Charlotte's PhD Research Tips

Charlotte?is a first year PhD researcher in?Manchester's School of Natural Sciences. Read her top tips for preparing for your own study; including how?to build your own reading list, why patience is an underrated quality for taking on a PhD, and the importance of taking time to get to know yourself.

This is an edited transcript of Charlotte’s advice, and you can listen to her thoughts in full as well as all of our other?research advice, here.

On... prep work in the summer

“So, I had a couple of zoom calls before I even applied for the position, and during those I did ask my supervisor, ‘what's your supervisory style, are you planning on being in the lab next to me?’ Because I was just interested to know how it was going to work. Then once I had the position I emailed, I think in sort of August time (I was starting late September), I emailed and asked, ‘is there anything I can be doing to prepare’, and his response was, ‘you need to rest because it's going to be really busy, so have some downtime now, but if you really want to do something, I've sent you some papers you can read’.?

It was quite nice to be told to chill, and then if you want to feel productive to have some PDFs to read. A little bit closer to the time I asked if I could do something more, because I wanted to feel prepared, and he gave me a list of synthetic targets to try and make, and asked me to come up with a method of making them. And then about a week before I started, we had a zoom call, and I showed him my ideas. So that was nicely structured in terms of being given some good background reading, and then having a simple task, to see how I approached it.”?

On... the three key factors in choosing a PhD project

“I got some good advice when I was starting to apply for PhDs. My academic advisor at my previous university told me that a PhD is about the research, the supervisor and the location.?And I was advised to decide which two were most important to you, and would make you the happiest, because it's really rare that you get all three perfectly. So, for me, the most important thing was having a supervisor with whom I had a good relationship, and living somewhere that made me happy.?I felt that I could be more flexible in terms of precisely what I was doing, whereas one of my best friends, she decided that she had to be in London. That was the most important thing to her, and she was more flexible on the supervisor and the project.?I think that advice was something that I really thought about a lot when I was choosing where I wanted to go. You're unlikely to get 100% what you want in all three of those, so working out what kind of balance is going to make you happiest and where you can be flexible, is important.”

On... developing a routine during your summer break

“I'm really not good at doing nothing! In the holidays I was working three days a week in an accountant's office, so I was doing accounting Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then because I had that nine to five structure set up, I took the routine into Thursday and Friday, but doing science.?And when you’ve spent three days typing numbers into a spreadsheet, getting the opportunity to read scientific papers is very exciting! So that's what I was doing, I needed to save the money, and I needed a job to do that, but it also helped in terms of forming a structure. I think with your PhD,?your routine is something that's really unique to you, and I'm still really figuring that out – asking myself, do I want to be a nine to five person, or do I want to occasionally work weekends and take a random day off in the middle of the week??It fluctuates, and maybe there's going to be a lot of fluidity in that, which can be great, but it can also come with a lot of pressure, because you can start comparing yourself to other people in your lab which is never good.”?

On... how I chose my PhD project

“I'd go on the FindAPhD website, which is I'm the classic approach, and I would just type in ‘inorganic chemistry’ and wade through the options. There were always quite a few - it's a very broad area.?What I wanted to do was a PhD, and I was just going to apply for any that looked like I'd enjoy them – I remember finding quite a few that interested me. What I really love is synthesis, standing in a lab physically making things. I knew that it was really important to me, and that I wanted a PhD that was focused on synthesis, so that could be organic or inorganic.?The inorganic stuff involves metals, and I really wanted to do research that had some sort of genuine real-world applications, so I was looking for something inorganic that also had some fun synthesis elements with some value to them, and that was how I chose everything I applied for.?A lot of the synthesis that I do is with things that are quite reactive in terms of air and moisture, so I have to do all my reactions using all these different techniques, which occasionally can be a little bit faffy, for example when you're trying to fight oxygen trying to get into your flask, but I find it really fun! It was more the actual practical ‘what will I be doing that interests me’, rather than the specifics of the research itself, that mattered.”?

On... how (and why) to build your own reading list

“When you're given your PhD title, and you look at the work of your researcher, you can start to build out a map to help you work out who the big names are in your field.?You can start collecting pieces of evidence from all those groups and putting it together like a jigsaw. You can go back and say, ‘ok, so this guy worked this out first and then it was developed by this group, but then it moved over there’, and if you can just get a feel for your area and start to recognise the names on papers, that can be really valuable. Even if you don't learn anything that's specific for your PhD, I think it can be a confidence-building activity to go into your project feeling like you at least know something.

I had an Excel spreadsheet where I dumped the title of the paper, and sometimes just added the pictures from papers. On a good paper you can often just look at the pictures and work out what's going on without having to read it, so sometimes I literally just screen-grabbed pictures that were useful, because I'm quite a visual learner. In terms of overall knowledge, it probably didn't make that much of a difference, so if you haven't done it, I don't think it really matters. But in terms of soothing my own anxieties, well I think it really helped with that. It depends massively on what you’re like as a person. Some people can be confident that they’ll know what to do when they get there, whereas I'm more of a chronic worrier, thinking; ‘can I do it, am I ok, am I doing the right thing?’, so I think it was more of a good exercise for me, than it was an actual academic pursuit.”

On... maintaining contact with your supervisor

“Something I'm very glad I did, was that during the process of preparing for my PhD, I?maintained contact with my supervisor. I was initially afraid of seeming too needy or concerned about what they were going to think of me, but if I'd have been less preoccupied with wanting to make them like me, I would have spent a lot of less time stressing during that period. Because every time I had a fear about how my supervisor was going to react to a question, he always replied and proved me wrong - he was really understanding and lovely about everything. Don't underestimate the fact that your supervisor has gone through this before you and knows how scary it is to be sitting at home thinking ‘how do I even start that?’. Now I wish I'd had more faith in my supervisor!”?

On... patience being a useful PhD quality

“Something that I really value about chemistry is that it really can humble you. You cannot have an ego when you walk into a lab, because there will be a reaction that you’ve planned for, you’ll try it, and then it won’t work. So every time you walk in you have to be willing to think ‘ok, what am I going to do when this doesn't work?’ Sometimes you have a plan on a piece of paper, thinking you want to get from A to B and it's going to take you four days, and in actual fact it takes you two weeks, because the first two steps of that plan don't work, and then you have to try alternative plans.?You can't let yourself get too stressed when things don't work out, and so I think patience is a very good quality to have.?

Also, if you can go in with lower expectations, then when anything does work it's bloody brilliant! You’re often pushing the boundaries and trying new things, and there's a lot of space for experimentation. But a lot of the research we do, in order to make these materials, we have to rely on a lot of very traditional chemistry.?And sometimes that traditional chemistry, that you think is well established, has actually never been written down properly, and there's all these little tips and tricks that you have to learn. Often all the papers say that you do it this one way, when really we all know that you have to do it this other way, but there's not really a book of everything that tells you what everyone knows, so you have to work it out yourself.”

On... the importance of taking time to get to know yourself

“I know it sounds really corny, but you should take the time to get to know yourself a bit. In particular, what you want your PhD look like, what you want your lifestyle to look like, and what's going to make you happy. I'm really fortunate that the way that I'm doing my PhD makes me happy, and I think that if you can work out what you think that could look like, it will help you to go into it with a clearer idea of how you want it to be.”