PhD 101
A growing collection of short lessons, reflections, and practical notes I share with current and prospective PhD students. Topics span research taste, productivity, writing, mentorship, and the parts of academic life that nobody explicitly teaches.
These notes are personal. They reflect what has worked for me in my own training and what I find myself repeating to my students. Take what is useful, discard the rest.
Chapter 0: Foundations
Why research is fundamentally different from coursework, and how the rewarding mechanisms diverge.
- Ep. 1 Research Is Not Homework Why the coursework mindset breaks in research, and the two failure modes I see most often.
- Ep. 2 Why Would Anyone Want to Do Research? (Except It Sounds Cool) Two answers from my own experience, and a question to you?
- Ep. 3 PhD = Permanent Head Damage? Why research's critique-centric feedback feels so different from coursework.
- Ep. 4 Self-Motivation is Not Optional What mental model is needed to thrive in research.
Chapter 1: Day-to-Day Research Skills
Practical, repeatable techniques for the research craft, starting with how to survey the literature.
- Ep. 1 Drinking from the Firehose, Without Drowning A practical method for searching, snowballing, and classifying the literature.
- Ep. 2 How to Win a Fight with a Thousand PDFs (How to Read a Paper) How to read papers at the right depth, take notes that stay useful, and avoid reading 100 papers when you only needed 30.
- Ep. 3 The Most Important Skill in Research (That Nobody Teaches You) How the papers you've already collected serve as a permanent library for teaching yourself the craft of research.
- Ep. 4 Arrive with Answers. Leave with Better Ones. (How to Lead a Project Meeting) A five-part structure for weekly project meetings, and what leading a project actually means.
Chapter 2: The Architecture of a Research Project
How to build a coherent motivation, formulate a research question, and design a study that holds up under scrutiny.
- Ep. 1 Judy Olson's Ten Questions Ten questions that test whether your project holds together logically, and six focused questions for building the HCI motivation section.
- Ep. 2 The Sentence That Decides Everything Why every word in a research question carries weight, and how to test whether your question is novel and significant enough to be worth asking.
- Ep. 3 Who Cares, and What Has Already Been Done Why understanding stakeholders is harder than it looks, and what separates a strong gap statement from a vague claim that reviewers will dismiss.
- Ep. 4 Everything Connects, or Nothing Does Why your approach must trace directly back to the gap you identified, and what it means to make a methodology specific enough that someone else could execute it.
- Ep. 5 What Happens Between the Clicks Why understanding the workflow in full is non-negotiable before any design decision, and how Activity Theory provides a structured way to decompose and ground your research.
Chapter 3: In-Depth Advice for the PhD Journey
Longer-form reflections on quality, peer pressure, and sustaining yourself through the PhD.
- Ep. 1 Your Standard Should Never Be Paper Acceptance Borderline Why you should hold yourself to a standard much higher than the acceptance line of a top-tier venue anyway.