Georgie's Manchester PhD Research Tips

Georgie is a postgraduate researcher in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Read her top tips on how postgraduate research differs from the undergraduate experience; why you don’t need to know everything before you start your PhD; how it’s important you find the right office environment; why you should shape your relationship with your supervisor from the start; and how you can take a teaching assistant role alongside your PhD.?

This is an edited transcript of Georgie’s advice. You can listen to her thoughts in full, as well to as all of our other postgraduate researcher tips, here .?

On... how the postgrad experience differs from the undergrad experience?

"It's very different from being an undergraduate student because you're much less scheduled, so you don't have lectures to go to and workshops and labs, and all of the other stuff. You have your work and you have to get on with it yourself.

There are a few things though, so I have meetings with my supervisor every week and group meetings where I chat with other people in my department, PhD students and researchers, who are working on similar stuff and get an overview of what everyone's doing, any problems that people have. We can talk about and try and fix them as.

Group meetings are really useful spaces to learn more from other people and those with international researchers, as well as just people in my department. I do a bit of teaching as well, so I've voluntarily signed up to help with first year teaching and I get paid. I go in twice a week, help some undergraduate students with their tutorials and their workshops, and I find that really rewarding. I enjoy it."

On... making sure you find the right office environment for you?

"I knew when I applied that JVCA was a big department for astrophysics, it's one of the biggest in the UK, and because of that there's a?big group of PhD students who all chat to each other at lunch, we all get along really well. There are all kinds of social events. It's just a really lovely environment and I think that's something that I was looking for when I was applying. I'd say making sure to talk to current PhD students and get an idea of that office environment is a really good idea.

It also means that if I'm stuck with a coding problem or something just isn't working and I'm not sure why, I can turn to the person sitting at the desk next to me and say, “Hey, I'm having this problem, do you mind having a look at it for me?”, and then you can work together and try and get some new ideas and solve whatever it is that's bothering you. They might have come across it 1000 times and be able to just quickly say, “Oh yes, you just need to do this, this and this”, and that sort of peer support I think is really important. It's worth making sure that you can have that.

Clearly everyone has their own PhD projects and is a specialist in what they do, so I can't help someone very much with the science that they do, for example, because I don't know how simulations work and I don't know how pulars work. That's completely different area of astrophysics than what I'm doing so I can't help them with that. But everyone in the department codes using Python and there are a few things like that. Like everyone writes using the same software, and so if there's those kinds of errors, then asking for help is easy. And if you need something that's very science specific you can talk to people in your group who will be much closer to what you're working on. And, of course, you can talk to your supervisor who will know the most of all."

On... shaping your relationship with a supervisor from the start?

"I'd say make sure you talk to your supervisor and meet up with them if you can before starting your PhD because your supervisor is so, so important and can help you so much. It is absolutely worth making sure that you can get on well with the person who's going to be managing you and helping you and guiding you through the PhD.

If you're feeling that you aren't quite sure or you don't really know whether it's the right fit, talk to your supervisor about that and see if you can get some accommodations in place.

The thing is, that relationship is so important and is something that you can put input in, as well as your supervisor. Your supervisor may have a preferred way of guiding students but if that doesn't work for you, you can always say that and say “Oh, actually I'd prefer to only meet once a month, instead of once a week”, and your supervisor might say yes, and might say no, but making sure that you have that input is a big piece of advice that I give."

On... taking on a teaching role alongside PhD research?

"I'd had friends in the first year of my PhD who were doing teaching and I talked to them about it, sort of heard about their experiences.

Then as the new academic year came around an e-mail was sent out asking for volunteers people to sign-up and give their help to some of the undergraduate workshops and lab experiments, those sort of things.

It's a fairly common essential part of a university course to have some postgraduate students there to help and guide the undergraduate students, and so I signed up, went through some induction training and was assigned to a?group of students and I go twice a week. I always have other GTA's with me as well, and I lead a workshop full of 60 or 70 undergraduate students and help them with maths problems that, to me, I've done that piece of math so many times that it's something that I understand well and so I can help people who haven't seen that before and explain it to them so that it's something that they understand."

On... why you don’t need to know everything before you start a PhD?

"Something less important is doing very hard work researching your subject area before you actually start your PhD because you're never going to know exactly all of the details of your fields before you start working in it.

Your supervisor is there to help you and support you and recommend the right resources to you that are more relevant. You can end up wasting a lot of time trying to find sources and trying to prepare yourself when you don't necessarily need to come into a PhD already knowing exactly all of the theory, and what you're going to do, and exactly everything about it because the first couple of months of your PhD will be learning all of that."

?