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Hey #astrotwitter! I& #39;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& #39;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& #39;m at 116 and counting), and it& #39;s easy to auto-generate new ones.
2/n. Log what you do every day. Doesn& #39;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& #39;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& #39;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& #39;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& #39;re invited to do something N months in the future, pretend it& #39;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& #39;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.">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impo... Knowing what it is won& #39;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?
