General tips for students

General Guidelines for Master’s and PhD Students

1. Principles

Science is supposed to be demanding and hard, but also exciting and fun. If you only feel the bad parts, something is not right and we should fix it.

• Supportive Environment: Aim to create a positive workplace that supports everyone’s professional and personal goals
• Diversity & Inclusion: Excellence is independent of background; diverse perspectives in gender, race, ethnicity, orientation, economic status, and other identities are essential for innovation and community wellbeing
• Addressing Bias: Everyone has implicit biases that can cause unintentional harm; we must acknowledge them, work to correct them, and be willing to admit mistakes
• Direct Communication: Group members are encouraged to discuss concerns privately with me, and I will always try my best to listen empathetically

2. Wellness, Work Hours, and Expectations

Sombody once said that researchers have total flexibility to choose which 60 hours of the week they want to work. Of course, this is a joke (at least for me!), but flexibility can indeed be a blessing or a curse. Some pointers:

• Work-Life Balance: Flexibility in academia is a feature — use it wisely (overwork ≠ productivity)
• Remote Work: Most tasks (e.g., writing, reading, coding) can be done remotely and/or asynchronously, and you can and should use this to your advantage
• Core Hours: Aim to be in the office from 9–5 for collaboration and social interaction, otherwise you will miss a lot of the fun
• Workload: No expectation to work evenings/weekends, if you feel like you have to, we need to discuss
• Rhythms: Expect ups and downs depending on deadlines, take breaks when needed and communicate proactively
• Support Resources:
  • Effective equality platform
  • Human resources help
• Sick Days: Prioritize health, always

3. Holidays and Vacation

As above, working longer hours or without a break is probably not very efficient for anyone. Science is hard work and most people are able to do just a few hours of mentally demanding work per day. Luckily, there is always some other boring, crappy thing to do for a few more hours. My advice is to try and make those few hours that matter really effective, so:

• Take Your Time Off: Fully use your entitled vacation and institute holidays
• Notification: Inform me in advance if you are not going to be around for whatever reason
• Conference Travel: You’re encouraged to extend conferences with vacation if feasible

4. Defining Research Projects

A PhD is not a sequential set of tasks that must be completed in order. However, funding often works that way. You will normally have a main project that will be co-designed based on your skills and interests (and the available funding constraints). If you want to bring up some side-project, here are some pointers:

• Balance: Assess novelty, risk, and impact
• Decision Gates: Use go/no-go milestones to steer project directions
• Goal Setting:
  • Short-term: achievable within weeks/months
  • Long-term: achievable over semesters
  • Visionary: dream-level (5–20 year) impact framing
• Publication Path: Each project should have a clear motivation and audience
• Efficient Use of Time: Prioritize projects with the potential for meaningful impact
• Collaborations: Strongly encouraged both within and beyond the lab
• Literature Deep Dives: Crucial for framing and scoping a successful project
• Project Selection Philosophy: See Michael Fischbach on Choosing Problems

5. Documenting Work

We must adhere to the FAIR principles in our research. Documenting what we do and how we do it is part of it. If done smartly, it does not take much time!

• Why: Proper documentation supports reproducibility, collaboration, and eventual publications or patents
• Format: Use electronic notebooks (e.g., OneNote, Notion)
• Backup: SACO CSIC (100 Gb), other cloud storage providers, GitHub, local NAS
• Version Control: Use private GitHub repos for all code-based projects
• File Naming Convention: Use: YYYY MM DD <Name> or YYYY MM DD HH mm <Name> for frequent drafts
• Further Reading: How to Record Research Notes

6. Literature

Staying on top of the relevant literature is essential for any research project:

• Responsibility: You are expected to actively monitor the state-of-the-art in your (sub)area of work
• Avoid redundancy: Familiarize yourself with existing work to ensure your project is novel
• Communication: Share interesting papers with the group
• Social Media: Can be an excellent way of keeping track of what other people are doing, but bear in mind it is designed to be addictive!
• Summarize: When possible, summarize main results with bullet points to spark discussion, and organize those in your ELN
• Google Scholar Alerts: Set up alerts for keywords and authors relevant to your field (Learn how here)
• Reference Manager: Use tools like Zotero to organize references and export BibTeX entries directly to Overleaf
• Journal Clubs: Consider forming small groups to review papers informally
• Skimming ToCs: Skim table of contents from key journals