Reflections on a first year

In what feels almost no-time at all it is now mid-August and I have just finished my first year assessment. This should (fingers-crossed) promote me to the lofty title of PhD student (proper), and seems as good a time as any to reflect on the the past year and look ahead to the next.

Perhaps the biggest lesson I have learnt is that writing is very important, and that writing is very hard! Conventional wisdom suggests the only way to improve is to read more, and to write more - so my challenge for the next year is to write here (at least semi-regularly). If by some stroke of luck, anyone ends up reading these musings, and even more optimistically finds themselves nodding along, then this would be a huge bonus!

Ok, so onto the good stuff. I was super lucky to arrive in Cambridge with the Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe (LCLU) in full swing. The weekly coffee meetings in term-time have been a great introduction to all sorts of origins-research, meet people from outside of Cambridge and also start developing a small network within Cambridge. This is something I should take full advantage of in the coming years (note-to-self).

Early-on I was able to contribute in a small way to one of Laura Rogers’ (many) projects. This helped me settle into the group quickly, involved some fun dynamical modelling (check this space soon!) and was overall a great introduction to PhD-life. I then dived head-first into a project investigating the cometary delivery of prebiotic molecules to rocky exoplanets with my supervisors Amy and Paul. This was great fun to work, and collaborate on.

I recently submitted this paper and have presented the work at a couple of conferences this summer, which has been a highlight of my first year. It has been really energising to get peoples feedback on the work, see what everyone else has been working on and meet lots of people in the UK exoplanet community! (Not to mention a few post-conference drinks…)

Something it took me longer to realise than I would really like to admit, is that research is much more fun when it involves chatting to people, presenting ideas and thinking deeply (!). This is in almost total contrast to racing through a ‘to-read’ pile, de-bugging code and writing (alone), which is probably a more accurate picture of my early PhD life.

Looking back, I largely attribute this to feeling a (totally self-imposed) pressure for productivity and results when I started the course. This is by no means a new experience, and is perhaps a trait that has served me well through my education up to this point, albeit potentially to the detriment of my enjoyment of research before now. There is, however, some irony in the fact that this pressure directly led to less enjoyable, and less productive working patterns.

Partly, however, I attribute this to the huge competition for PhD positions (which only increases throughout a typical academic career trajectory!). I took a year off before starting my PhD (having failed to land a funded position the previous year), exacerbating any internal sense of pressure to justify my position, and also to make the most of the opportunity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this initial sense of pressure is something that has been echoed by a number of other PhD students, which strikes me as a huge shame.

I have spent lots of time reflecting on these ideas in the past weeks, and have naturally tried to think of how I (or anyone) could avoid this pit-fall if I had my first year again… but to little success. I am increasingly of the opinion that there aren’t any easy fixes. As evidence of this, I am sure that having some results under my belt played no small role in allowing me to relax and move away from my initial very individual-based approach to the PhD. So, perhaps easier said than done?

To wrap this up, I will quickly finish with some resolutions ahead of the next year. I recently spent quite a lot of time figuring out a rough plan for future work, which will naturally take up quite a lot of my time! This was a super useful exercise, but also one I found quite hard. Both in terms of nailing down exactly what I was interested in doing, whilst also matching this up to what should (hopefully) be useful and interesting to the wider community. In-between working on these projects, this leads nicely into the three resolutions I set myself for the next year:

• Sketch out a (rough) project plan each month. This should keep me actively thinking about where the wider field is moving.
• Collaborate more. Actively make the most of the people, and expertise all around me… and it’s fun!
• Write more!

Hopefully this added accountability will mean that when I come back in a years time, I can write a (potentially shorter) post saying just how well I did on all three… or I can at least hope!

Richard