is to do the best you can with what you have.

6) Become a real project manager

The last skill (and not the least) that you will have to develop during your doctorate is your ability to manage a project from start to finish, respecting certain objectives, certain deadlines.

This means that you will have to make sure several months in advance that your ethics committees are well established and validated, that your data will arrive complete and on time, that you will have the necessary measuring devices for your experiments. All of this takes time, energy, and a lot of organization!

Knowing how to improve yourself in it will not only allow you to always have a clear vision of where you are going with your doctorate but also not to feel too stressed and under pressure if something takes more. time than expected ...

For those of you who are working in addition to your doctorate, this project management skill will also allow you to know how to juggle all the things you have to do during your week and once again keep control over your schedule and on your project.

How to work on your organizational skills:

First of all, you can educate yourself by talking with those around you, by reading the articles I write about the organization of your work (like last week's one on Deep Work ), but also by reading books ( like Getting Things Done or Making Things Happen).

You will also need to get into research mode on your way of working to see what you are doing well or not in terms of project management, do you tend to spend too much time on the details or is it that you find it difficult to take a long-term view of your research, etc.

It needs to be worked on and in my opinion, it should be an internal discussion that you should have regularly to improve little by little during your doctorate!

Conclusion:

To conclude on all this, I would just like to remind you that the doctorate is a somewhat special moment in your life during which you will be able to work on a subject that you like, surrounded by passionate people.

The doctorate is an initiatory path, you will surely not revolutionize the world in three years (or more ...), but you will discover yourself and develop these very beautiful skills that will be useful throughout your life, both for your professional career and in your everyday life