Rise to the Top: The Habits and Mindset of Top 0.1% PhD Students.

In this video I share with you the habits and mindset of top 0.1% PhD students and how you can join the club.

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▼ ▽ TIMESTAMPS
0:00 – have
2:29 – supervisor choice
3:47 – skills for papers
5:03 – short publishable experiments
7:20 – peer review
8:48 – get yourself some publicity
11:43 – wrapping up

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[Caroline-tvxy]

Hi Andy! Just wanted to say that I passed my Ph.D. defense yesterday and that your videos have been so incredibly helpful in providing me with some useful advice over the years. So grateful for your videos and keep doing what you're doing!!

[elizavetabelova]

There is a major quality crisis in science right now due to overpublishing. And this is particularly because of people in nanotechnology and material sciences who publish small experiments that don't add any value to the scientific community.
I was in the nanotechnology field for a while and to be honest I don't understand why someone would want to defend a dissertation on 100 ways to synthesize magnetic nanoparticles, for example. It is the level of work of a skillful technician, not an independent researcher.

[claudiolentini]

"Try to find that skill that everyone needs, and no one wants to get, and try to get that"
... And then, after long days of imprecations, you'll discover that there was a reason that no one wanted to get that skill

[gergotr]

In mathematics, we always list authors in alphabetical order, no matter what their contribution is, which can be a little frustrating if your coathors always come before you even if you wrote most of the paper. It is not fun to be always "et. al."

[ZhangWei-dfej]

In an isolated Ph.D., sometimes the only interaction is with some guy on youtube (Andy).

[Garcia-elf]

I’m finishing my PhD soon. I have 4 first-author papers published, including in Molecular Ecology and Current Biology, but no middle-author papers.

[suze]

I have to admit that the more I watch your channel, the more I think: get the hell out of it asap. Sunday late afternoon here (Netherlands), spring arrived today, and I'm basically (still) surviving: finalizing the lay-out of my dissertation (having no means to outsource); working on an job application (temporary contract); preparing the 4 courses I'm teaching at the moment (another temporary contract). Anyhow, thanks for the content!

[gracekimchi]

Ahahahaha I had to make sure that my playback speed wasn't actually 1.5x. Amazing. Thanks for sharing all your wisdom with the rest of us!

[javlontursunov]

Man u r awesome, Even thought I am not a PhD student yet, I am constantly watching ur videos . Thank you. May you be blessed

[harperlee]

At least in the US, I would say your advice about getting published in a top journal is spot on. Everyone I know in my field who published 1st author in Nature, Science or PNAS as a phd or post doc landed a job as a tenure-track professor, usually at a top university.

In my experience, "cheese" publications as you put it are not as helpful at all, at least not directly. Even things like "Q1" publications are less clear. Certainly you want lots of 1st author pubs in top journals, but in my field what counts as top doesn't always track stuff like impact factor or scimago rankings (it requires talking to top people in the field to know what are the top journals that people respect).

[LeonidasZ]

One other advise: Except from scimago, try to also get into an ABS listed journal as well.

[stretch]

It's a shame Schekman's advice and open criticism hasn't changed anything about publishing in the sciences. As it stands, the only real motivation I see for people to go into Academia is to work on a certain problem that they don't have the opportunity to in private industry.

[Garcia-elf]

Also my thesis doesn’t have a nice umbrella where everything fits. I worked on the genetic basis of pigmentation in a snake and genetic basis of freshwater adaptation in stickleback. Putting a thread through that in the thesis has been a challenge!

[KnowledgeGardenApp]

In my field (data visualization), the top conference (ieee vis) has several tracks that have quick turn-around (workshops, short papers, late-breaking. With Arxiv, the opportunity for wider feedback has increased for many fields. Good advice, Andy!

[colcoco_co]

That's interesting about the last author being a key role, what fields is that for? In social sciences we list the names based on amount of work done, so the last person is actually the least involved.

[ProbablyKen]

What about the good old scientists mindest to have love for ones field and produce good content and then publish it. I know it is also about career but this process just seems dubios. However, I am not yet part of this.

[ashdown]

Publishing a lot is not how you make research better, and the number of publications is not a good criterion to measure the quality of someone's work. And we don't need to be flooded under a massive amount of useless articles. I would like it a lot, if people stopped advising to publish just for the sake of publishing, or for self esteem reasons (0, 1%, really ??? is that really what you are doing research for ?)

[maximrojkov]

Andy, thanks for another interesting video!

I've used the design of your communication award (downscaled) for live CAD modeling on a lecture about 3D printing (and printed it during the lecture) :)

[Erintii]

I was to go person after my PhD for data analysis. My contract was not prolonged as students were cheaper and this was a priority not skills.

[TheGarrymoore]

Many times the Principal Investigators (PI's) put PhD students as first authors just because there are criteria requiring students to be first authors of papers, whereas the PI's are the real bearers of the original ideas....so "the first author" principle does not tell anything about the contribution to the research. More often than not PIs help PhD students to get the degree by letting them to be the first author.