This handout is from Rebekah Drezek's workshop entitles "Building Your Lab: Transitioning to Independence" and is an example of the welcoming tips she gives to her new students.
Organize your life
You cannot decouple professional and personal happiness. Stress in either area will bleed into the other. So, yeah, a lot of you will find this between silly and ridiculous, but if you can stomach it, I strongly suggest reading some of the better books on this topic if you haven’t already (even more so if you, like my husband, are the kind of the person just rolling your eyes when you read this…)
Suggestions:
- Covey books (Seven Habits, Living the Habits, etc.)
- Allen books (Getting Things Done – skim rather than read or you will feel the pain, Ready for Anything)
Email/calendar
Make sure you have effective email and calendar systems in place. If you are using Rice webmail, you are doing something really wrong. It is horrible. You can use Outlook. You can use Gmail and forget Rice. But do not rely on the Rice webmail server! The minutes you will waste each day add up to publications over the course of your grad career. (Also if you are using POP rather than IMAP you should probably switch. If you don’t know the difference – thanks to Adrien for teaching me – read the Rice IT help.) Restrict the number of times each day you check and respond to email so that you control your email rather than it controlling you.
I personally think the Rice calendar is not ideal and Google’s calendar, Outlook, or other alternatives are more functional. But make using one of these a personal habit. As your life gets busier, it will help a lot! I strongly believe you want to get everything you can out of your head and on paper (basically what the Allen books are all about.)
Also, learn the basic keystroke short cuts (Ditto to above – won’t matter much each time you use them – but adds up to huge amounts of time over the course of your career. Time you can spend with the people you care about most rather than staring at your friendly laptop screen…)
Internet
If you waste time at work surfing the net (I used to do far too much of this), don’t. I found removing all the sites I used to check each day from my favorites list dramatically cut back the time I spent surfing.
Read
If you are not spending at least 3-4 hours/week reading the new literature in your area, you are not reading enough. This needs to be a life-long habit as long as you are in science. (I don’t read as much as I should but how I do this is printing out any articles I want to read as I notice them and keeping them in a folder I carry around with me so that while I’m waiting for a meeting to start/in line at the post office/at the doctor’s/etc., I have something to do.) You should be the world’s expert in your particular area. Searching for new papers and reading them should be something you schedule time for weekly. Also learn which journals matter for your work. As a first and second year graduate student, a tremendous amount of your effort should be invested in reading the literature. The last thing you want to do is start a PhD on a topic someone else has already investigated...
