How to be a good PhD student [01]

I "Interviewed" with the senior PhD student in my group. He is graduating soon, and he provides many good insights of what a good researcher should look like and how can your decide if you are really belongs to this research topic. Here is a draft of summary of what he has told me. I can't write down everything but I do try my best to collect strings from his talk and summarize the best. It is just a draft, and I'd like to see it to be a more mature guide for us new PhD students.


Prograstination:

1. You procrastinate because you fear it. You think it is hard and you don't want to spend time on it.
2. You can't force yourself to do something. The only thing you can help is to not let you do anything else, the so called Procratination by Nothing. That should work because you cannot expect doing nothing is easy.
3. Work is hard, so the essential way to avoid procrastination is to enjoy the work you're working on.

I asked him if he's already passed the phase of procratination. He said, no, you can never pass that phase, you will always have to fight it. At least, you know if you are procrastinating or not, that's a good sign.

The sign of enjoyment: (that is actually surprisingly extremely important if you want to success in academic) there is only one sign.

1. Lose track of TIME. 

• You don't know what is happening around you, you don't know what time is it now, you don't know if you are hungry or full, you don't know if it's day or night. The only thing you know is the thing in front of your computer's screen.
• This is indeed a nice description of devotion. I do like the feel of devoting yourself into something that really attracts your attention.

How to find the things you like?

Try as many projects as you can to really feels the essence of the project. I am now having 3 projects going on, but I don't actually deeply understand what is the research essence of the projects. The thing I believe we should all know is that 

1. What is the problem the project trying to solve?
2. Why is the problem important?
3. Why you can solve the problem using this way?

Writing is important, but you can't write well if you don't have faith in your projects. That means, at the end of your project, you should feel like you know your project in every propective, in every depth. When you encountering stuff during the writing procedure, you probably just don't have a CLEAR MIND in your head of what suppose to be here in this section.