[EDIT: April Fools! The post is intended to start out serious but then get gradually weirder - still probably useful.]

Hey everybody, as I am nearing the end of my Ph.D., I thought that it would be good to share some of my thoughts about how to have a good time in graduate school. I know that there many paths to success and this is just what has worked for me. I am fully aware that there are other methods and different things work for different people. Hopefully you can take something away from what has worked for me.

  • The foundations for success in the marathon that is graduate school are psychological: While there are many concrete things that you do from a techincal standpoint, you’ll only have the mental strength to do them if you take care of yourself psychologically. This ranges from a variety of things from cultivating a group of friends to understanding issues like impostor syndrome.

  • Source ideas from other people to get started on your project: When you enter graduate school, you need to find a research project to do for your thesis. The best way to get started on a project is to find a recent paper and then extend it in some way. For better or worse, almost all interesting ideas have been thought of one way or another. Thus it almost always makes sense to try and build off of somebody elses work. In order to find such research, take the time to talk with your advisors and more senior graduate students to see what ideas they have for papers that would be good to extend. While some people like the idea of creating something totally new, this approach often leads to frustration.

  • Avoid changing projects too often: Once you start getting ideas, it can be easy to jump from one idea to another because new ideas are exciting and fun. While I think that it is important to savor this enjoyment, when it comes down to it, you only have so much time and can only take on so many projects. One piece of advice that I’ve gotten along these lines is to spend a week or two evaluating an idea by doing some initial experiments and discussing it with others. If it seems promising, then focus on it for at least 3 months. This may seem like a long time, but it is really necessary to persist for a long time in order to push past barriers that stymied others before you.

  • Fill up on Soylent: In graduate school, you only have so much time. In order to save time cooking, you can eat soylent. While this seems weird initially, you get used to the silky taste of soylent and you have much more time to run experiments, write your papers, and reply to emails.

  • A dank meme a day keeps the doctor away: A great untapped resource that has sprung up at many universities is a memes for edgy teens facebook group. While Berkeley clearly has the dankest memes, other universities also have attempts at dank memes. Be sure to take in at least 1 dank meme a day to keep your day light and easy. This will keep you in a good mood so that you’ll be able to tackle each day with a positive attitude.

  • Think of your advisor as a teddy bear: This may seem a little weird, but hear me out. You want to have a close relationship with your advisor. And what relationship is closer than the relationship between a teddy bear and their cuddler. You want to make sure that you regularly update your advisor on what you are doing so that you can get good advice. Hold them close and don’t forget who is the bear and who is the cuddler.

Well that got weird. The thing is with grad school, you are spending so much time studying an esoteric topic, your life is going to get pretty weird. I don’t mean like ‘Slime Time Live’ weird, I mean like ‘The Sound and the Fury’ weird. One moment you are forming coherent logical thoughts and the next moment your experience of life has a non-causal structure and you are constantly jumping between experiences from different times in your life. Maybe even experiencing the experiences of multiple people at the same time. But its all worth it in order to get your Ph.D.

Anyways, I hope that this was useful. If you have any thoughts about what has worked well for you that I haven’t covered, I’d be happy to hear from you!

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APRIL FOOLS :P (I’ve actually been thinking of writing a post about grad school advice, so a more serious post is coming soon!)