Some random taughts on PhD. (views are personal)

• PhD use to be a stress period for most of the candidates. The reason mainly is our helpness in facing problems. Often we lack the support which was assured by the higher bodies. But always keep in mind, that everything is like has this same nature. Life always have positive entropy. Our role is finding ways or solving problems in the midst of all the adversities comes in the life. May PhD may have a slightly higher intensity but not any thing to destory you. Just imagine that you are driving a car in the road. Vehicles comes from opposite side, some comes in our same side. Some have better vehicles than us. Some over take us, some are slower than us. But if we focus on drive safely and with proper plan we will reach our destination safely. Even in the worst case even if we get to block or acciedent it wont refrain us from driving is it. Because we know we need to move on and we always enjoy the small satisification we get in reaching our destination. I would like to elloborate some conditions in this analogy and share some thoughts on how to tackle it.

• Some have better vehicle than us.
  Problem: It is a very common in PhD system, that you may be working on a topic not inlined to the expertise of your group. Often you feel that you are out of the race. Your results and publication progress will way slower than the other labmates or some other group in your school. Solution: The easy one is you can switch the group if you detect it in the early stage and you have better offer in your hand. But this is not the case in most of the students. You may have a family, which you may have to partially or entirely supported with your scholarship. So first step in such case make your self aware of this problem. Think ways to solve it. Rely more on reading, learning techniques and practising skills. Identify the groups which working with the problems. Try to understand how they are solving similar problem. Always read. Whenever you get stuck in a problem, and you are unable to navigate. Take a break in the form of reading papers. Atleast you brain get satisfied in getting a new knowledge. Always make more plans, I mean dont stick on just 4 objective approach in these scenarios, because you may not an expert to forecarst the risks in each approach. So keep making more plans and facilate you to try experiment a new plan if one in your archery fails. Whatever plan works can be accumulated as an acheived objective in your thesis. Use linkedIn, researchgate wisely so that you dont miss any new work in the field.
  Avoid comparison; yes this is very important. As we are humans, we always feels to do it in our life. Remember everyone have different life. To me life is a problem solveing process and everyone is solving different problems simultaneously. So you cant make comparision just based what the other guy is solving at the moment, his next problem will be different than us.