Road to Ph.D.
1. Road to a doctor of philosophy
The road to a Ph.D. is completely different from those to Bachelor and Master's degrees. If we compare the undergraduate and master's programs to a trail hiking, then the Ph.D program would be like a climbing to the summit of a steep mountain. It is important to note that there are neither clear trails nor paths to the summit. Although your advisor may train you in the mountain-climbing, give you a brief direction for climbing, and provide resources for climbing, they may not guide you to the summit. Rather, individuals must find a path, cultivate a trail, and climb to the summit by yourself. This original, unique, and solid path to a summit that you have created is the evidence of a doctor of philosophy.
The left figure illustrates the road to a doctor of philosophy. From my point of view, a Ph.D. course can be devided into two stages: 1) a training stage and 2) a practical stage, each of these stages is indicated by cold and warm colors, respectively. The year for each stage may be just a general example, but it would be a good marker to know how much you have been climbing toward the summit. You may spend the first 2-3 years in the training stage and another 2-3 years in the practical stage.
2. The training stage
In the first few years, you may have rich opportunities to enrich your background knowledge and technical skills, through the course work and research projects, witch will build a solid foundation of your capabilities as a scientist. In particular, through this stage, it is essential for you to acquire an in-depth knowledge of your research subject, broad knowledge of surrounding topics of your research subject, and particular technical skills needed for your project. Your advisor may provide resources and opportunities for you to do so, or even coarch you a bit. Also, you may ask your senior students or staff members for something unclear for you. As seen in the figure, the slope is not very steep, which means that you can easily go through this step (note that this may depend on how high the hurdle for the qualifying exam is). However, I would like to highlight the particular importance of this stage because these knowledge and skills are vital to climb a mountain with much steeper slope in the practical stage. My take-home messages are the followings:
Do not skip something you do not understand. Try your best to understand these things.
Do not hesitate to do a new thing (e.g., learning a new discipline subject, a new computer language, etc.)
Invest your time and effort to yourself in this stage as much as possible.
An insufficient preparation in this stage may make the second stage a lot tougher or let you take a longer time in the second stage.
3. The practical stage
In the second several years, you may focus on your dissertation through handling projects given from your advisor or your fellowship. Based upon your knowledge and skills that you have aquired in the training stage, you may conceptualize your dissertation project, define the project goal, formulate methodologies, and conduct the research project. In this stage, your advisor may provide you just resources and opportunities for you to conduct your dissertation work, and may encourage you to be a self-governed research scientist. You are encouraged to solve a problem by yourself (through discussions with other people or reviewing papers/textbooks/docs) rather than asking seniors for "How-to-do". This is because this would be a good "training" for being autonomous, which is the most essential capability for a scientist. While working on your project, you may also take a mentorship role for junior students.
A good indicator for the evaluation if your are qualified as a Ph.D. is whether you are confident that you can initiate, conduct, and complete a research project alone. Unfortunately, all Ph.D. students are not always pass this stage as it depends on their capabilities for conducting research. As clearly seen in the figure, a potential path to the mountain summit is extremely steep, which tells how tough the road to a Ph.D. is.
4. How to make your Ph.D. life successful
First of all, be healthy. You should have moderate exercise, sleep at least for seven hours, and have social interactions with external people to be healthy. Being healthy is the most essential and fundamental factor for a succesful Ph.D. life. In addition to your good health condition, there are several tips to make your Ph.D. life sucessful:
Be self-motivated to tackle challenges, work on your research project, and focus on sciences. Your passions for research are the greatest source of your energies to working on your research project. Invest your resources (time and effort) for research as much as possible (but, not too much).
Be honest to Sciences. If you recognize that you do not understand something or you have only a surface knowledge on something, then do not leave it. Learn it. If you find a small piece of something inconsistent with previous findings (e.g., 99.5% of them looks reasonable, but other 0.5% looks not...), then do not leave it. Find issues and resolve them!
Do more than your best (say, 105-110 %). This is how we improve our capabilities. Doing your best may not be enough.
As you may already be aware, these tips do not involve any particular technical/knowledge on your research subject but rather they are all mental related. In short, the essential factor of these tips is to face and control yourself who pursues a Ph.D. degree.