Towards a better PhD

Audience

PhD students and their post-doc supervisors

Goal

Define the role (i.e. expectations, responsibilities, rights, …) for PhD students and their Post-Doc supervisors, highlight the critical skills and good traits to develop:

skills: computing, writing, reading, presenting, underlying skills: zooming (know when to take a detailed or a higher level view). traits: independence, initiative,

and provide resourses to achieve those goals

Key skills to develop

Being able to synthesise papers/concepts/ideas/… to their esssence. This enables:

• recognising related problems, so you can take inspiration from what other people have done
• recognise limittions/weaknesses of your own methods, opening up new research problems
• comunicate your ideas. A paper and a research proposal need to be sold!

Key thinking skills that underly everything else

• analythical thinking (enables modular thinking and critical thinking)
• modular thinking . thinking in patterns helps recognising logical mistakes. thinking in terms of modules and interfaces leads to scalability.
• hierarchical thinking: different granularities of modular thinking.
• critical thinking