The Literature Review: Knowing Where to Stop

This is the first guest post by Eloise Zoppos, a PhD student at Monash University. Here Eloise wonders whether managing a literature review is a similar to managing social media.

On a large scale or long-term project it can be hard to know where to start, and a PhD is no exception. However, now I’m in the third year of my PhD, I have come to realise that the hardest part is actually knowing when to stop.

The ‘traditional’ model of a 3 year PhD assumes that you spend the 1st year on the literature review, the 2nd year on data collection and 3rd year ‘writing up’. However I found that the literature review process never really came to an end after that 1st year. Even now, when I should be writing my thesis up, the literature review process is still not completely dormant. There’s always new research, new studies, and new information to digest.

After speaking to fellow postgraduate students I realized that this feeling of not knowing where to stop was common. I’ve come to realise that it’s okay to feel overwhelmed by the literature sometimes. At some point however, the constant reading has to stop (or at least be paused!) for the writing to begin. So how do you learn to stop (or pause) the reading and start writing?

I see some similarities between research literature overload and social media overload. There are so many different types of social media sites available: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube to name a few, that people have developed ‘rules’ for how to best manage the avalanche of information. Here are my top 5 guidelines for dealing with literature overload based on this advice:

1. Time: you do not always need to be connected

Social media aficionados recommend evaluating social media on the time we spend using various sites. Scheduling social media time (for instance during the commute to and from work) is one way to make sure the day is used productively. In much the same way, we should take a step back and evaluate the time we spend on our literature review within the whole research process. Schedule reading time between other important parts of PhD work, such as thinking, writing and discussing ideas with others.

2. Prioritise: don’t forget your offline relationships

Social media is meant to facilitate relationships with family members and friends. In much the same way that social media users should avoid devoting all their time to social media relationships and neglecting the real life ones, when researching we need to take some time to remember the purpose of the literature review.

A literature review is there to produce a well-rounded PhD thesis - but it is only one part of the whole. If we fail to keep the purpose of the literature review and the end result in mind it’s easy to get stuck feeling like you’re never going to finish.

3. Control: you don’t have to friend or follow everyone

Users of social media sites often complain about the personal, inappropriate or just downright annoying status updates that people post. But the beauty of social media sites is control. You don’t have to friend everyone on Facebook, and it is just as easy to ’silence’ people who talk too much. Having too many Facebook friends means that your newsfeed is constantly cluttered with meaningless information.

Likewise, in the process of the literature review, collecting too many articles, books or papers means that the good information can get lost. As easy as it is to get off track with new ideas and new directions, you’re only writing 1 PhD so limit your scope accordingly!

4. Familiarity: if you’re going to use it, use it well

With the amount of social media sites out there, it’s normal for users to want to dabble in all the various sites. However it is often recommended that users should concentrate on using their chosen site well, rather than just using every site for the sake of it.

This is a good lesson for PhD students in the writing stage of their literature review. When it comes time to write up the information you have collected, you don’t have to include every single piece of information you collected over the past 2 years or more. Focus instead on using only the key authors and the key arguments so you can critically discuss and evaluate these key pieces, instead of just mentioning them because you’ve dedicated too much time and space to less relevant material.  And finally;

5. Be realistic: anything can be overwhelming at first

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when learning or doing something new, and with all the options out there social media is no exception. In order to deal with this new users should pace themselves and take a break from social media every once in a while.

Whether it’s a cup of tea, a walk, or even just getting away from the computer, escaping and recharging can be vital to feeling in control again. This is true for new researchers during the literature review stage – and in fact is one of the most important points for the whole PhD process in general!

In the past 2 years, I’ve found that the difficulties of the literature review process are often underrated in discussions of completing a PhD. It’s easy to let the I-have-to-write-90,000-words anxiety take over! I found that thinking about the research and literature review process in this way made the whole process seem a LOT more manageable – I hope you do too.

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Finishing with perspective (and without finding Oz)

This guest post is written by Elizabeth Humphrys, who has recently completed her Masters Thesis. Her day job is investigating student complaints and misconduct at a public university. Here Elizabeth shares her thoughts on the feelings she experienced just before submitting.

I submitted my Masters thesis in October 2010. I recently received the examiners’ reports and was passed without any changes. It took just shy of four years part time, with a year of leave for good behaviour in the middle, to submit. All the hallmarks of graduate research were there: elation, tears, exhaustion, procrastination, productive work, annoyance and deep, deep enjoyment.

In retrospect, none of these emotions or experiences was a surprise.  What was unexpected was the distinct lack of perspective about the ‘quality’ of my work I felt just before I submitted. I knew it would not fail outright, but beyond that I had little sense of what the examiners would think. No matter how many times I read “It’s a PhD, not a Nobel Prize” I just couldn’t calm those thoughts that the thesis could be better, or more insightful and fretted about the result. I was concerned there was some glaring problem; some catastrophic oversight or drawback that would result in ‘disaster’, or some comment or view that the examiners would think was idiotic. Finally I worried that my insights into the topic would be seen as overreaching or, conversely, just plain ‘obvious’.

I kept looking to others for confirmation these ‘disastrous’ things were not going to happen, but no one provided the reassurance I craved. My supervisor gave me comments of course, and we discussed the chapters. We argued about key points, and, on those occasions where we remained in disagreement, I was confident that my position was defensible. Yet when my supervisor said, about a week before I submitted, that he thought I would be ‘surprised by the feedback of the examiners’ I went into a small panic. What does that mean!?

My partner, who read the thesis, told me he thought it was fantastic and I had nothing to worry about. But partners are meant to say this, aren’t they?! My partner promised he would hold my hand through any possible narcissistic injury that might occur as I read the examiner’s comments. Given my partner is a psychiatrist, I knew this was part truth and part joke. But I also knew he was saying something true: things do not need to be perfect, no one is, and examiners understand this. The reports would give critical feedback which is an essential part of the process of writing in public.

But to return to the motivation for this post…why did I have so little perspective on my own work? While I can’t say I was shocked to get a good result, I believe that had the result come back as minor or major revisions I would also have accepted these as reasonable views. How could I be so uncertain about my own work?

At a personal level it the lack of perspective was connected to my being a natural ‘worrier’.  No matter how much work I did during the thesis I constantly felt guilty if I sat at a café drinking coffee and not reading a journal article. Every weekend activity (as I have a ‘real job’ during the week) was laden with guilt about not working or not working efficiently enough.

The second reason was the difficulty of getting critical distance from the thesis as a whole, no matter how hard I tried. I set chapters aside for periods and went back to them. I had six months leave on two separate occasions where I did little work on the thesis. Each time I did this I managed to gain some distance and map out a new path. But, unlike other large writing projects I have done, these breaks, although they helped me find critical distance on each ‘section’ did not help me see how the sections were creating an overall narrative. I found it difficult to assess whether the question tested in the thesis was, at points, even being answered.

The last reason only became clear to me in the last few days. I think I subconsciously believed that there was some sort of sleight-of-hand, or magic, involved in producing a thesis. I didn’t really believe my key insights were the result of the process of research, analysing data or thinking; they felt more like  luck or chance (although if someone had articulated this to me while writing I would have fervently disagreed). As a result I felt there was something missing. Why did I believe this? Perhaps because insights came slowly and were given due consideration, there was no ‘light bulb moment’ where I ran from my desk to the street to exclaim ‘eureka’ (!).

The perspective I seem to have gained, only in finishing, is that completing the thesis is not magic although it is equally as wonderful. While we would all love to think that glowing examiners’ reports mean we are geniuses, but they are more likely to reflect that a thesis is the product of diligent, hard work; the result of exercising all your practical and intellectual abilities. The achievement is breathtaking, but very much the result of the ordinary process of research. I do wish I had realised this earlier. So my message is: you don’t need to have magic red shoes or follow the yellow brick road; diligent work will win the day.

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5 ways to fail your PhD

In Australia most theses are examined through blind peer review. Other countries have different ways of doing examination, but in every system judgment of any PhD is the job of a small group of experts. This is an assessment process unlike any other in academe and it pays to make yourself familiar with it.

You’ll be pleased to know that people have spent time studying how examiners read a thesis and what sort of document they expect you to deliver. The seminal paper is “It’s a PhD, not a Nobel Prize: how experience examiners assess research theses” (2002) by Gerry Mullins and Margaret Kiley. I consider this paper required reading for every research student, regardless of their location or discipline. There’s a lot I could say about this paper. In fact I have been talking about this paper for about 5 years in one of my On Track Workshops “What do examiners really want?”, where I spend two hours examining it in detail (there’s sessions coming up next week for students at RMIT – check your email!).

As you can imagine this is one of our more popular sessions, but I must admit I’m beginning to feel like one of those aged rock stars. Although the audience expects it, I don’t want to sing a straight version of my hit wonder from the 1980s. I want to sing songs from my new album. So here I turn around my normal presentation of the paper. If Mullins and Kiley are right about how examiners examine – what are 5 things you could do if you really wanted to fail (or at least be asked to do major revisions)?

1. Don’t talk to your supervisor about who you think should examine your thesis

I am located in the School of Graduate Research, who manage the examination process, so I get to read a lot of examiner reports and see the occasional complaint go by. Far and away the most common complaint is that the examiner didn’t understand what the student was trying to do. Usually this means there’s some kind of disagreement about method and how the student has handled (or not) validity, reliability and so on.

You don’t have to know exactly who the examiners are, but you do need to know if the supervisor is thinking about the right kinds of people. There aren’t too many academics who are truly broadminded. It’s best if you have someone who will be sympathetic to your methodology.

Sometimes supervisors take the confidential nature of the examination process seriously and may brush off your attempts to have a conversation about what sort of people they have in mind. However most universities, including ours, include an option for you to send a list of people who would not be appropriate. In my opinion every student should send a list of inappropriate people to their supervisor – if only for the record.

Just in case ok? Humour me.

2. Send your thesis to someone who has never examined a thesis before

Mullins and Kiley found that even more than methodological orientation, the amount of experience the examiner has matters. This probably makes sense to those of you who teach. Young teachers tend to have high expectations because they haven’t had time to see the full range of student abilities out there. The longer you teach, the more forgiving you become because for every new student you encounter, you have probably seen another who was worse. Some people can be nervous about sending their thesis to the world’s expert in *blah*, but they are exactly the sort of people you should be aiming for.

3. Write your introduction first

One of the most interesting and useful observations Mullins and Kiley made is that most examiners don’t read your thesis like it’s a novel – starting at the beginning and reading through to the end. Shocked? I was the first time I read this, but then I reflected on the last academic book which I read from start to finish… and I couldn’t think of one. Academic texts are  dense, difficult, cumbersome beings at the best of times and a thesis is even worse.

Most examiners read the abstract, introduction and the conclusion to see what the work is about and then look in the references, so you should write these last – or rather rewrite them at the end. Any questions you raise in the introduction should be answered in the conclusion. If these parts act as righteous ‘bookends’ the examiner will form a better impression of you as a scholar – and is likely to  be more forgiving of you if you slip up a bit in the middle parts.

4. Write a bad literature review

Oh boy. Where do I start? There are so many ways to write a bad literature review that it deserves a few posts on its own. The literature review is the nice party frock of your thesis. If the examiner sees that you have chosen the right frock for the occasion they are more likely to want to have a drink with you. It goes without saying your frock should be freshly ironed and have no stains on it – even better if it matches your handbag and shoes.

The kind of dress you think is appropriate is up to you, but I think you can’t go wrong with a little black dress (LBD). In thesis land the LBD is a simple, but competent run through of the major authors with a thread of an argument running through the whole. The argument should be connected to why you are bothering to do the study. It’s up to you of course, you can be more daring, but I would stop short of trying to be Lady Gaga.

5. Don’t let anyone else do your copy editing

Mullins and Kiley note that across all disciplines examiners report being put off  by ‘sloppiness’. Yep – typos, missed footnotes, badly formatted bibliographies and so on. Those of you writing in a different language don’t need to fret too much, there’s evidence to suggest that examiners accommodate idiosyncratic grammar more than plain mess. I’m not sure how much it costs to get a copy editor – but most universities will allow you to employ one under certain guidelines. If not, do a lot of favours for a grammar enabled friend and ask them to perform the duty for you. It’s hard to see the mistakes in your own work on the 700th read

I’d be happy to have a discussion in the comments section about fears and questions relating to examiners and examination – and a special shout out to all the RMIT students due to submit at the end of March!

*Update: Later Mr Thesis Whisperer found another 3 mistakes in this copy, other than intentionally missing full stop. That’s why I made him read my masters thesis :-)

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The Thesis wants what the Thesis wants…

This guest post is written by Magdeline Lum – Chemist, Metallurgist & Photographer, Master of Science Communication student and blogger. In this post, in honour of Valentine’s Day, Magdeline tells us about her experience of dating a Thesis.

I write this from my experience, and do so hesitantly, but at the same time it needs to be said: when you date a PhD student, you also date their Thesis.

I keep hearing that dating while doing a PhD student is fraught with disaster and that it isn’t worth it. The everyday wisdom is that one partner will have to sacrifice their brilliance to support the other. I started dating my boyfriend while he was working on finishing his thesis for submission. To say that timing was crappy would be an understatement, but almost three years later we are still together and very much in love. It hasn’t been easy.

There have been days, weeks, where I have felt that it was all pointless. At first I did not understand that the Thesis, (yes, with a capital “T” for which reasons will hopefully become clear), would be the third being in the relationship. It had much more pulling power than me and it didn’t wear stupidly high heels, clingy dresses or a wonderful body. It did, however, occupy much of my boyfriend’s mind. So much so that he did once leave in the middle of a party to work on his thesis. Some five hours later, he rang to see where I was at. I had ended up in bed very drunk and in no shape to hold a conversation.

There was no way to compete with the thesis. I have never grown fond of his Thesis. I don’t even understand it and I’ve tried. It took me months, almost a year before having a serious conversation with my boyfriend about his thesis. He had thought that I wasn’t interested in his work, which couldn’t be further from the truth. The number of journal articles that I have attempted to read in his field would top 20. My reading of New Scientist and Nature News dramatically changed; I charged towards anything in nanotechnology first rather than reading pieces from my favourite columnists and reporters.

This conversation was the hardest. I didn’t want to look stupid, but at the same time I’m talking to someone who has been researching intensely in their area for several years. It is impossible to not look stupid. I felt vulnerable and had to accept that being in a relationship isn’t about equal in everything that we do. Looking stupid and asking the dumb questions have never been my thing. I have always been a high achieving student, but this thesis had managed to strip it away.

To make matters worse the Thesis had the propensity to send its tendrils into other areas of the relationship. Dates would have to fit around what the Thesis wanted. Sometimes it was writing. Other times it was reading or worse still, sometimes it just demanded work. There were weeks where I was reduced to coffee dates of no more than 15 minutes. I grew to hate the Thesis. My boyfriend was a slave to it and I hardly saw him. My only hope was him finishing the damn thing.

I know that this sounds like I was the only one who compromised and was a pushover. To be honest, I don’t care what it looks like. It is what it is. A few of my friends teased that I had an invisible boyfriend and dubbed him Casper as he never showed up to anything during his writing. It was especially helpful to have friends who had gone through the PhD machine. They assured me that the Thesis would stop interfering with my relationship. In the meantime, had I met his parents.

For the record, I met my boyfriend’s parents a few months ago. I have to say that moment was a lot less stressful than any of the times involving the Thesis. My boyfriend’s parents fed me chocolate and told me a funny story from his childhood. All the Thesis has ever done is remind me that I will never be able to share a special mental connection with my boyfriend. Ever. That is the hardest part that I have had to deal with. The writing ends. Then it’s submission. Corrections get done and a doctorate is gained. What doesn’t end is the research. It continues.

I have learned that I can’t ignore the research my boyfriend does. It’s always going to be there and that mental connection he has is not something I can compete with. He assures me that he leaves it behind at the lab. It’s nice to hear it, but I accept that this isn’t the truth and I am okay with it. It’s part of him, our relationship. And just to complicate matters further, I am about to introduce my Masters thesis to the mix this year. Wish me luck!

Want to hear more from Magdeline? Follow @scientistmags on Twitter

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Doing a PhD is getting to know yourself

This guest post is by Eva Lantsoght who is a PhD student at Delft University of Technology. Here Eva reflects on how knowing yourself is an integral part of developing effective working habits

This post is inspired by a course for PhD students which I am doing, in which a small group of PhD students gets together for workshops (time management, dealing with stress, giving and receiving feedback, …) with a coach. The focus of the workshops is on what lies behind our behavioral strategies. Today, I’d like to focus on research itself, and the valuable lessons for life it can teach you.

Regardless of the field in which you are doing your PhD, you will need to spend a lot of time thinking. Thinking about how to allot your time, analyzing data or other results, critically reading published material, and reflecting on your overall progress. I’ll be zooming in on the last item of this list. If you reflect on your progress every now and then, you will learn about your way of working and about yourself. In my opinion, getting confronted with yourself is a key parts of doing a PhD.

1. Behavior patterns

When you reflect on your overall progress, you will discover your typical behavioral strategies with regard to the way you work:

• Do you only start working very hard when the deadline is getting very close?
• Do you tend to do small tasks first before you tackle the real problem?
• Do you  prefer to postpone meeting your supervisors?
• Do you make a complete draft, which your proofread until it is free of all typing errors before you send it out to someone else, or do you prefer to leave it with comments in it to ask for the other’s input?

To help you getting to know your way of working, you can track your time for a while and see when you are most productive (close to a deadline, early/late hours when campus is quiet, …).

2. Behind the patterns

Once you have determined your typical behavioral strategies, you might start to realize what is behind this. Most of these strategies are the result of some emotion:

• fear of disturbing or upsetting someone,
• feeling as if you need to prove your value before you can be accepted in your research group,
• sensitivity to your surroundings, or
• fear of disappointing your supervisors.

In the course I took, we spent some time determining what are the reasons behind our coping mechanisms. Perfectionism, my vice for example, can be rooted in the fear of making mistakes and being laughed at. I’m now challenging myself to send out draft documents which are not entirely polished, to avoid spending 80% of my energy on the last 20% of improvement.

Surprisingly, we discovered in this course that procrastination in some cases can be rooted in the same emotional background as perfectionism, while the results of it are entirely opposite. Once you learn to determine what lies behind your actions (for example by making a “ladder of inference”), it becomes easier to point out what actions you can undertake to avoid falling in the same patterns over and over again, and improving your way of working.

3. Getting to know yourself

Just as with research, one question leads to another question. What is the origin of these fears? How is this related to my character or past experiences?

I myself am still chewing on these questions to understand the deeper reasons behind my ways of working. Trying to understand why I make certain decisions and work in certain ways, has become part of the entire process of doing a PhD for me. Somehow, this part of doing a PhD, feels like growing up and becoming a more mature and centered version of myself.

Even though I’m through and through into the engineering sciences, I’ve started to realize that force equilibriums and mathematical equations are not the only tools I need for doing a PhD. In fact, those tools I already had when I entered my doctoral program, while now, I seem to need a whole additional set of skills. These skills are more personal, and self-reflection in order to grow seems for me to be a much needed attribute for fine-tuning my working mechanisms and getting the most out of my years in the doctoral program of my choice.

4. Getting to know how you interact with others

When you’ve gained a thorough insight in how you work, you automatically learn about how you interact with others.

Understanding your ways of interacting with others and improving these to make sure your communication is clear and adjusted to the other person, is a key feature for good leadership. Going through the process of doing a PhD, and as result, growing as a person, seems to me to be somehow undervalued in business.

This is especially true from my European point of view, in which doing a PhD is sometimes seen as just staying in school to avoid the scary outside world and a waste of years which you could have spent on gaining experience in your field.

5. Workshops?

I’ve followed quite a number of workshops for PhD students during my first year in doctoral school. Most of them provided me with a few nice tricks, but most of the advice was forgotten after a few days. On the other hand, the PhD course which I am taking has taken me to a deeper level and was of incredible value to me.

There are many coaches which offer their services to PhD students. However, in my case, getting an explanation on – for example – how to make a plan was never what I needed. In the end, I won’t make that plan as long as I feel inner resistance to it. Learning why I feel inner resistance against certain actions, was what I needed more.

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Are we big babies?

When my son was born I was obsessed with parenting books in the way only first time parents are. Most of the advice seemed to be on the subject of sleep.

The sleep literature is extensive because babies are bizarre creatures who spend most of their lives fighting to stay awake. The cruel irony is, if you let them follow this basic instinct, your child will become overtired. For the uninitiated this is when your cute, cooing infant turns into a raging beast who wants to sleep, but is so over stimulated they just can’t.

My child, 2 months old and already touch typing!

My son is now 9 and all I can remember of this advice is the phrase: “sleep breeds more sleep”. In other words: the more sleep your baby has, the more easily they will go to sleep. I have a theory that just as sleep breeds sleep, writing breeds writing. When I started this blog I thought I would only be able to write it for a couple of months before I ran out of ideas. As it turns out, I was wrong.

Writing a lot is a good way to breed more ideas. Yet the most common lament I hear from students and academics alike is that they aren’t doing enough of it. I wonder if we academics are a bit like big babies sometimes: more writing would be good for us, but it’s hard sometimes to get stuck in. I don’t know about you, but I find writing most enjoyable when I am fully engaged it all ‘flows’, but it can be terribly hard to get into this state.  

@jasondowns helped me understand this difficulty better when he sent me a link to an  interview with the writer Tobias Wolff on the subject of writing. The article is well worth a read for the way Wolff describes the working life of a writer. Wolff points out that most professional writers are quite boring people because the characteristics which make one a good writer – such as the ability to work alone – are quite anti-social. Many of us do a PhD because we like to teach;  teaching is profession where you talk for a living. By contrast writers spend most of their time in their own heads struggling with their own ideas. If you are a social person by inclination it’s not surprising it can be a struggle to write for long periods of time.

The anti social nature of writing as a process explains why we can be so easily distracted – or find it hard sometimes to just sit down and get on with it. Wolff says simply: “All I need is a window to not write”. How true this is – for me at least. In fact, over the holidays I found myself starting to clean the fridge just to avoid going back to the keyboard.

This is one of the reasons why regular habits are the writer’s friend. Again this blog is a good case in point. When I started last July I had been vaguely wanting to write down some thoughts on the topic of doing a thesis – both from my own experience and from my work with PhD students at RMIT. But I lacked a format which was going to encourage me to write. Writing into a word document felt like writing a thesis again – and I was so, so over that. Writing a blog feels more like you are talking to someone, not just putting words on a page. As soon as you hit ‘publish’ your words are out there. Delightfully, people write back in the comments section and let you know what they think.

Blogging feels more like a social act than a writing act. Maybe in here is a little insight which can help with the writing of a thesis.

Writing may be an anti-social process, but all writing is a still a social act – otherwise we would keep these ideas in our heads and never commit them to the page. If you are struggling with the unsocial nature of the writing process it helps to bring your audience into sharper focus. Since your most important audience is your examiners, one thing I recommend all students do sometime in second year is to write an examiner profile. This is easy for you students in the USA as you will will already know your panel, but for people in the UK and Australasia the examiners are outsiders who will not have seen the thesis before. You will have to imagine them, so why not use some techniques from fiction writers? A writer might use a series of questions to ‘sketch’ their character in words. I found a good list on the Bubble Cow blog, which I have changed into a list to get you going:

Write a one sentence summary describing your examiner’s current academic position
What sort of things does my examiner already know about my topic?
What is my examiner interested in theoretically?
What methods does my examiner like to use?
What might my examiner expect to learn from reading this thesis?
What annoys my examiner?

This little exercise will help you form a ‘picture’ of your examiner in your head as you write. I encourage you to show such a list to your supervisor to make sure that you both are on the same page about who will be reading the work when it is done. Once you have spent a bit of time developing up this ‘examiner’ you can then imagine them sitting by your side, reading the page you are drafting. Talk to your examiner in your head – what do you think of that last sentence? Do you agree with that idea? No? Maybe I need to fill you in on a little more theory?

While you do that, I might go and finish cleaning the fridge.

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Drinking and Your PhD

In honour of ‘Feb Fast’, this top five Thursday post comes from our guest blogger, PhD student and artist @themarquise , who would like to share her thoughts on alcohol and PhD life – how do they really mix?

1) Having a wine or two at the end of a hard day of research work can be a nice way to unwind.

You’ve been slogging it out on that thesis, paper, presentation, or artwork and you feel you can do no more. However, your mind is still racing as you try to switch off and concentrate on other areas of your life such as cooking dinner, putting the kids to bed, or catching up with Grey’s Anatomy.

A drink or two of alcohol can help you to relax, and if indulged in only a few times a week, can provide some health benefits. Some people may even use alcohol (or food) as a ‘reward’ for working so hard.

2) Having a wine or two at the end of the day can become a habit that starts to get in the way of productivity and your health.

Using alcohol to relax or as a reward can easily become habit forming. Most of us realize the current recommendations are that women should not be having any more than two standard drinks a day and for men it’s four.

However, not all of us are equally aware that we should be having two to three alcohol free days, commonly known as ‘AFD’s, per week. This provides our bodies with a rest from processing alcohol and helps to prevent us from becoming alcohol dependent. Having three AFDs per week will mean you have at least three nights where you can get some extra work done and  give your presentation the next day without a hangover. Furthermore, the combined effect of sitting on one’s bottom most of the day studying, and drinking alcohol is a sure way to put on a lot of weight: think of all those wasted kilojoules!

3) Some people find a couple of drinks can free up their thinking and lead their writing or practice into unexpected areas.

Alcohol can have powerful affects on our thoughts and perception. Depending on how much you have consumed, this can be moderate or extreme. On the moderate end of the scale, a wine whilst writing might relax you enough to see an idea you’ve been struggling with a little differently. On the extreme end of the scale, a little too much booze and you’re deleting parts of your thesis and moving files around that you will never see again.

At the moderate end, a couple of wines can lead to an inspirational frenzy of painting. At the extreme end, you find yourself staring at a dog’s breakfast of a canvas the next morning. Moderate amounts of alcohol can make us feel confident and happy, a useful thing at conference dinners. However, a mere glass or two more and we can be plunged into depression, anxiety or anger, none of which go down very well anywhere.

4) Small habits can become big problems that affect many areas of your life

In contemporary Australian society it is often easy to forget that alcohol is a highly addictive drug. Smoking has been ‘outed’ for the killer that it is, but alcohol is everywhere. Don’t get me wrong: I LOVE a drink. That’s why I’m writing this. I’ve loved having a wine as my ‘gosh you’ve worked hard reward’ for a long time now. I’ve also enjoyed drinking at pubs, clubs, social occasions and work functions, christenings, funerals, dinner parties, in front of the TV and in the bath.

Problem is, it can get hard to say no. Even as you realise that your drinking is starting to affect your productivity, creativity and health, it can still be hard to say no when the whole world seems to be offering you a drink. People often have perceptions of alcoholics as people who can’t function effectively in society because of their drinking, but this isn’t always the case.

I expect that every one of you reading this knows an alcoholic, or if not, someone like me who is a ‘problem drinker’. We manage to get up everyday, meet with our supervisors, whack out some words, and in my case, make some art.  But I’m sure that if we didn’t drink as much, we would feel a whole lot better about ourselves, be a lot more productive, and lot more creative.

So…

If you’d like to put your relationship with alcohol to the test, it’s not too late to sign up for FebFast. Imagine how much more clear headed you’ll be after a month of not drinking alcohol! And you’ll be helping another researcher out as all proceeds go to funding research into alcohol related diseases and rehabilitation.

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This is the first guest post by Squishy Scientist, a self confessed ‘crusty old post doc’, who is keen to share her insider knowledge with you.

So you’ve enrolled in your PhD – what’s next? Although no one will probably tell you outright, learning to fit into the existing academic culture is one of the most important tasks for the newbie. Although this post is written for science students, I hope what I have to say will be helpful to other ‘first timers’.

Unfortunately ‘academic culture’ can be a slippery concept. If you take the 21st century approach and ask Google, a quick look at the top ten image results for “scientist” is quite disturbing. Scientists are portrayed as men, mostly senior in years, who wear lab coats, have shocking outcrops of grey hair and predominantly work with bubbling vials of green goo.

This image is, of course, wrong. Scientists work in teams made up of people of varying ages and at different points in their career. It’s an international environment, with people from diverse backgrounds and cultures – and definitely better hairstyles. In your first week as post-graduate student meeting people is the most important thing to do – well that and not licking the floor (otherwise known as OH&S).

Other people are your best guide to how things work. Of course your most important guide is your supervisor. You have probably met them, but you may not yet have discussed your project in depth. This is the time  to get to know each other better, so talk about what interests you, what attracted you to the lab and this area of research in the first place and what you want to learn.

You will need to work out a meeting schedule with your supervisor early on; this can be difficult. Unfortunately most academic staff do not have administrative support; it can sometimes be difficult to pin down a date in their non-existent diaries. I’ll never forget the time when a professor’s wife rang the lab looking for her husband, only to be told by an embarrassed post-doc that the professor was actually at a conference in Cuba!

Many universities insist on co-supervision of post-graduate students. If you have two supervisors, or even better – a thesis committee – then make use of them. Introduce yourself to them all as soon as you can and put aside some time to talk about your project with them. Many secondary supervisors are happy to meet up on an ad hoc basis when there’s something you want to discuss.

If your supervisor is a senior post-doc, or junior professor, then you may find yourself side by side in the fume hood, setting up nitration reactions together. However, if your supervisor is the head of the department, then they may not be as accessible in the lab environment. So in your first week, ask your supervisor who is the most appropriate “go to” person in the lab for the basics. Where are the tubes kept? How do I switch this microscope on? Do we have any more butanol? The kind of thing your supervisor may not have a clue about if the last time they put on a lab coat was when a photographer from the newspaper came to visit.

Whoever your contact is, make sure you also establish with them that they’re happy to help you out with the basics. It is my observation, as a crusty old post-doc, that there is a growing expectation from post-graduates that other lab members exist to teach new students. This is not the case. Ask all the questions you need, even if they sound stupid (they’re probably not), but ensure you respect the time of those around you and they will respect you.

Speaking of respect, my top tip for the first week in your new lab is to make every effort to befriend the support staff that you will be working with. The engineering staff are the ones who will unlock your centrifuge when it gets stuck with your samples inside, the purchasing officer may end up rushing an emergency chemical order through, even though you should have got the paperwork done by Thursday, and the IT people will calmly ask you if you’ve turned it off and back on again when the printer won’t work. These are the people to turn to in times of trial, learn their names, say hi to them in the lifts and thank them every time they make your life just a little bit easier.

Try to spend time with the other students and research fellows; it’s important to find out what they do and how it might fit in with what you want to do. A great way to do this is to schedule a short one-on-one with each of your new lab mates, a coffee, or over lunch. Don’t be shy. Although you might think you’re a bit of a geek, so is everyone else, and you’re all in this together. Most departments will run welcome BBQs or organise a social night for students to get to know each other and the rest of the department. Make sure you go. Introduce yourself to everyone and don’t worry if you have to ask someone’s name twice.

The friendships you make as a graduate student often last a lifetime, both in and out of the laboratory, so what are you waiting for? Enjoy!

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