Idk what new PhD student needs to hear this but create a system to organize and keep track of your experiments and data from day 1, including your negative data

When I first started I never thought of data as potentially one day ending up in a manuscript, especially if it was negative data, and when it came time to put my paper together I spent FOREVER organizing and finding data from early in my PhD

Especially highlighting negative data here because in the end a BUNCH of negative data went into the paper as controls and ruling things out. You never know how you’ll be able to leverage the data you have unless you keep track of it!