Skills to Succeed

Here we'll try to point you in the right direction about hacks you should know and skills grad students should work on to succeed.

Actually Good Grad Student Life Hacks

Use Reload @ UMCP. This gives access to all articles UMD has access to from anywhere that has an Internet connection.
Get free UMD software from Terpware, including Mathematica, MatLab, and the Microsoft Office Suite. More serious software run on decent computers can be accessed through citrix and the engineering virtual computer lab.
Add yourself to relevant email lists and spend a few minutes per day reading them.
- JQI, QuICS, and many other institutes have interesting events even for students not in these institutes.
- You can sign up for ArXiV newsletters, Physical Review journal newsletters, and more through their websites.
Improve your views using ArXiV 14:00 submission. Uploading your paper exactly at 14:00 (use NIST clocks to get the perfect timing) will make you the first on the page the day they are released. Uploading Wednesday at 14:00 means you are first for the entire weekend!
Go to seminars and colloquia! Meet new people and learn about all different kinds of research going on. It's easy to underestimate how important this is.
Physics Stack Exchange maintains this long list of physics resources from all fields.

Improving your literature reviews

Learn how to research a topic in depth and write a literature review. Even if you don't end up publishing a literature review in grad school, these strategies form great write-ups, notes, and thesis chapters. UMD Libraries has additional resources for learning and performing research, or you can meet with a staff member who specializes in research before starting a significant project.

To access papers off-campus, Use Reload @ UMCP. This gives access to all articles UMD has access to by a simple, magic button and your UMD login info.

For writing the literature review and properly citing your sources, a Graduate School Writing Center Fellow in the Physics department wrote up some info about common citation practices in physics, which you can access here.

Reading scientific papers

You will need to read frankly too many scientific papers during your PhD. It's worth hearing how others read papers when they need to read quickly and when they need to read carefully. Many others have slightly different approaches; here's one with a nice infographic!

Improve your writing at the Grad School Writing Center

The Graduate School Writing Center offers one-on-one consultations with other graduate students about your writing. You can go to them in the early stages when you're still brainstorming or when you have a draft to talk about, and you can bring them job and fellowship application materials, journal article drafts, candidacy paper drafts, dissertation chapters, and everything else academic and professional!

Schedule a one-on-one appointment here and find more info about these consultations here.

There is also an English Editing for International Students service! More info can be found here.

Mastering time management and planning

The National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity has a great series UMD gives us access to. You can learn about planning a semester and managing your projects.

Here's a helpful guide of tips for time management for grad students from the UMD Counseling Center.

Organizing your research

There's a wide variety of tools to help organize your research.

Reference managers: Zotero, Mendeley, and Papers are all there to help you keep your PDFs and other references organized. These are programs that are built to contain all of the reference information, let you search through that information, generate BibTeX references, and let you read and annotate the papers themselves. Each has their own strengths, e.g. Zotero is slightly better for sources that are not PDFs, and Papers has more features in its built-in PDF viewer. Zotero and Mendeley are free for most important features; Papers is $3/month for students.

For some comments about using BibTex and citation practices in physics, you can view some notes from a physics grad student here.

Note-taking apps: OneNote and EverNote are programs to help you take notes and organize these notes into useful categories. Several lab groups have their lab notebooks in OneNote, for example. (OneNote can be obtained through the Microsoft Office suite, which you can get from TerpWare for free.)

Surviving and thriving in a research lab

Learn important unspoken skills:

Ask for help when you've tried a project and shouldn't waste time being stuck
Try for a consistent schedule, but allow yourself flexibility when needed
Document everything you do! Create a "lab notebook" and write copiously in it. Pretend that you're explaining what you're doing to somebody else; in a few months or years, you will be that somebody else, and you'll thank yourself profusely.
Fill out the Mutual Expectations Agreement at least when you start with a research advisor and ideally each year or semester
Regularly communicate with your advisor
Have multiple projects at once. You can make progress on another when one is stuck
Be useful to older students. Ask questions, sit in on meetings, try to find calculations that you can do to help, etc. This can help you get on papers and projects early
Speak to the Ombudsperson after repeated bad interactions with faculty or other students

Talking to other students and hearing what they've learned to do or not do is a huge source of expertise. There are hundreds of students going through similar struggles of being a physics grad student and they all have ways to thrive.

Asking good questions in class, colloquia, and readings

Practice makes perfect! Try and come up with at least one question during each lecture you listen to, even if you don't ask it
Focus on the details of the images, plots, or concepts. Do any details seem familiar? Surprising? Important?
Asking to explain a concept again is a great go-to. If you were unclear on something, others were too!
Ask about connections between what was just discussed and the bigger picture, or ask about connections to another field
Pay attention to people who ask a lot of questions. Try and replicate what they do

Getting involved and professional development

There are many opportunities in the department to develop skills outside the lab, such as mentorship, leadership, and project management skills.

You can get involved with student organizations in the physics department or the broader UMD community! See "Student Organizations" on this page for more info!
You can also engage in professional development activities to hone your skills as a teacher, for example. See this page for more info.

Advice for TAs

Unless you are coming in on a fellowship or with an agreement to start research right away, you will have to work as a TA for at least a semester. While it is important to take this job seriously and to work hard to teach your students effectively, remember that your primary goal as a graduate student should be to get involved in research as quickly as possible. That means working to find a potential advisor quickly, hopefully by your first summer, as summer TAs are limited.

When acting as a TA:

At the beginning of the semester, schedule a meeting with the professor for whom you will be teaching so that you can discuss expectations for workload. Use the Mutual Expectations Agreement (MEA), found here as a guide to your discussion (ideally you would simply fill out this form together).
If there is a conflict over expectations, or if, at some point in the semester, you find that the demands of your professor have become overly onerous (e.g., asking for an unreasonable turnaround time for exam grading in a class of 200 students), the first thing you should do is reach out to them and ask if you can discuss their expectations. Let them know that their requests are becoming difficult for you to fulfill, and try to offer a reasonable compromise (e.g., if they ask you to grade exams in 24 hours, let them know that you are not sure you can accomplish that, but that you can get it done by the end of the week). If there is still a conflict, then you can email one of the physics department ombudsmen to get them to help mediate the conflict.
- When trying to decide if requests are unreasonable, it is ok to trust your gut. Remember that being a TA is not necessarily supposed to be a pleasant experience. The class sizes at UMD can be quite large, so grading can be expected to take a long time and be a bit of a pain. But you should not be miserable, and you should never be asked to work more than the 20 hours a week for which you are being paid (though, remember that this is an average: it is ok if you have to spend 30 hours in, say, an exam week when you have to grade and host lots of office hours, as long as you then work only 10 hours the next week, for example).

When finding an RA:

Search through the list of faculty on the department website and the websites for institutes such as JQI, QuICS, IREAP, etc., and find faculty that are working on research you find interesting. Looking at their CVs, Google Scholar profiles, and arXiv listing will help you get a sense of the research they are doing.
Email to let the professor know that you are interested in their research and would like to learn more. Don't be afraid to ask directly if they are currently looking for new students.
Be aware that many advisors will bring new students on with a sort of "trial project" before they officially agree to advise them. This trial project could be a reading project (i.e., to read, summarize, and discuss the current state of a subfield), or it could be a more involved theoretical, numerical, or experimental project that is closer to the kind of research you would do as their student. Treat this trial project as seriously as possible! Most faculty will understand that you are likely taking classes and have TA obligations, so it would be reasonable to work 5-10 hours a week on this trial project. However, the more time you can devote to this, the better. While working on this trial project, be sure to talk to members of the faculty member's group: ask them questions about their research, talk to them about what it is like to work for this faculty member, and ask them for help when you get stuck. Use this as an opportunity to see if you would like to have them as a formal advisor.
It can be difficult to balance everything, especially if you are taking classes, teaching, and working on a research project. This is completely normal. Keep expectations for yourself reasonable, and if you are having trouble balancing everything, try to maintain an open line of communication with everyone. There is no hard and fast set of rules for which of classes, teaching, and research to prioritize at any given time, but, remember that:
- You are being paid to be a TA, so this will always have to be a strong priority.
- Your grades in your classes do not really matter for the most part (as long as you pass), but it will be harder to find a research advisor and actually perform research if your fundamental knowledge is lacking.
- Ultimately, research is the most important part of being a graduate student, but most faculty will have reasonable expectations for trial projects when students are taking classes and teaching. If you feel the faculty member is being unreasonable and demanding too much time before agreeing to pay you and advise you, ask yourself whether this is someone you would really want to have as your dissertation advisor anyway.
- If you are struggling, you can always schedule a meeting with your academic advisor or another member of the department who can help you assess your specific situation.