by Franziska Boenisch and Adam Dziedzic

You’ve made it! You’re a Ph.D.! But what’s next? Here is your personal todo list for the first days (apart from starting to read papers ;))

1) If you haven’t already: make a professional website. People want to be able to look you up, it helps to find internships, to establish research connections, and to gain some visibility. Publishing papers is one story. But with thousands of papers published each month, you also have to market your work. Tomorrow, we’ll give you some advice on how this website should look like.

2) Get a Google Scholar profile. Again, people will look you up, they will want to see your publications and your impact score(s) at a single glance. Google Scholar gives you this option.

3) Meet your advisor and talk about research interests and ideas. The ideal outcome of a first meeting is that they provide you with some entry-point papers to read in order to pursue your research interest.

4) Meet your lab mates. It’s great to have a lab of people around you who all went through the first week of their Ph.D. themselves. They already know how the institute functions, what the workflows are, and can give you valuable tips and tricks.

5) Make sure you have all access and accounts setup. Once you will want to really start your research, you don’t want to first go through the trouble of setting up user accounts on the compute infrastructure etc. So do it in your first week and be prepared once things get really started.

Once all that is going, start reading and thinking! We’re all excited about the outcome!