1. Care and maintenance your supervisor

• Meet regularly with your supervisor
• Discuss and negotiate your progress regularly
• Understand your different styles
• If it is not working out, so someting about it. Don’t just think it will get better or that you can do it on your own.

2. Write and show as you go: This is show and tell, not hide and seek

• Writing and showing your work focuses you to stay on rack and refine your thinking
• Set deadlines for your writing and handing in
• Generally it is good idea to write journal articles (on your exact thesis topic) as you go
• Practice writing with your peers, this can be very effective

3. Be realistic: It’s noe a Nobel Prize

• When you are doing a PhD you are learning how to do a PhD, you are not expected to know this in advance
• Original work does not mean a cure for cancer. In reality it means one small step in advancing existing knowledge
• Do not go off in tangents in the hope of answering ‘The question’, stay focused

4. Say no to distractions: Even the fun ones you think you must do

• Set priorities and be ealistic about what you can do
• Do the important rather than the immediately urgent
• The golden rule to avoid over-commitment is don’t let anything eat into your set study times, or as you would  with a job, make the time up if interruption is unavoidable

5. It’s a job: That means working nine to five but you get holidays

• You may not work from nine to five, but you definitely need fixed hours
• Set up a proper workplace
• Like a job, if you take time off, make it up somewhere else

6. Get help: You are not owner-operator single person business

• This means you are allowed to get help
• Use any and all formal assistance in the University including tutors and graduate schools, skills development and faculty staff

7. You can do it: A PhD is about intelligence and persistence

• Persistence is at least as important ingredient; this comes from habits like meeting regularly with your supervisors, treating a PhD like a job
• So in fact the final habit of a highly effective PhD researcher is to know and believe that you can do it, and when the going gets tough, keep going!

Extraxts from “The Seven Secrets of Highly Successful PhD Students” by Hugh Kearns &Maria Gardiner, SDTU, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia