HNers who are doing PhD,<p>1. What is your topic of research?<p>2. Is it different from your undergrad and/or masters field of study?<p>3. How do you spend a typical day?<p>4. What is the most useful skill that you have learnt or regularly use in your life as a researcher?
I did a phd in cognitive neuroscience. It was similar-ish to my undergrad.<p>Early in the program, days were fairly structured: a typical day had classes/homework, maybe meeting with an advisor, read some the foundational "classic" papers, and maybe collect/analyze data.<p>Later in the program, the structure disappeared. You <i>might</i> have a meeting or two, but the rest of the time you need to figure out what to do. Should I write something? Apply for something? Which papers/journals are worth reading to stay up to date? When should I stop playing with new analyses and start writing up some findings? The hardest part of the PhD was dealing with this lack of structure and the most useful skills you work on are self-discipline and time management.<p>I didn't learn self-discipline and time management very well and it really took a toll. There was a constant drone of "I should be working right now" so I took a laptop and stack of papers with me <i>everywhere</i>. But I rarely did much work, so I ended up a) never truly disconnecting from work and b) piling on extra layers of guilt because I was not working.
i finished my phd quite a few years ago. My topic started out as signal processing applied to speech, but morphed into signal processing applied to bioinformatics because it was easier to publish.<p>it was an extension of undergrad, electronics engineering.<p>a day was either reading papers or writing matlab code, or waiting for matlab code to finish running. Pretty much everything was either reading research or working on future research. If I tried 20 ideas, one might work well enough to get a paper out of. Then a whole lot of testing to flesh it out, then writing the paper and editing and typesetting a creating images.<p>I was in a lab so there were other people to talk to working on similar things, that helped a lot.<p>most useful skills i think are just the research process, how to go from undergrad to expert in a topic. how to interact with the academic community.
I enjoyed the process of learning so much. Not so much the process of writing papers.