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Hey #astrotwitter! I'm putting together a presentation for new students on "Life Hacks for Grad School", and I want your input - what do you wish you knew when you started?
Here are some things I've cobbled together over the years that make my life infinitely easier (combination of work flow/mental health stuff)
1/n. Use a password keeper! I use keepassx and I CANNOT function without it. With one master password you can access all your others (I'm at 116 and counting), and it's easy to auto-generate new ones.
2/n. Log what you do every day. Doesn't matter where or how, so long as you do it. I personally keep a text file with a progress log in every project folder that I update with what I've done and what the next steps are.
3/n. Back up your computer!!! Use GitHub!!! As my dear friend @kfogel once said, "once you start using version control, you can never go back ... except ... you can!"
4/n. Organize your files in a sensible way and put dates on EVERYTHING. Set yourself up to succeed when a collaborator asks you to reproduce a figure from a project you finished up N years ago. Here's a skeleton version of the file tree that I use:
5/n. Treat grad school like a job. Keep regular working hours - and make sure that includes time off! and yes I know I'm writing this on a holiday... one of the nice things about academia is the flexibility to choose what time you take off ;)
6/n. Use a calendar. When you are asked to do task X, put time on your calendar to do it rather than adding it to a giant daunting to-do list. For open ended projects, block off calendar time for "writing" or "data reduction", etc.
7/n. If you're invited to do something N months in the future, pretend it's next month and think about whether you would have time to do it. If the answer is no, just say no! Your future self will thank you for not over-scheduling.
8/n. Prioritize your mental health. Grad school is HARD. Learn about mental health resources and use them! It doesn't have to be an emergency situation to reach out to a therapist or counselor for help.
9/n. Learn about impostor syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome. Knowing what it is won't make impostor thoughts go away (I still have them every day), but it makes it easier to recognize them and put them aside.
10/10. Grad school is filled with people who Know Things (and often say them loudly). This is a reminder that you know more than you think, other people know less (and none of us know all that much).
These are just a few of my favorites. If you could go back in time and give advice to your first year grad student self, what would you say?
