📢 Research request: Help co-design a psychological intervention for individuals with PCOS If you're 18+, live in the UK, have a formal PCOS diagnosis & want to take part in two focus groups, check out the info sheet & sign up: derby.qualtrics.com/jfe/form… #PCOS #Research

Things to do in PhD first year! First year will usually go into doing course work but alongside there are few additional things you must do to set the foundation for the rest of the journey. 📃 Figure out your style of working: What works best for you, do you prefer to work early mornings, late nights, late afternoons. Define your time zone when you have highest concentration. This will help you plan your days better. 📃 Become familiar with your supervisors' expectations: Have a frank conversation with your supervisor on understanding expectations on timelines, structure and strategy of your research work. Insights from conversations can help in research planning. 📃 Network: Don't wait to reach middle or advanced stages of PhD to start networking. In middle of data collection, analysis and thesis writing you will barely have time and mind space to work on creating your network. Start creating it in earlier stages of your Ph.D. and strengthen and leverage it as you move closer to job market entry stage. 📃 Plan your finances: Your scholarship/ stipend will be your income for couple of years. Work on budgeting and planning your finances. It's never too early to start saving and investing. 📃 Form a strong support group: PhD mostly is an independent, yet lonely journey and you need a strong support group for your own good later as you move ahead. Create one! 📃 Set a schedule/routine of working: I made a costly mistake of taking first year of PhD for granted thinking it's just the beginning and I have so much time at hand. I would just float along rather than consciously planning my day. Only later I realized I could have extracted so much more from that time because it's least stressful year, had I planned my days better. Getting into routine early on has immense benefits in terms of productivity and ensuring smooth transitions to next stages. 📃 Read a lot: Cannot over-emphasize this! Later stages will be so much about action: data collection and cleaning, analysis, writing, editing, publishing that you will not have so much luxury at hand to read literature on your work peacefully and to heart's content. Read papers, journals, non-academic works. All that you read will feed into your research ideation and planning process. 📃 Write a lot: Don't wait for the 'thesis writing' stage to arrive to start writing. Very likely you will be too exhausted to start writing if you haven't written earlier. Also, the stress of writing a long thesis can be stressful leading to procrastination. So, get into the writing loop right from start. It can be 1 paragraph ,100 words every day. Document your thoughts, a new perspective you came across, that research paper you have read. You will avoid writer's block later on when you are required to actually write your thesis. If you are about to start, just starting your research journey, hope these points will help. For those who have crossed that stage, feel free to add:)