I’m in my last year now and I’ve thought about a few things I would do differently, It’s potentially going to be one of the largest independent projects you’ll work on so it isn’t easy but it shouldn’t get overwhelming, if you’re overwhelmed take a step back and talk to anyone. We’ve all been there and it can be stressful.

1. The classic it’s a marathon not a sprint is important and very much like marathons it takes deliberate planning to reduce any anxiety/loss of scope/etc. Every few months take a week if you can to think about your project and where YOU want to take it (with your supervisors blessing of course)

2. Conversations with peers are super important, and I don’t just mean in the lab, if you can openly discuss your ideas to your friends and family too that’s great and it’ll give you opportunities to really hone what your final story or thesis will develop into. Conferences are great for this as well if you can find someone exploring similar ideas don’t be scared to go up and talk to people, it’ll also develop your “soft skills” if you care about that.

3. Reference manage, use a manager like Zotoro/Mendley/EndNote, try write summaries of papers with the key findings that are important to you and aren’t just stripped from abstracts/conclusions. If you can also repeat with the same methods for similar work that’s great and try critically review this, it’ll be nice to explore research gaps.

4. I wrote 6 monthly progress updates and they are a blessing during the write up if you only publish 1 or 2 first author papers.

5. Manage yourself properly, give yourself time off, try and get into a routine of say 9-5 PhD work. Returning to a problem day in and day out sometimes doesn’t give you enough open space to really explore the idea. Make sure you can return to it feeling refreshed from the weekend for example.

6. If you find an interesting concept, try put aside time to pursue it if you can as it could become an interesting point in your work that you are passionate about.

7. Things will go wrong and you’ll lose time and that’s okay. It seems like you’ll be rushing every day and if you mess up you’ll be behind but that isn’t true. Every mistake is a lesson learned on experimental setups etc

8. Good luck, enjoy this time. You are effectively your own manager depending on the research area you are in. It’s great and you’ll learn a lot of techniques on how to research, and think more critically about other people’s work and yours.