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How to Read Like a Doctoral Student

In his wildly popular 1986 book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten , author Robert Fulghum reminds readers of simple lessons they once learned but may have forgotten, lessons such as share everything, wash your hands before you eat, and of course, flush. During the past year, I’ve experienced the opposite of what Fulghum describes. Some things I’ve done my entire post-kindergarten life—that I thought I was pretty good at—I’ve had to relearn.

Things like reading and writing.

You see, I’ve just recently finished the first year of a business doctorate and the program forced me to revisit reading and writing skills I’ve always taken for granted.

In a recent twitter thread, I described my admittedly still brief experience in the program:

1/ Coming from industry to work on a business doctorate, many friends ask first, "Why the hell would you do something like that?" Then, they follow with, "So what do you do in a doctorate?" #phdchat — Kevin P. Taylor (@ktaylor) May 30, 2018

When friends, family, and people in my industry hear that I am pursuing a doctorate in my forties after a career in technology and entrepreneurship, they fall into one of two camps.

Firstly, there are the people who subconsciously savor the sight of a train wreck. These are the people who slow down and lean over to get a better view when passing a three-car pileup on the highway.

From these dear friends and relatives, I hear comments such as, “Wow, kudos to you but I’m so done with school. No way! So, what does it involve, anyway?”

When I tell the second group of friends and family about my educational plans and the “interesting” research projects I am pursuing, I’ll catch a sparkle in eye.

From these folks, I hear comments like, “I would love to do that someday. I almost applied to a Ph.D. program after undergrad but, you know, I had student loans to pay off. So, what does it involve, anyway?”

The short answer is reading, reading, and more reading.

In this blog post, I’ll share five techniques I’ve learned over the past year while learning how to read as a doctoral student, where I’m required to read, retain, and recall large amounts of complex information.

If you must absorb and make use of large quantities of information (everyone?), then you too will benefit from learning the powerful—but not easy—reading techniques that follow.

This is not the reading you learned in kindergarten.

5 Advanced Techniques to Learn How to Read More Effectively

In the past month, I’ve read 575 pages from scientific journals and academic book chapters in electronic format (either a PDF or a Kindle book). I’ve read several hundred additional pages in paper books.

This is a normal reading load in my program.

The reading doesn’t always go smoothly. Many time over the past year—usually after 10-12 hours of binge reading—my eyes would quiver and water.

At one point I could no longer focus my eyeballs on words. Imagine that feeling when trying to do your…let’s imagine…50th push-up but your arms just stop taking orders from your brain.

So, how do doctoral students read so much dense material and keep it all straight? Scientific articles are not reading cliffhangers. No Harry Potter or The Hunger Games 1 for doctoral students.

And, just as important, how do doctoral students retain and recall everything we’ve read?

During the first few months of my doctoral studies, it was clear I was coming into the program ill-equipped for the amount and type of reading that was expected. The techniques that follows are what I found work best for me. 2

Read with a Purpose in Mind

Do you read novels at work?

Probably not, if you’re like most people. You have job to do, for crying out loud. But, when you read like a doctoral student, reading is your job. You must treat it as such.

Keeping that in mind, every time I crack open a book or journal article, I do so with a clear purpose in mind.

I read to accomplish a predefined goal. When done, I don’t linger in the material, I move on. If you don’t take anything else away from this article, remember to read for a specific purpose.

Let’s look at some reasons I might need to read something. Depending on your job, you may come up with a different list.

Purpose for Reading

• When I start a new research topic, I likely don’t know much about it. I won’t be sure what research questions 3 to ask. What has already been discussed and researched? Who is writing and working in the area? When doing this type of survey-level reading, I stay at 30,000 feet. My goal is to understand terminology, categorization, schools of thought, common research methods, seminal works, and prolific authors.
• The world evolves over time and scientific knowledge is no exception. The state-of-the-art knowledge a year ago could now be refuted, retracted, or otherwise out-of-favor. Assuming I’ve developed a specific research question on a topic and understand the area broadly, I’ll want to delve into the specifics—detailed information on hypotheses, constructs, phenomena, models, methods, and theories.
• If I have a general understanding of a topic and know the current state of knowledge, I’ll want to learn what gaps exist in the current knowledge about a topic (e.g. the effect of passion on launching new ventures). If I have a specific question in mind, has it already been answered? If it has, am I convinced the answer is plausible? Or, are there reasons to doubt (e.g. are currently accepted conclusions built on shaky research or are the conclusions over-generalized)? If my research question hasn’t been answered yet, this could point to a possible research opportunity.
• Sometimes I need to acquire a new skill. For instance, I may need to test the reliability of a set of survey questions or I may need to perform a statistical analysis that I haven’t used before. In what ways have previous researchers already done the same things? (Precedent is important in science.)

Your method of reading should be driven by its purpose. To gather the right level of information with the least time investment, I read in layers.

Read in Layers

Imagine a journal article or academic book is an onion. Both consist of layers of material. And, both can make you cry.

Thinking of reading material as a series of layers to be peeled focuses my time and energy on only the layer that will best serve my purpose at that moment.

Layer One Scanning

The first layer of a piece is its outer shell. Layer one scanning reveals the most basic information. I use that information to decide if it is relevant to my purposes.

The output of layer one scanning is simply a list of relevant pieces I will later read for layer two survey-level information.

For a journal article, 4 the first layer is comprised of just the title and abstract.

Together the title and abstract should contain enough information to decide if the article warrants closer examination.

The first layer of a book includes its title, cover material, table of contents, and any relevant book reviews.

If I believe a piece could be useful to my research, I move it to a second layer reading to understand its background, conclusions, and key points.

Layer Two Reading

Layer two reading is the scientific equivalent of CliffNotes™.

The second layer of a journal article is comprised of the abstract, introduction, and conclusion, also known as the AIC . In layer two reading, I quickly read the abstract, introduction and conclusion and lightly skim the method and analysis sections and all tables and figures.

A book’s second layer consists of its preface, introduction, table of contents, chapter introductions and conclusions, and, again, any figures and tables. In addition, I skim the body of each relevant chapter looking for important nuggets. This will give me a fair approximation of a book’s contents with only a few hours investment.

Layer Three Reading

The third layer of a piece represents its nitty-gritty details.

A third layer reading is a full, detailed examination of the entire piece (article or book). At this level of reading, I engage deeply with the material, reading it front to back, closely examining every figure and table, every claim or finding, every step of its narrative.

Clearly, I reserve third layer reading to pieces that are highly relevant to my topic of interest.

While reading each progressive layer of material, I highlight and annotate. In other words, I engage the author in a conversation via the margins of the piece.

Converse with the Author

Active learning increases information retention and recall. In fact, systems such as the SQ3R Method provide a well-trodden approach to active reading.

My version of active reading includes reading in layers (action) and conversing with the author (another action) at increasing levels of detail. Conversing with the author requires both systematically highlighting text and scribbling comments in the margins.

The deeper I read, the more I converse. The conversation should heat up as I develop a more nuanced view of the piece.

Highlight and Annotate

When I read in layer two, focusing on the abstract, introduction, and conclusion, I highlight the most important points in yellow, usually less than one sentence per paragraph. Orange highlighting designates supporting points, while sky blue marks any references I need to further examine.

In addition to structured highlighting, I write brief notes in the margins, questions, cross-references, etc. I specifically annotate the following:

• Purpose of the piece,
• Gaps addresses,
• Gaps not addressed,
• Sketch out the theoretical model,
• Hypotheses,
• Sample and methods used (survey, experiment, etc.),
• Findings, and
• Obvious inconsistencies, questions, or cross references to related material.

Make Up Your Own Shorthand

I use my own homemade shorthand:

• “RI” is for a research idea,
• “Q” is for a question,
• Empty Square is a to-do item (i.e. a checkbox),
• “Gap” identifies a gap in the literature,
• “RQ” is the piece’s research question.

Here is an example of an article I recently read at layer three for a research methods class:

Consume instead of Preserve

If you are anything like me, you love books. You probably have stacks of books sitting near your chair as you read this. Like me, you might even have some in protective covers.

But when I read to learn, I consume my material. I destroy books and journal articles with highlighters and red pens.

Yes, deface, mutilate.

Here’s a recently defaced PDF:

I should be clear, though. I only deface books in electronic format or books still in print that I can easily replaced.

If a book is out-of-print or borrowed (e.g. from a library), I never mark in it but instead use plenty of sticky notes.

The point is that purposeful reading of a book or article is important work. Work often requires consuming resources.

The book or journal article is there to serve my purpose.

Summarize and Synthesize the Material

After spending time reading, highlighting and annotating an article or book, it is time to put the new information in context and make sure it is available for future recall.

Unlike the ancients and their method of loci 5 people today are not trained to retain and recall vast quantities of detailed information using memory alone.

Instead of trying to remember everything using my sketchy-at-best memory, I use a structured process of summarizing and synthesizing new information. How in-depth I do this depends on the reading layer in which I’m operating.

During layer one reading I’m simply trying to collect and organize relevant sources for later use. During my searches, if a piece looks interesting based on its title and abstract, I simply import the reference into Zotero 6 7 , my citation management software.

After a layer two reading, I will have highlighted and annotated the most important parts of the book or article. Immediately after reading—or better, while reading—I put notes into a structured Google Sheet called a “conceptual synthesis worksheet.”

I create one conceptual synthesis worksheet for each important keyword or concept in my research topic. These worksheets also correspond to the subfolders in my Zotero citation management software. For example, a current project has worksheets and Zotero subfolders for the following topics: Entrepreneur Personality, Angel Decision-Making, Angel Motivation, and Angel Investor Characteristics.

After layer two reading, in addition to populating a row in a conceptual synthesis worksheet, I often write (meaning sometimes write) a prose summary and synthesis of the piece in a structured “Journal Reading Summary Form.” In the JRSF, I address the following questions:

• What is the aim of the research? Specifically, what “big picture” practical question is highlighted and what more focused research question is addressed?
• Why should anyone care?
• What major theory(ies) are used to support the work?
• What methods are used to test the study’s hypotheses or research questions?
• What are the major findings/conclusions?
• What are the most important contributions of the research?

Early in my doctoral program, a professor handed out these questions to the class. But, there are several “how to read a journal article” documents floating around the Internet with similarly structured note-taking forms.

Layer three reading helps develop a deep understanding of a piece. In my experience, this only occurs after attempting to synthesizing the material with other research I’ve read and with my own thoughts.

Layer Three

Synthesizing material during level three reading requires developing an understanding of how the piece relates to the work of others and the work that I am doing. This is where I really question the material, think critically. Question everything: assumptions, methods, sample, validity, and reliability. Where are the contradictions? Do the conclusions make sense in the real world? What are the flaws (all research is flawed) and how could those flaws be overcome in future research?

I use one of two ways to synthesize material during layer three reading (deep reading). If a piece is not immediately needed, I write a stand-alone memorandum and store it in Zotero.

If I need the synthesis for a current project, I might also create a shortened version of the memorandum and include it in the project’s annotated bibliography , if it exists. In any case, I also save the AB entry in Zotero for future use.

Go Read Like a Doctoral Student

Whether you are a doctoral student, an entrepreneur, or engage in other knowledge work, the skills to efficiently filter through large amounts of information and purposefully capture and use just what you need can be a competitive advantage.

For example, I follow over a thousand blogs in my Feedly account . I check my account once a week or so and there are always hundreds of new posts.

I use similar techniques to what we’ve explored in this article to quickly scan at layer one, survey-level read at layer two and, rarely, dive deep at layer three. Blog posts and web pages that pass my layer one scan go into an Instapaper folder until I have time to read it at layer two.

My challenge to you today is, think about what we’ve discussed in this article. How can you use these techniques to stop reading…all…the…words…in a book or article and just read to accomplish your specific purpose?

What information organization system can you set up this week using Zotero, Evernote, Feedly, Instapaper, Google Drive, etc. to organize and manage the information you consume and want to recall?

Robert Fulghum, the author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten shared many useful lessons from kindergarten. But, even he assumed reading was a given. But reading at an advanced level, for a purpose, takes a systematic approach. Now you have the necessary tools to do just that.

Share this post:

• Well, unless you happen to be a scholar researching Harry Potter or The Hunger Games .
• The techniques are not my invention and have been shamelessly borrowed from other smart people.
• Good research questions are ones that investigate something interesting, that are valuable either practically or theoretically, and that can possibly be answered given the researcher’s resources, time frame, and skill set.
• Journal articles follow consistent formats. Quantitative articles often contain an abstract, introduction, method, analysis, discussion, and conclusion section.
• Also know as memory palaces.
• Zotero has a powerful “Connector,” or browser plugin, that makes it easy to import sources directly from web pages and library databases.
• Each of my writing projects might use 5-8 Zotero subfolders to organize the material. You could alternatively use another citation database, or even Evernote , Google Drive , or Dropbox for organization.

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Thanks a lot for this article, so helpful as a new PhD candidate. I especially liked the Layer reading method and conceptual synthesis worksheet.

Thanks, Sarah — good luck with your PhD.

This is really a helpful article,I have gotten a couple of nuggets from it,I plan to use them during my researches.Glad I stumbled on this article.

Really helpful article. I know I am replying multiple years later, but I have a question. How do you do all this and still read multiple journal articles? It takes me several hours just to finish a single article by reading through, so I can barely get to the next article I have to read. What enabled you to do all of this layered reading and writing for one paper that you read and still be able to read other papers without it taking millenia?

Scott, thanks for the questions. In short, the point of the layers is to save myself time. I only read papers at layer 2 if layer 1 indicated it is relevant to my project. If not, I’ve just saved myself a lot of time. Layer 3 papers are the ones I spend the most time with but those are the most important papers and deserve the time.

If you are taking several hours to read each paper, let me reassure you that it will get faster, especially if you use a triage system like the one I describe here. As you get to know a particular literature well, you will skim much of the front end of a paper because it’s repeating what you already know. You’ll be looking for the results and any anomalies or issues with the methods.

Good luck in your journey.

Wow I read this and got inspired, I did not feel anxious about the idea of reading until my eyes hurt or felt some discomfort. Wonderful writing! This is an article most PhD students need to see.

Thank you for this information. The conceptual synthesis worksheet will be very helpful to current and future research and assignments.

You’re welcome!

Kevin- This is awesome and incisive work. Love the practicality. Well Done!

Thanks for reading!

Glad you enjoyed the post. Thanks for the recommendation for “Digital Paper.” I’m eager to learn more techniques. I’ve read the skimming, scanning, extracting terminology the book description mentions but it looks like it is more extensive than what I’ve seen previously. I’ll check it out.

Great writeup Kevin!

I wanted to pass on a related reading, “Digital Paper” by Andrew Abbott (Sociology prof @UChicago), which is about the art of scholarly library research. He has 7 stages (“design, search, scanning/browsing, reading, analyzing, filing, and writing”), which has some similarities to how you outlined your process in this post.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo18508006.html

Getting into the right mindset to read scientific papers quickly:

Before you start anything, you need to isolate your singular goal for reading papers in the first place. Otherwise, you’ll be passively reading every paper that comes up rather than hunting for specific details. Don’t be a forager, consuming anything edible that crosses your path. Be a hunter: have a specific target that keeps you selective, efficient, and guides every step you take.

Most of these tips are designed to help you focus on extracting value efficiently so you won’t give up after two papers! So, what is your goal here? Is it:

• Getting a solid foundation in your field?
• Collecting the newest research for a cutting-edge literature review?
• Finding ideas and inspiration to further your own research?  

I’ll be honest here: The first dozen papers of a new subject will be a grind. But it gets easier, I promise! When you find yourself blasting through the “template” introduction and recognizing citations you’ve already read, you know you’re close to being an expert. At this point, if you’re struggling to understand a new paper in the field, it’s likely the authors’ fault, not yours. 

Keep in mind that academics aren’t exactly known for concise writing. Practice skimming paragraphs for high-value verbs, numerical values and claims. Skip over wordy low-value prose like “We thus appear to have potentially demonstrated a novel and eco-friendly synthesis method for…” It’s easy to fall back to a casual fiction-reading mentality. Try to stay in a high-energy search mode and you’ll be effectively done in half the time.

Later on I’ll reference our journal article notes template , which I used to synthesize notes for my literature review. Go ahead now and open it in Google Drive where you can download and edit it for free. We just ask that you drop your email so that we can stay in touch on new helpful resources and awesome new tools for scientists.

How do you read scientific papers effectively?

Below are my tips for how to read scientific papers most effectively. I used this methodology to write a critical literature review in a brand new field in about 4 months, citing over 150 papers. My first-author paper now has nearly 1000 citations in only six years since publication, making it my advisor’s most highly-cited paper in his 30-year career! You can do this. Just keep reading: 

1. Briefly read the Abstract

The abstract is your most condensed look at the paper. Read it quickly and highlight any claims or phrases that you want more details on. I like to copy the entire abstract text or screenshot into the journal article notes template for later reference. It also helps to copy the keyword text into the template or your citation manager tags so you can search for them later. Things to read for:

• Is the research applicable to what you need right now?
• Are the findings significant enough to help you with your goal?
• What is the most interesting aspect of this paper?

2. Carefully read the Conclusion

Reading the conclusion gives you an instant look at the quality of the paper. Do the authors seem to make claims bigger than appropriate for the scope of the paper? Do they use hyperbole to inflate the importance of the work? Are the results not clearly stated? These could be red flags identifying a poor quality paper. 

Highlight and copy a few of the most important phrases or sentences out of the conclusion into the journal article template in the first bulleted section or into the notes section of your reference manager. Look for:

• What the authors think they accomplished in this work.
• The reasoning behind their results. Any useful insights?
• Ideas for future experiments.  

3. Identify the most important figures and dig through the Results & Discussion for more detail

If you’re still interested after the first two steps, start digging into the results and discussion for more details. Before making the deep dive, write down the specific questions you need to answer in your notes section. Search the paper for those answers, writing down new questions as they come to mind. 

One favorite strategy here is to look at each figure, read the caption and then dig through the text for supporting information (use Ctrl+F for “Fig. 3”, for example). The figures should tell the story as well as (and more quickly than) the text. 

Copy and paste specific claims you may want to quote or paraphrase later. Isolate what the authors think they did from your own commentary and summarize it in your own words.

4. Search the Methods section to answer questions if necessary

The Methods section is usually the most tedious and tiring to read. That’s why we don’t do it first. Only go through it when necessary or you’ll never get to the 100 other papers you just downloaded.

Go back through the Methods when:

• This paper showed a different result than another similar paper, and the methods may have caused the difference. 
• You’re sure you want to include the paper and you want to be critical of the way they conducted their experiments. 
• You may want to replicate their experiment in your own work.

Make sure to note anything unique, odd, or unexpected in their methods. Maybe it will lead to a breakthrough in your own work or help explain a surprise result!

5. Summarize your thoughts and critiques

Re-read your notes so far to check for any missed questions. Go back and extract sentences or paragraphs of the paper that you want to challenge so you can quickly find them verbatim. Write your own thoughts and questions around those topics so you can copy them into your literature review later. Ideas for notes:

• What would you have done differently in the experiment or data analysis?
• Is there an obvious gap or follow-up experiment?
• Does this paper uniquely contribute to the field’s body of knowledge? What is its contribution?

6. Copy important figures into your notes

This is the most important step but many don’t do this. Figures are the anchors of every good journal article and the authors who spend the most time making excellent figures also will get cited the most often in review papers. This leads to even more citations from experimental articles. My secret for getting the most citations of my review paper was to spend more time than typical finding or creating the best possible figures for explaining the content. You can do this too, it just takes time!

The best reference manager Zotero doesn’t have an “add image” button in the “Notes” section but you can actually screenshot the image with the Snipping Tool then Ctrl+v paste it into the notes section! Now when you come back to the paper you’ll get an instant look at the most significant figures. If you know you want to use one of these figures in your review, add a tag to the paper like “Figure Rev. Paper 1”.

7. Pick important references (especially review papers) out of the Introduction and Discussion

Now that you have a good understanding of the paper, it’s time to start tidying things up and thinking of where to go next. Skim the introduction for helpful references or check the first 5-10 listed in the References section to find mostly review papers you can use for new leads. Go and download these into an “Unread review papers” folder in your citation manager for when you get stuck later. 

Then, go to the journal/library website and check for new papers that have cited this paper. This will help you follow the trail of a specific research topic to see how it’s developing. Download the interesting ones and put them in an “unread” folder for this very specific research topic. In Zotero, you can even tag the paper as “related” to the current paper for quick access later.  

8. Clean up the metadata if you plan on citing this paper later

If there’s a chance you’ll cite this paper later, make sure to clean up the metadata so your word processor citation plugin creates a clean reference section. Author initials may be backward, special characters in the title may be corrupted, the year or issue of the journal could be missing or the “type” of citation could be wrong (listed as a book instead of journal article) which would change the format.

Fully tag the paper using whatever system you’ve come up with. Keywords, chemicals, characterization methods or annotation tags like “Best” can all be useful. One other trick I used was to come up with an acronym for the paper I was about to write - “NMOBH” for example - and use that as a tag in any paper that I planned to cite later.

Being methodical in your post-read organization will save you many hours and endless frustration later on. Follow these tips on how to organize your research papers and you’ll be a pro in no time. You’re almost done, but don’t skip this part!

9. Take a break, then repeat!

This methodology makes it a little easier to get through a paper quickly once you get some practice at it. But what about 10 papers? 100?! You can’t do all of your reading in a week. I set a habit for myself over the summer to read two papers a day for 2 months. If I missed a day, I made it up the next day. This keeps you fresh for each paper and less likely to miss important points because you’re falling asleep!

Get comfortable. I preferred to kick back on a couch or outside in a chair using my laptop in tablet mode so I had a long vertical screen and a stylus to highlight or circle things. Reading 2-column scientific articles on a 13 inch 16:9 laptop screen at a desk for hours on end is a special kind of torture that I just couldn’t endure. Change scenery often, try different beverages, take breaks, and move around!

Here are some bonus tips for breaking the monotony between papers:

• Pick your top few most controversial, confusing, or interesting papers and ask a colleague or advisor for their thoughts. Bring them some coffee to discuss it with you for another perspective. 
• Email the authors to ask a question or thank them for their contribution. This is a great way to make a connection. Don’t ask for too much on the first email or they may not respond - they are busy!  
• Reward yourself for every paper read. Maybe a small snack or a short walk around the block. Physically cross this paper off your to-do list so you internalize the good feeling of the accomplishment!

How do you choose which papers to read next?

So you’re downloading 15 new papers for every 1 paper you read? This could get out of control quickly! How do you keep up? Here are some tips for prioritization:

Google Scholar is an excellent tool for tracking citation trees and metrics that show the “importance” of each paper. Library portals or the journal websites can also be good for this.

• If you’re starting a search on a new topic, begin with a relevant review paper if one exists. Beware of reading too many review papers in a row! You’ll end up with an intimidating pile of citations to track down and it will be difficult to know where to start after a few-day break. 
• Prioritize experimental papers with high citation numbers, in journals with high impact factors and by authors with a high h-index (30+) published within the last 5 years. These papers will set the bar for every paper you read after. You can check the journal’s rank in your field by using Scimago . 
• Identify the most prominent authors in this field and find their most recent papers that may not have many citations (yet). This indicates where the field is heading and what the top experts are prioritizing. 
• After you’ve covered a lot of ground above, start taking more chances on less-established authors who may be taking new approaches or exploring new topics. By now you’ll be well-equipped to identify deficiencies in methods, hyperbolic claims, and arguments that are not well-supported by data. 

Final takeaways for how to read a scientific paper:

• Don't be a passive word-for-word reader. Be actively hunting and searching for info.
• Read in this order: Abstract, Conclusion, Figures, Results/Discussion, Methods.
• The figures are the anchors. Save the best ones to reproduce in your article and spend extra time to create your own summary figures to supercharge your chances of citation.
• Clean up the metadata and use a good tagging system to save time later. 
• Set your daily goal, reward yourself for finishing, and take breaks to avoid burnout!

Lastly, remember that this blog is sponsored by BioBox Analytics ! BioBox is a data analytics platform designed for scientists and clinicians working with next-generation-sequencing data. Design and run bioinformatic pipelines on demand, generate publication-ready plots, and discover insights using popular public databases. Get on the waitlist and be the first to access a free account at biobox.io !

What sections of a research paper should you read first?

The Abstract and Conclusion sections of a research paper give you a quick sense if you should continue spending time on the paper. Assess the quality of the research and whether the results are significant to your goals. If so, move to the most important Figures and find additional details in the Results and Discussion when necessary. 

What is the fastest way to read a research article?

Skim the Abstract and highlight anything of interest. Skip to the Conclusions and do the same. Write questions that pop up. Examine each Figure and find the in-line reference text for further details if needed for understanding. Then search the Results and Discussion for answers to your pre-written questions.  

What is the best citation manager software to use for my scientific papers?

I used Mendeley through grad school but recently Zotero seems to be more popular. Both are free and have all the features you need! EndNote is excellent but expensive, and if you lose your institutional license you’ll have a hard time transferring to one of the free offerings. Zotero is your best bet for long-term organizational success!

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This page contains resources on how to be a better reader (for specific help on reading journal articles look under the Find Articles tab). It also includes various ideas on note-taking, and ideas and strategies for studying. There are written articles/editorials and videos. Resources are listed in no particular order. 

Please review for what works best for you. If you have a method that you find works better for you that is not here, please let me know so I can include it! 

Need help with writing? Try these resources from the University of North Carolina. 

• Videos on reading
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Reading for Graduate School

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Many new graduate students find themselves assigned much more reading than they ever had to do in their previous schooling. In some fields, the amount might be similar, but the type and difficulty may increase significantly. One of the best ways to be successful in graduate school, both in terms of doing well in coursework and in terms of preparing yourself to be a scholar, is to learn to read strategically.

Reading for Classes

When you read for your classes, your professors may assign you more reading than they actually expect you to complete, at least word-for-word. Typically this will include both material from textbooks or scholarly monographs and articles from scholarly journals. In American academic contexts, these texts are usually organized in a fairly consistent structure, with the main ideas frontloaded in the introduction and backloaded in the conclusion. Rather than expecting you to read the entire article cover to cover, for instance, most professors read articles by reading the abstract and introduction, reading the discussion, and then looking for important information in the middle sections (literature review, methods, results). This may vary somewhat by field, but in general scholars do not read texts linearly; instead, they read strategically, looking first for main ideas and then looking for information that would support or refute those main ideas in the middle sections. You can use these same strategies when you read texts for coursework, so that you can cover more ground in a reasonable time and so that you can glean the most out of the texts as you take notes in preparation for class.

Part of doing reading for class is gaining an understanding of the scholarly conversations in your field. One strategy you can use to make this easier for yourself is to make a list, database, or other chart that tracks the source of the readings (are they monographs from a particular press, are they articles from a particular journal or set of journals?) and the common sources in the bibliographies (which authors and texts appear regularly?). Over time, this information will help you find the journals and presses you like to read from, and will help give you an idea of which texts and authors are foundational for your field or research area (and which you therefore need to perhaps read more carefully). This is not to say that texts from other authors, journals, or presses are not valuable; it can be just as revealing to ask yourself why these common publication venues and authors are so often used, and what gaps in the literature are not addressed by these common texts.

Reading for Research

Becoming a scholar in a particular field usually means having a good grasp of the literature in the field. You don't need to read every journal, but scholars typically keep abreast of new research and know older research well in the areas where they work, plus adjacent areas that might speak to their work. For instance, a scholar in Technical and Professional Communication who researches rhetoric and communication in engineering settings might read titles and abstracts in the major journals in their field, but only read articles that have to do with engineering, engineering education, and workplace communication.

Reading for research follows a similar process to the strategic reading you might do for class (described above), but goes deeper on texts that are useful for your research topics. You might also write on these texts after reading in a more detailed way than your typical note-taking process; for texts that you might cite in your work, writing a short annotated bibliography entry may be more helpful for you later on than a set of notes.

One key strategy in reading for research is to identify what specifically about the text is useful for you. Is it the topic? The research questions? The approach, the methods? You can then focus your reading, note-taking, and writing more heavily in those areas.

It's also a good idea to start using a citation manager early and often when you read for research. A good citation management software can help you organize your resources, more easily find sources you already read and need to retrieve, and even track your own publications for easy retrieval.

Reading for Genre Mastery

Learning to write in the various genres required in graduate school and in academia often involves a great deal of reading examples. It's important to analyze examples systematically so that you can quickly understand what a genre asks you to do. Some key features to look for include:

• Sections/Organization — how is the document broken up? What goes in each area? 
• Rhetorical Moves — how does the author understand their audience, purpose, and context? What strategies do they use?
• Paragraphing — how long is the typical paragraph? What information do most paragraphs contain and how are they organized?
• Style — what does a typical sentence look like? What is the language and vocabulary like? 

The OWL has a vidcast and several handouts to help with genre analysis and reverse outlining here.

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Surviving Grad School: How to Read and Take Notes Efficiently

When I googled how to survive a graduate seminar, I found a zillion different websites with a zillion different opinions. I realized that I could spend my entire graduate career reading tips on how to survive graduate seminars and graduate school more broadly. And there would still be more to read out there!

But here’s the best piece of advice I ever received on how to survive in a graduate seminar: learn how you learn. Try out a strategy, assess if and how it might work for you, and then keep what’s useful and discard what’s not. Learning how you learn is actually how you survive in a graduate seminar (and graduate school and academia)!

Learning is a conscious, deliberate, and engaged process, and while it’s not the same for any two people, foresight and organization can help just about everyone get ready for a graduate seminar each week. So here is my strategy for being intentional, expedient, and effective when you read for seminar (or for reading historical monographs more generally).

You don’t have to read every word. Your instinct may be to read every word of every book. Each author took the time to write each and every word so they must all be important, right? The answer to that question is the historian’s favorite answer: “yes and no” and “it’s complicated.”

Yes, the author’s words are important. But no, each word and sentence in a book is not equally important. And, importantly, you do not need to give each word an equal amount of attention and mental energy. There is not enough time in a week – and it is simply not necessary – to store every sentence, example, or argument in a historical monograph in your long-term memory (or even in your notes).

One strategy to sift through all the information and pull out what’s important is to write abbreviations while you read . I write in the margin of books when I am reading, but using post-its or keeping a piece of paper with corresponding page numbers works just as well. These abbreviations correspond to information that I know I will need for seminar. (These criteria can change depending on your sub-field or your faculty member’s expectations).

• “T” = Thesis (author’s overarching argument in the book or article)
• “Arg” = argument to support the thesis (usually 1-2 in each chapter or section of a journal article)
• “S” = primary sources (archival or otherwise)
• “HI” = historiographical intervention (what the author is doing that other scholars have not done before, what is new or innovative about this book—for instance, a new source base, methodological approach, geography, timespan, etc.)
• “M” = methodology (what theoretical framework or lens the author is using to analyze their sources)
• “RQ” = research question (the question the author is trying to answer and the parameters of answering that question)
• “CR” = criticism (this indicates places where I think the author is falling short. For instance, if the author seems to be stretching their evidence or has left something out that should have been included to answer their RQ. Remember that good criticisms don’t ask the author to do something they didn’t intend to do; they assess the work within the bounds of its intentions and offer clear, specific examples to support the criticism.)
• “FRQ” = Future Research Question (places where new ideas come to my mind, such as different research subjects or questions that scholars could pursue as a follow up to this author’s work).

Create a reward system that motivates you. I place a post-it at the end of each chapter so I know approximately how many pages I have left to read. I use these post-its as benchmarks – as mini-motivators to get through my reading. Sometimes I add other motivators, such as a timer to challenge myself to read more expediently—I rarely get the work done within the time limit I set but just having the timer forces me to read more quickly. And, finally, I almost always plan a reward for myself for when I get to a post-it (a small victory!). For example, I’ll tell myself: “when I finish this chapter, I’ll go get a cup of tea” or “when I get through this section, I can eat a cookie” or “when I finish the book, I will take a walk with my dog.” 

Use the author’s language to hone in on important sections . As you read, look for important passages where you should place an abbreviation (and where you’ll need to focus on what the author is staying so that the information gets stored in your long-term memory). You might find that the language that precedes these passages is predictable. For example, “scholars have studied x, y, or z from a, b, or c perspectives” is likely where you’re going to find a historiographical intervention.

The location of the important information in a book is somewhat predictable . You’re likely to find most of the key information in the introduction and conclusion or epilogue. And, the sub-arguments that support an author’s overarching thesis are usually found in the first few and last few paragraphs of each chapter. You’ll want to read more than just these sections to fully understand the author’s points, but at the very least (if you are pressed for time) make sure you carefully read and focus on these important parts of every book.

Summarize as you go . At the end of each chapter, I hand write between two and five sentences that summarize the chapter’s argument and how that chapter supports the book’s overarching thesis (which I write out at the end of the introduction). I only give myself about five minutes to do this because time is scarce in grad school and it’s more important to have a decent summary of each book than one perfectly eloquent summary of a single chapter. They usually look something like the image to the left (complete with partial thoughts, fragmented sentences, and almost unreadable penmanship!).

Make the process your own . When I’ve finished an entire book and made hand-written notes throughout, I go through these final steps:

• I sit down and type out the end-of-chapter summaries that I previously hand wrote in my book. Check out my book notes template here. If you do this step, it gives you a chance to correct any incomplete sentences or misspellings, and jot down page numbers with important passages, including each chapter’s argument.
• I type out the overarching argument of the book. (I look back at what I scribbled after reading the intro and compare it to what I noted when I finished the conclusion and typed my chapter summaries.)
• I go back through the book, looking for my other symbols (ex. “S,” “HI,” “RQ,” etc.) and type these into my notes with corresponding page numbers.
• I then type, as bullet points, my ideas about the book’s weaknesses (“CR”), strengths, and future research questions (“FRQ”), including page numbers where I’ve found examples to support my analysis.  

5. I also look back at the Research Question (RQ) and Historiographical Intervention (HI) and make sure the Criticisms (CRs) and/or Future Research Questions (FRQs) that I’ve included in my notes are well evidenced. For instance, that I’m not criticizing the author unduly by enlarging their scope beyond the parameters they set or coming up with an FRQ that someone else has probably already studied. In short, I check the parameters of my CR and reassess the merits of my FRQs.

6. If I have time, I re-read what I’ve typed, ensuring that my notes are as precise and concise as possible. (I aim to keep them no more than 2 pages long.) As I do this, I remind myself to trust my own memory . I’ll remember the small details if they’re relevant to the discussion, which means I can limit what I’m putting in my notes to the big, really important takeaways from the book. In short, I try to write down only what is new to me so that I’m not overwhelmed by the length or organization of my notes later on.

7. Finally, I print my notes and go to seminar. There, I participate in the discussion and make any necessary corrections or additions to my typed book notes — and there are always both because I’m a fallible human and I’ve pushed myself to be expedient! This revision is crucial so that when I go back to my book notes weeks, months, or even years later, I’m sure to find the author’s argument and other key details as precisely as possible.

Just remember, consistency and intentions are key! Preparing for graduate seminars can be overwhelming—you usually have 1-2 books to read in addition to scholarly articles, supplemental readings, and/or any written assignments that are due. But seminars are not meant to be impossible. Take time to learn how you learn and make it your intention to keep improving your strategy to read efficiently and take notes effectively. Paying attention to how you (and not just the historical events you’re studying) change-over-time is an important part of graduate school, as is continuity in your commitment to read and take meaningful notes so stick with it. You’ve got this!  

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8 thoughts on “ surviving grad school: how to read and take notes efficiently ”.

This is so good–I do something similar but this system is way better! Have you cracked the code on a good system with audible books or with kindle books? I know the hack on cut and pasting your kindle highlights on line but haven’t come up with an usable system for Audible books.

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Hi Jack, thanks for reading my post! I’m pretty low tech so I have not created a system for audible or kindle books but I’d love to hear your ideas. Have you found a way to parse out the workload and take notes on either platform?

Great article! I have shared it with my students.

Thanks for a very helpful piece. Right now I’m struggling with the massive number of journal articles I need to digest each week. Any tips specific to retaining and organizing information from these beyond what you discuss for book reading? I’m struggling with a system for storing what I learn from each article for better retention.

Hi Kelly, thanks for your comment. I totally understand–journal articles always sneak up on your because they always take longer to read than you expect and are often so engaging it is easy to get lost in the details and stories. But the good news is that most have a formula to how they’re written and here is the order with which it will go–articles typically start with an engaging anecdote; introduce the authors argument, historiographical intervention, research questions and methodology; then present their primary source evidence to support their argument; and finally wrap up with a conclusion that relates it all back to the larger topic and/or some contemporary issue. I would suggest targeting your reading and note taking to make sure you touch on the same categories of information (the author’s argument or thesis, historiographical intervention or what they are doing that is new, sources, methodology, and then come up with some criticisms). Your notes will likely be more concise than the book notes template I provided because each history monograph is really made up of multiple journal articles that follow this general formula so it may help to think of these notes as mini book notes. I generally follow the same annotation style for reading journal articles (T, HI, S, FRQ, etc.). Please feel free to let me know if you have any additional questions. I hope my method is helpful–it has worked to me but I’d love to also hear other ideas of what is working for everyone so please feel free to leave some more comments and let me know what you’ve found helpful!

Thanks! I do have one question- is there a particular note storage system you find that helps make it easy to access information in a given note later on? As the number of book and article notes multiply, it gets hard to keep them organized and usable.

Hi Kelly, that is something I’m still working on. I experimented with OneNote and found it cumbersome so I used just plain old Microsoft Word and file folders on Dropbox but now that I’m reading a lot more books on my iPad (I got an apple pencil, I’m a huge fan!), I’m starting to use GoodNotes. I like that the organization system in it and how it mimics file folders and paper notebooks while allowing me to add tags and search for things. I’m not sure if this is helpful because I’m super new to this new platform but my main tip is keep to start organizing early and keep trying things until you find what works for you. What systems you tried?

Hi. Not really. I’ve been using Evernote for a long time for all my ideas and interests, but it’s become a virtual black hole and I don’t really use it properly. My current approach is just creating a 1-page summary google doc for each book or article I read. But this is time consuming and doesn’t really help me with accessing and cross-referencing. I think I’m going to give GoodNotes a try!

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How to read for grad school.

One of the very first things you’ll learn in graduate school is that your professors will assign a lot of reading. A lot  of reading!

Depending on your field, each week you may be asked to read anywhere from several journal articles (mainly STEM fields) up to an entire book per class (social sciences and humanities).

How can you manage all of this reading? Here are a few tips to help get you through those pages.

• Remember, you can’t read it all…

The first thing is to recognize that you can’t read all of it in the time allotted . Graduate professors, quite deliberately, usually assign more reading than the average graduate student can complete in a given week. With research, teaching, sleeping, eating, and your personal life, there aren’t enough hours in the day to read all of the materials you are assigned.

This means that you’re going to have to get creative in how you manage the reading load so that you cover the material requested.

• Prioritize your readings

Since you know that you can’t read it all, you’re going to have to figure out which of the readings are most important for a particular week.

Start by organizing your readings into three groups:

• anything that you’re going to read closely;
• articles/chapters/books that you’ll “actively skim;”
• anything left that you will try and skim if you have time.

But how do you determine which assignments to read closely and which to put on the back burner? Sometimes professors will make it obvious by designating certain readings as “required” and others as “optional,” or by foreshadowing what you’ll talk about in your next session.

You can try to surmise this yourself by quickly looking through the materials that are assigned and finding their common theme. From there, you should be able to determine which readings are ‘core’ and which are peripheral to the main theme.

What about ease of reading? It’s tempting to select the papers or books that you think will be the easiest to get through, but take caution. Often, the thorniest theoretical papers are the seminal ones that are the heart of the themes your graduate professor is trying to convey. They’re likely to be on your qualifying exams down the road. But if two or more papers look equally important and have similar purposes in the assigned readings, sometimes a good strategy is to pick the one that captures your interest most.

Read ‘Closely’ by Taking Notes

Doing a “close reading” of graduate school papers is not like reading a pleasure book. You’re looking for key themes and discussion points – things that are relevant to your research and scholarship. When doing your close readings, take notes!

If you are using a paper copy, you can annotate right onto the paper. If you’re averse to writing on your paper – or don’t have enough room – brightly colored sticky notes can help flag specific sections in which you have a particularly insightful comment. These notes will be helpful to refer back to when discussing articles in class.

Skim Actively

While you’re not reading every single word, you’re also not just reading headings. Read the first and last sentences of each paragraph. Scan your eyes over each paragraph to see if there are important supporting points or keywords.

After skimming a section, take a moment to summarize what you skimmed – jotting down brief synthesis notes can help, although they won’t be as extensive as the notes from the materials you read closely. Writing down broad questions you have can help, too – they may be questions you want to raise during the discussion or in your seminar paper.

Whether you are reading closely or skimming actively, you should ask yourself questions as you read . Constantly challenge yourself: What is the point of this passage? What is the author trying to convey? How does this connect to my own scholarship? How does this connect to the larger body of work in my field?

• Don’t read when you’re sleepy

Graduate school life is super busy, and many grad students find themselves getting around to their reading late at night, after they’ve spent a full day in the lab or classroom.

If your lids are feeling heavy, put the article down and go to sleep!

You’re not going to absorb the information in a meaningful way, while at the same time your cutting into precious time that could be spent on other more enjoyable aspects of your life. A double-whammy of wasted time and missed opportunity!

Set time aside to take care of yourself. Sleep is important, so make sure you get enough of it! In the end, it’s better to have meaningfully consumed a smaller portion of your reading than it is to have read it all and retained nothing.

• Figure out what works for you

One of the perennial questions I get about reading in graduate school is “should I use electronic resources, or hard copies?” I think this is a personal question that depends on your individual preferences and desires, but in so doing highlights an important point: you’ve got to figure out what works for you.

Some students have a difficult time concentrating when staring at lighted electronic screens; others prefer the ease of annotating paper copies. On the other hand, all that printed paper can be an organizational nightmare that for some can be a distraction in itself.

Whether you like reading real paper or the electronic version, try different options and see what ‘clicks.’ Likewise, try switching up the environment where you read to find the best fit:

• Morning/afternoon/night?
• Office? Library? The local coffee shop?
• Music? Total silence? Background noise?

Getting through your reading doesn’t just take steely perseverance, it also takes common sense and a personal strategy that works for you.

How do you manage your academic reading?

Tags: coursework , grad student , graduate school , phd , reading , survival strategies

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 25th, 2014 at 10:01 am and is filed under Surviving Grad School . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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Five tips for starting (and continuing) a PhD

On 4th September 2020

In Advice for other students

Lots of the specific stuff you learn as a PhD student, as well as general approaches to your work, begins with informal advice rather than formal training. I’ve received lots of advice from others during my PhD, since the very early stages of my project. This has helped me both build a PhD project that I’m happy with, and actually enjoy my life while I do my PhD (the two, of course, being closely but not entirely linked!). As it’s the start of the academic year I want to share a few of my own tips along those lines, to help get your PhD off to a good start, and keep it on a trajectory you’re happy with:

1. Keep notes on everything you read

My PhD, like many, kicked off with lots of reading of textbooks and academic papers. My reading has ebbed and flowed, but not really stopped, since then. Reading is a big thing during your PhD. It’s useful to keep track of what you’ve been reading because you won’t remember all of it, but you will want to come back to a lot of it.

My system for keeping notes on my reading is highly unsophisticated, but it works: I have (currently) three Word Documents, called Reading_[insert year here] stored on Dropbox so I can access them anywhere. I’ve got a separate one for each year of my PhD because 1) each document is a bit more manageable than one scary enormous one, and 2) I find it surprisingly easy to remember when-ish I was reading different stuff because my reading has gone through some quite distinct phases (e.g. more stuff relevant to study design early on, more stuff about analysis later) so it seemed like a reasonable and simple way to organise my notes.

The  notes I make on what I read vary a lot: at my laziest, I just copy and paste the paper title, first author and abstract into the doc, and I’m done. If I’m feeling enthusiastic, I make more extensive notes on the paper and my thoughts on it, or copy specific sections that are especially interesting or relevant to my work. I make sure that each paper title or reference is formatted as a heading so that I can scan through the document easily, and create a contents page for each document.  Now, if I want to find a specific paper or read publications on a particular theme, I can Ctrl+F to find key words in my Reading documents.

2. Read a couple of theses

I’m going to disagree with tip #2 in Five Tips for Starting Your PhD Out Right and say you don’t need to read them cover to cover – I don’t think this is necessary in the early stages in your project, unless you really want to do so, or if you feel that every chapter is highly relevant to your own PhD. But I do think it’s helpful to flick through and see different thesis structures (trends in how to structure a thesis evolve over time, and also vary by subject area, so look at recent graduates in your field for ideas of what’s likely to be appropriate for you).

Theses might also contain some specific content that you didn’t realise you’ll need to add to your own thesis (such as more detailed methodology than you usually see in a published paper) or useful references if the PhD is closely related to your own work. I think it works well to look through the theses of recent graduates in your research group, your supervisor, or others working on similar stuff to you. But you can also search for theses online, for example by using EThOS .

3. Start a Word document called “Thesis”

You can use other people’s theses (see previous tip) as a guide to add appropriate headings and subheadings to this document which will act as your own thesis structure / outline. Okay, I did this in third year, not first year, but I reckon it would have been helpful to start this earlier. Since I started this document, I’ve made good progress on actually organising my thoughts and even writing a few things down. And if you’ve got this document ready from early on in your project, you can populate it with notes and ideas whenever they occur to you at any point during your PhD.

Recently, I’ve been going through my Reading documents (remember tip #1) page by page and copying across notes from papers that I have read (and often forgotten about) into the appropriate sections of my Thesis document. It’s surprising how quickly my rough structure has been populated with ideas and material for literature review and synthesis, and how this has helped me link different ideas together i.e. stuff I read in first year and forgot about, with stuff I’ve been reading recently, with stuff that’s coming out of my own analysis. Actually, now that it’s getting quite full, I’ve split my Thesis doc up so that I’m just working with one document per empirical chapter. In first year, a simple thesis structure in a single document is a good place to start.

4. Think about how to make the flexibility of your PhD (and your control over it) work best for you

This one’s quite big-picture, and I’m kind of cheating the list-of-five by squeezing several tips into one. But I think that the general principle of this tip is important, and can be interpreted in different ways to suit different people: PhDs are often inherently flexible, in how you set your daily, weekly and monthly schedule, and I think that you should make the most of that.

The nature of your PhD flexibility and your control over it depend on the details of your project, how you’re going to be working with your supervisors and institution. But there are usually opportunities for flexibility, even if you have to be in the lab most days. PhD-life-flexibility can be exploited for your professional or personal development, to maximise your productivity, to create opportunities that are fun or useful now, or allow you to flex creative muscles you haven’t had the opportunity to flex before.

Below I list the kinds of things you can think about to best use the flexibility of your PhD. These are all things that can work alongside the core research / write / defend thesis requirements of your PhD, and while you definitely don’t have to make any firm plans on day one, I think that it’s really valuable to think about ideas like this (and any more you have) early in your project. It’s all about what you want to get out of your time whilst doing your PhD , including but not limited to the PhD itself, and how you want to structure that time:

• How do you want to set your daily schedule, where do you want to work? What’s going to be most pleasant and productive for you, and fit in with your home life?
• What things do you want to do outside of your PhD (sports, reading non-PhD-related books, joining local clubs and groups, always protecting weekends off) to actively maintain a healthy work-life balance (which is better for both your wellbeing, and the state of your thesis)?
• Are there times when you’re going to be working extra hard (like fieldwork)? How do you want to balance that with rest and recuperation afterwards (an extended post-fieldwork holiday…?)?
• Do you want to take an interruption from your PhD for an internship or job?
• Do you want to practise writing by starting a blog or try a bit of science journalism ?
• Do you want to get involved with science outreach?
• Do you want to build a professional profile and network by making a website or getting on social media?
• Do you want to teach undergraduates or Masters students?
• What training courses would you like to do (and where do you find out about them)?
• Do you want to try turning one or more of your chapters into academic papers?

5. Talk to people, lots, in both general and specific ways

Starting a PhD can be overwhelming, and knowing where to start, or where to go next, can be really tough. Having conversations with other PhD students about what they are working on, how they are finding their PhD, what kind of training they have received, might point you to interesting new research topics, training opportunities, or just give you a bit of a general feel for what it’s going to be like doing a PhD in your new department. These general conversations are important because they can provide you with nuggets of wisdom you didn’t know you needed and, crucially, help you feel connected to and supported by your colleagues and peers.

Asking your supervisor or others specific questions like are there any academics whose work you recommend I look into? / do you recommend any textbooks on [planning a research project], [planning fieldwork], [fundamentals of landscape ecology], [fundamentals of development research] [insert another topic you’re not sure about yet but want to learn about]? / are there any conferences I should look out for? can give you some useful starting points for directing your own learning in the early stages of your project. So, think specifically about what you need at the start of your PhD, and ask for help with it.

…And one bonus tip: read advice from other (ex-) PhD students

There are similar posts to this one with advice on starting your PhD here , and I particularly like the twenty top tips from Lucy Taylor here . There are actual full guides to PhD life like The A-Z of the PhD Trajectory and The Unwritten Rules of Ph.D. Research which can be very helpful to read through at any stage of your PhD (though I guess you maximise your use of them if you read them early!) and to use as reference books as and when you need them. There are lots of people blogging about their past and present PhD experiences, which can offer great advice and comfort at every stage in your PhD. Personally, I love the Thesis Whisperer and like to check in with it semi-regularly. Reading TW feels a bit like my tip #5: it’s about seeking out help and advice, sometimes when you didn’t even know you needed it.

Practical tips on how to be an interdisciplinary individual

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Essential PhD tips: 10 articles all doctoral students should read

Phd advice: from choosing the right topic to getting through your thesis.

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If you’re still deciding whether to study for a doctorate, or even if you’re nearing the end of your PhD and are thinking about your next steps, we’ve selected 10 articles that you really should take a look at.

They cover everything from selecting your topic to securing a top job when your years of hard graft come to an end.

14 essential PhD questions answered Welcome to the  Times Higher Education  PhD surgery with Tara Brabazon, professor of education at Charles Sturt University , Australia.

The PhD experience: this far, and no further Five students on how doctoral study changed them and their futures.

10 steps to PhD failure Top tips on making postgraduate study even tougher (which students could also use to avoid pitfalls if they prefer).

How not to write a PhD thesis If you want failure, this is your road map to getting there.

Realistic expectations keep you on the path to a PhD Isolation is part of the experience, but peer support groups and co-working can combat loneliness and quell students’ self-doubt.

10 truths a PhD supervisor will never tell you There are some important dos and don’ts to bear in mind when choosing someone to oversee your doctoral thesis.

Me and my PhD supervisor: tales of love and loathing Academics discuss how supervisors shaped their teaching.

How to get students through their PhD thesis Tara Brabazon shares her 10-step regime for steering emotionally drained postgraduate students through the final stages of their thesis.

Choosing a PhD subject A well-chosen doctoral thesis will have a focus that can be explored in the appropriate time and built on in the future.

How to get ahead with a PhD Postgraduates do not to realise how employable they are. Pat Cryer explains how to get a well-paid job.

Read next:  visit the THE PhD advice page

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PhD Reading Tips That Can Actually Help Your Research

PhD reading tips for all Ph.D. doctoral scholars for getting success with your research.

• Love your Ph.D. books and reading itself.
• Choose a right and relevant book that suits.
• Follow skim and scan techniques.
• Underline important points while reading.
• Note taking while reading a Ph.D. book is a good habit.
• Reflect on the article after reading a while.
• Read calmly and loudly at particular intervals.
• Increase reading speeds as time pass by.
• Read different books on the same topic.

Love what you are reading. This is a very important rule while reading any book. If you do not love and like about your research area of interest how can one read it effectively? Try to use skimming and scanning techniques for the first 10 minutes just to see what is exactly taking place with the book that you are reading. So here is my list of 25 amazing tips on Ph.D. reading.

Choose the right book relevant to your PhD Reading

The initial challenges faced by an aspiring Ph.D. candidate is getting their application accepted, and it significantly pertains the nature of the proposal that relies on the topic chosen by the scholar.

It is essential that the scholar ensures that they choose a research topic that is relevant to a complex societal problem in need of effective solutions.

It requires extensive research on the same using advanced researching techniques whereby the researcher must ensure that they make use of resources that have relevant and credible information.

While choosing the book(s) for research, the scholar should ensure that the right materials are selected written by reputable authors.

Therefore among the things that the researcher must consider is the book’s relevance to the research topic, the credibility of the author and the extensiveness of the book’s research. These PhD reading tips will benefit you a lot if you do it regularly.

It should cover a wide range of interdisciplinary fields that are directly linked to the research topic. Also, the source(s) must be published in reputable journals.

Never start PhD Reading from the first page (try the skim scan technique)

Another factor I want to bring about PhD reading tips is that many scholars are tempted to read the whole book while researching which may not be ideal given that one is required to conduct detailed research. As a result, the scholar is advised to make use of the skim scan technique.

The technique is helpful because it enables the scholar to cover a wide range of sources in search of relevant information. Not only is it possible to go through many sources, but also it saves a lot of time.

It is notable that many candidates are faced with a time limitation, and some of them are forced to request an extension of the PhD. program.

The skim scan technique enables the researcher to identify research sources that have the most relevant information and also those that are rich in content on the topic.

Therefore, the technique is important in saving the scholar significant time and also enabling them to identify sources that have the best content regarding the research topic.

Hold Pen or pencil an underline while doing PhD reading

After the scholar has identified a good book for reading, the scholar as advised is recommended to use the skim scan technique. The technique enables the candidate to locate good information easily and quickly.

Once the content has been identified, it is recommended that the candidate underlines the content using a pencil or a pen. Some may be tempted to put too much trust in their mental capacity and assume that they will be able to recall all of the information.

However, this is contrary to how the brain works because it is 100% certainty that the scholar will not remember almost 50% of the information.

The reason for underlining content is to enable the scholar to revisit the data and remind themselves of the important points that should be included in the dissertation.

We recommend the scholar always to ensure that they have a pen or pencil for underlining strong points that support the main ideas as well as supporting ideas.

Do not read while dreaming something (it is research, not newspaper)

Other PhD reading tips include like that of research which seems like an easy task that one can complete without much hassle but that kind of attitude may tempt the researcher to think the dissertation process is a walk in the park.

On the contrary, research is an intensive process that requires a lot of concentration and hard work. The candidate is required to invest long hours in research by exhibiting a high level of commitment to the work.

Writing a dissertation comes out as challenging since scholars have to balance education with other aspects of personal life. Other factors such as personal commitments and work may make it difficult for the researcher to concentrate on their paper fully. It results in the scholar writing a paper that does not meet the requirement which is dangerous. Lack of commitment compromises the quality of the paper and may result in the candidate failing.

Note taking is part of PhD Reading

PhD reading tips on note making. The recommended use of a pen or pencil is not only important for underlining content found in books but also useful in taking notes.

It is inappropriate to underline content in different books and think that is enough. The noted points that touch on the research topic should be written on a separate piece of paper preferably a book.

Note-taking is an equally important process since it facilitates reading because one cannot write something without reading the content.

Although the process may not be as direct as one may desire, reading content and summarizing in the form of notes enable the scholar to remember the content compared to another that does not take notes.

We highly recommend the PhD. candidate to develop a habit of taking notes every time they are reading. It is vital because it ensures that essential information is recorded at the researcher’s mind and also written separately where it can be accessed easily and quickly.

Always follow a reflective style of PhD Reading

There are various modes of reading adopted by readers, but the most recommended one for PhD. candidates are reflective reading.

Essentially, this type of reading is the best because it has many advantages to the researcher. One of the merits is that it enables the reader to understand better the content intended for the audience by the author.

A reflective reader asks themselves questions such as what they have learned and how they can relate the information to real-life situations.

The content can be related to personal experiences or experienced by people that the reader knows such as friends, colleagues or family members.

Another important aspect is that reflective reading enables the reader to arrange content in their minds chronologically.

It enables the reader to identify the problem(s), note the causes as well as the solutions. It ensures that the scholar can connect the events or theories to the causes and solutions and also determine whether the recommended solutions are sufficient.

It is through reflective reading that the candidate can come up with innovative and creative solutions to complex problems.

Choose the time to read and finish in time your PhD Reading

In another article, discussed that a timetable is essential to the researcher because it enables them to allocate available time effectively.

One of the resources that have been identified as insufficient for a Ph.D. candidate is time. It is important for the scholar to plan their time properly since it enables timely completion of the research paper.

By using a schedule, a researcher can categorize the dissertation process in stages or plans that must be realistic and achievable.

When we consider proper allocation of time to the reading process, it means that the researcher should set aside reading hours so that they do not conflict with other activities.

It is essential because it allows the scholar to concentrate on their dissertation and therefore puts them in a position whereby they can write a good paper that can be published in a reputable journal and also meet the university’s expectation.

Increase your PhD Reading speed in the long run( not possible all of a sudden)

Reading can be a challenge to scholars given that they are required to balance the activity with other commitments. Some candidates find it difficult to cover a lot of content within a specified amount of time and some end up demoralized.

Others on the hand can read many books within the same time-frame and therefore find it easy to write research papers. It should be noted that reading is not the only process that counts but also understanding the content.

Therefore, reading speed also involves the degree of understanding of the content, and it varies among different scholars.

However, the scholar must know that reading speed like any other activity increases with frequency and practice. Scholars should not be discouraged when they feel that their reading speed is snail-like and instead they should continue reading to improving their reading process.

The speed that a scholar develops depended on how committed and dedicated they are, and it enhances with time.

Observe Vocabulary and Sentence Construction While PhD Reading (Helpful for your thesis)

Different fields have specific terminologies that must be accounted for in the thesis. Regardless of the field, it is necessary that the scholar notes how the sentences are constructed and also make a point of observing the vocabulary used.

It not only assists the candidate to understand the weight of the content but is also a useful tool in writing the thesis.

The scholar should ensure that terminologies that are linked to the topic or field of study must be included in the research paper.

It is vital in the writing process because it enables the student to show that they have a proper understanding of their topic as well as the field.

Read loudly sometimes for a change in PhD Reading style

There are many venues that the scholar may choose for the reading process, and while some may not facilitate loud reading, it is a technique that can prove beneficial.

It is tempting to perceive that loud reading may be slower than reading silently but it has advantages. Most of the time when one is reading loudly, they may find that repeating sentences is more encountered.

However, it leads to better comprehension of the content and therefore ensures that the scholar is not reading to cover more content but understands the author’s message.

Loud reading enables the scholar to enhance their reading and listening skills and increase their vocabulary. A loud reader has a better command of intonation and also benefits the body through practice.

A loud reader exhibits more focus on whatever they are reading, and therefore they are good at concentrating on their thesis.

Cultivate interest (You cannot do PhD Reading without interest)

Deciding between pursuing a doctorate requires taking the time to consider whether one will be able to complete the process successfully and should therefore not be rushed.

The first thing that a candidate should consider is the topic and the field that they intend to write their research paper.

One of the basic elements in cultivating interest in the topic so that the scholar does not consider the dissertation process as a burden.

Interest in the topic enables the scholar to consider research as an opportunity to expand their knowledge on the field that they have majored in while as an undergraduate or a Masters student.

Interest cultivates a positive attitude, and therefore the scholar finds the reading process enjoyable, unlike the one that has little or no interest in the topic.

The latter lacks the incentive to read and therefore considering reading as difficult and even time-wasting.

Appreciate yourself with a reward after PhD Reading

The fruits of a Ph.D. title is not easy to come by and may take years before the scholar feels that their efforts are rewarded. It is notable that a research paper requires a lot of input regarding time and physical resources.

There may occur many instances when the scholar may feel that they are not getting returns, but such an attitude must be avoided at all cost. After hours of reading, it is inevitable that the scholar may feel exhausted.

At times, one cannot avoid the feeling that they have comprehended or sometimes not understood the desired amount of content. Either way, it is essential for the candidate to reward themselves after hours of reading to relax their mind.

There are many ways of rewarding oneself such as making personal time to do what you love such as taking a field trip, going out or even shopping for those who enjoy the activity.

For others, they may choose to hang out with friends, but the point is that the scholar should identify an activity that they like and go for it.

Do some eye exercises regularly (stress eye cannot read)

Reading large volumes of content from different sources can be laborious, and times one becomes physically and mentally tired.

One of the side effects of long hours of reading is that the eyes may become strained and therefore make it impossible to read. Therefore, it is essential for the reader to relax their eyes by exercising them on a regular basis.

There are many ways of exercising the eyes such as trying to focus one’s view on distant objects. It counters the effect of focusing on nearby objects such as books while reading.

The candidate may also opt for other techniques such as the long swing, exploring the periphery and sunning and skying among others.

Tell others to read it for you and listen (not more than 10 minutes)

The most important Ph.D. reading tips are becoming apart from reading for themselves, the scholar may find it useful to use assistance from other people such as friends and family members. Another excellent reading tip is requesting someone else to read out loud as the candidates listen.

This is a good technique that enables the scholar to concentrate on the content more as they direct their energy on listening and actively trying to understand the author’s intended message to the reader.

However, this technique is not encouraged for a long duration, and we recommend a maximum of ten minutes. Part of the reason is that one can get distracted easily and therefore easily lose concentration.

Explain and discuss what you have read with a friend

An effective way of retaining what one has read is through discussing what has been learned and it achievable by explaining and discussing the same with a friend. When one reads any given content, the information retained by the mind after the process can never be 100%.

The situation is worsened as time elapses and therefore it is easy to forget more than half of the content since the human brain stores such information temporarily.

To prevent loss of data, discussing and explaining what has been learned with someone else enables the data to be stored permanently and information retention can be enhanced by revisiting the content later as the scholar deems necessary.

Write difficult words on the page itself (Many benefits) while PhD Reading

As mentioned earlier, every field of study has specific terminologies that must be included in the thesis. Care should be taken to ensure that such terminologies and difficult words are noted.

The best way to do this is to write them on the page where they are located. This not only enables the scholar to remember to use them in the dissertation but also ensures that they understand the terms as they have been used the original author in context.

Writing on the individual page makes it easier to locate the words while writing the research paper.

Check whether you have Dyslexia& Attention Deficit

These are conditions that affect many people including scholars who may find it difficult to concentrate on their reading. Such conditions may pose a threat to a doctorate student especially because they are required to deal with large volumes of data.

People suffering from the condition find it difficult to concentrate on what they are reading and are easily distracted. They are neurological conditions that we recommend the scholar to find out if they suffer from the same and if so, proper treatment should be administered as soon as the condition(s) are detected.

It is worth noting that the scholar is required to defend their thesis and therefore such conditions are obstacles that should be eliminated.

Keep Oxford Dictionary beside you while PhD Reading

Reading for a research paper means checking out books and journals written by other scholars and therefore it is certain that one will find new lexers.

To facilitate a comfortable reading process, we recommend that the scholar must have an Oxford Dictionary at all times while reading. A dictionary is essential because it enables the reader to look up the meaning of new terms so that they can understand how they have been used in the text.

Otherwise, it is useless to read large volumes of content and not understand what is discussed in the same.

PhD Reading on a mobile screen and TV screen (not always book reading)

Unlike traditional reading that was only on paper, technological advancements have revolutionized the reading process, and the modern society can find data and read on electronic equipment such as mobile devices, Television, PCs, and laptops.

We recommend the scholar to enhance their reading experience through using such devices. It is not necessary that reliable sources are only found on paper since there are eBooks in reputable databases where such books can be accessed.

Furthermore, all universities have library databases that the scholar can identify with the help of the supervisor. Using such devices improves the learning process and makes it more enjoyable thus aiding the candidate to develop a positive attitude towards reading.

Besides, it is easier to find the desired content on electronic devices since they have search engines search as Bing and Google.

Sometimes walk while PhD Reading

The traditional way of reading is while seated but it does not mean that one cannot read while doing other activities such as walking or even exercising.

Depending on the scholar’s cognitive ability, it is advisable to develop a habit of reading while walking. This process is more effective when using mobile devices since it is possible to access content on the go.

One of the benefits of reading while walking is that it is possible to tend to the dissertation whenever the scholar feels. For instance, the candidate may remember something that they feel they did not understand fully or may develop a new idea.

It is easier and efficient to research on the contentious issue(s) on a mobile device anytime, anywhere and even read about the same while walking.

Choose always one place or position to PhD Reading

When setting up a schedule for reading, we recommend that the scholar choose one location when they are not reading while walking.

Not only is reading physical, but it is also an intensive mental process that requires the mind to be completely relaxed. A relaxed mind is capable of learning new concepts and also retaining information compared to one that is not settled.

The dissertation process takes a lot of time, and as we recommended in another article, the candidate should be ready to adapt to a routine that must be strictly followed.

Choosing one location or position enables the body to program itself so that when the scholar is at the location, the body knows that it is time for reading and therefore one can be psychologically prepared.

Try to do PhD Reading twice always with a certain gap (for thorough understanding)

It is not easy for one to understand everything that has been read at the first time and therefore it is vital that the scholar develops a habit of reading twice the same content at different occasions which should be separated at a given interval.

This practice is important because it enables the scholar to comprehend the reading material better and improve their cognitive ability.

By reading the same content at least twice, the scholar can thoroughly understand the information, and therefore they are in a position to write a good research paper and also defend the dissertation when they are required to do an oral presentation.

Besides, revisiting the same material improves retention of content, and therefore the researcher can relate material read previously with new material that they encounter as the thesis progresses.

PhD Reading in your mind while on the bed ready for sleeping

Before the scholar goes to sleep every day after reading, it is recommended that they should develop a habit of measuring what they have learned during the day before sleeping. Fortunately, this is part of reflective reading and facilitates reflective learning.

The basic idea is that the candidate tries to remember what they have learned by asking themselves questions and answering. The practice is beneficial in that it enhances data retention since it is a form of revising what has been read.

Furthermore, candidates that practice this activity can identify the areas that may not have been properly understood thus they can note them down and revisit the same later.

Connect with the information to your old one during PhD Reading

As stated earlier in the article, reflective reading comes with advantages such as connecting what has been read in a book. It is essential for a researcher to possess this quality since it is a requirement that the thesis must be coherent, precise and chronological.

One of the reasons why one is recommended to take notes is to enable them to identify the main and supporting ideas.

Therefore, it is easy to connect information collected from different sources and present one paper that addresses the research topic. It is also essential that the scholar connects what they learned previously to the new findings.

Ask always questions like “how” “when” and “why.” during PhD Reading

It should be noted that reflective reading involves the reader attempting to engage actively with the author by asking themselves questions such as “why,” “how” and “when.” Such questions stimulate the researcher’s mind, and therefore they become curious and want to find out more about what they are reading.

Also, when the reader asks themselves such questions, they become more creative and innovative thus making the reading process active.

Reflective reading makes the scholar interested in their research topic and therefore develop a positive attitude towards reading for the Ph.D.

Extra Strong PhD Reading tips

Reading your PhD books involves a lot of struggle. It must really enhance the possibilities of making your life to the extent that you will have to get knowledge out of that. If your aim is not knowledge, then you will not be in a position to read effectively. Once you do with this type of understanding that you must get knowledge after reading, then your way of reading will change slowly.

This reading is completely based upon your background reflection and thought. When we see some philosophers and writers, they are very particular about reading in different angles correlating with some codes. The reading must be fairly advanced and you cannot just read and go on. You must really make sure that your reading is based upon some other thing happening in the background

What is this background? This background while reading is some traditional knowledge that is reflected while reading the present book or a novel. So your reading while doing Ph.D. is something linked with traditional knowledge. In order to understand the text, you must first understand the tradition of that book. How the knowledge developed throughout the generations. This is what I want you all to know and apply while reading.

Sometimes there are chances that you really do not know such traditional knowledge. Do not read any book if you do not have some background about that particular topic. First, try to read from the scratch understanding the basic lessons of tradition about that particular topic. This way you can perform well in a variety of reflections and various dimensions of the knowledge.

Once you have these various dimensions of understanding something, then you will get success in your Ph.D. This course is all about decoding certain text and trying to interpret in your own style. So You must interpret very logically about how much you can grasp through certain text. So while reading it is not the line in the book that you are reading but you are reading all the tradition from the past.

This past is very important to decode the text that you read. Now what happens is that you will be in a position to write your thesis or dissertation effectively. You can win the impression from the text to proceed to learn and interpret thing in order. This is the whole thought process behind reading the text.

So when you start reading your Ph.D. books, you must consider this traditional knowledge that I have been speaking throughout this article. You must read with full of traditional knowledge.

The second dimension that I want to remind you that when you read, do it full-time reading and not any part-time. What is full time reading? This is the reading that you do for almost 5 hours continuously without any break not more than 15 minutes in an hour. This is what I mean by full time reading.

But unfortunately for Ph.D. students, full-time reading is very far knowledge. Many students just study for some time and continue the reading whenever they are free. In this way, you will never get any type of benefit or growth. You will never get any ideas with such way of reading. And one more factor about Ph.D. reading tips is about Part-time reading of books.

What is Part time reading? The part-time reading of a novel or a book is just this that you read once in a while. Now how can you just do this during your Ph.D. is a tough question to ask yourself. You cannot really read that way because it does not give you any way to reflect and understand and decode the text. You cannot be in a position to interpret in your own style.

So while reading I advice to all the PhD students, PhD candidates, Ph.D. applicant, PhD aspirant and all who are pursuing now your Ph.D. studies to know that reading is something outside the text and mind. Your first knowledge first passes your mind and goes outside and connect with the tradition and comes back. Here starts your interpretation of the text in your own way.

This interpretation of the text will lead to the discovery of newer things. This we call “research.”

Reading through concentration is the third dimension that I want to speak today. This means when you read there are high possibilities that you will stray away from the point of view. You will be in a tough situation to get real knowledge. Only your words pass through your mouth and your mind does not really grasp on your reading.

So while reading, your concentration plays its own high strength of role to give you a fuller understanding of what you are reading. That is why I tell you not to just read with your mouth but rather read with your heart. Reading with your heart is the final and best step rather just reading with your lips.

How to read with your heart? For this, you need to do some meditation techniques on how to hold your mind on one thing for a longer period of time. Once you practice holding your mind on only one thing for at least 10 minutes, then you can get this.

Practice once in a day taking any object and doing some practice. Just concentrate. This exercise will give you reading abilities. You can read a text for up to 45 minutes comfortably. You will never struggle with a lack of concentration. You will read and understand with your mind all the text. So think well and concentrate well while you read any bool during your Ph.D.

Reading your Ph.D. books involves one more dimension as a fourth one. This is the dimension that will ask you whether are you reading the right book or not. Whether are you reading the book that is related to your subject. If you do not choose the right book, then whatever you read will not give much fruit to you. If will not give you much knowledge in your subject area.

Ultimately you need to become an expert in your subject. But how can it become possible when you read the wrong book which is not related to your area of research. So my suggestion is first to select the right book with which you can read interestingly. Interest and love for the book are very important. If you do not have a love for the book that you are going to read, how can you read it happily and with concentration?

You have to note this point seriously in your heart on how you will read a book without love for it. If you are not able to love the book that you read, then My advice to all the Ph.D. students is not to go for reading at all. Just leave it.

Another dimension on my way to Ph.D. reading tips is that never read a book when you are utterly disappointed or disgusted with some incident in your personal life. Give some time to your mind to be normal. Only then start reading. While reading a book, if you have some quarrels with your friends, you cannot concentrate. You cannot put your mind at work for reflection.

The last dimension that I want to speak is that using your pen while reading. Try to use your pen or pencil to underline the important aspect that strikes you. This is the best method you can follow. When you finish reading all the book, you will have to make another attempt to read again shortly. This time you will not read the full text but rather you will just read only those lines that you have underlined. These Ph.D. reading tips are from my own experience.

You will only read the main points that you had marked while reading some days ago. These main points will give you all the gist of the book. You can send all the knowledge to the long-term memory. You can store information in your memory perfectly. There is not a chance of forgetting what you have marked with your pen while reading.

So practice all these efforts to gain some reading abilities within you. These reading tips will be helpful not only to your Ph.D. but for all other goals of reading throughout your life. These tips will give you some understanding on how to start reading effectively without much confusion of how to read.

It is all lies within your heart. If you say yes to an effective reading and reflective reading and slow reading(initially), you can come up with smart reading skills that will give success in many assignments and research papers and thesis submissions.

These Ph.D. reading tips will also help you to finish your Ph.D. confidently and successfully.

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The Savvy Scientist

Experiences of a London PhD student and beyond

My Advice and Tips for New PhD Students

I started my own PhD exactly six years ago this week and looking back there are LOADS of things I wish I’d known when I started! Previously I’ve written a whole post about my PhD regrets . In this post I want to focus on actionable advice and tips which I hope will help out any new first year PhD students.

Even if you’re already midway through your PhD I hope that you find some of the advice useful. Do you have a piece of PhD advice yourself? Feel free to share it with us in the comments section below.

1. Set Up Regular Meetings with Your Supervisor

One of the main things which really helped during my PhD was having regular one on one meetings. Not only do you get an opportunity to check things with your supervisor, they’re also a useful way to stay focussed and disciplined.

Rather than set up ad-hoc one on one meetings when you need them, I’d really push for a regular slot. I had a recurring weekly meeting, mostly just with my primary supervisor but sometimes my secondary supervisor came along too. Some people may find this is too frequent but in any case regular meetings are crucial.

Supervisors will be familiar with many challenges you’re likely to face. They can offer invaluable advice  to not only solve the problem quickly but also offer perspective to put your mind at ease. It is almost impossible that you won’t have anything at all to discuss. In fact you are likely to end up receiving lots of other advice which you may not have been actively seeking near the start of your PhD, such as career guidance.

Some supervisors by default only have group meetings with their PhD students. Whilst they can be great for getting to know what everyone in the group does and for getting feedback, these really aren’t the place to raise a lot of issues to do with your PhD. For starters it isn’t an effective use of other students’ time to sit through you doing a deep dive into technical details. In addition, some topics are far better suited to a private meeting: mental health, a review of your progress etc.

For any prospective PhD students reading this, it’s a good idea to gauge how much support you can expect to receive from a supervisor ahead of time. If you’ve already recently started your project, now can be a great time to set yourself up with regular meetings.

2. Don’t Work Too Hard

When you’re new in the research group it is natural to not want to come across as a slacker to your colleagues and supervisor. However please don’t become that person who feels the need to hang around in the office just to be seen to be committed to the project.

A perk of a PhD is that they’re flexible: you should be able to control your own time and work when you want and take breaks when you want. Some people see this flexibility as merely theoretical and instead end up working really long hours. Please don’t!

Instead I suggest treating the PhD like a job (in a good way!). For me personally I found that working roughly 9-5 Monday to Friday was more than enough time to complete a PhD at a top tier university in less time than average. For more details, including my own calendar just over one year into the PhD, check out the separate post:

How much work is a PhD?

3. Work Smart and Learn to Take Breaks

Working in unison with the previous point about the number of hours you put in per week, a top tip for new PhD students is to learn to work smart and take breaks where necessary.

Repeat after me: don’t waste time being unproductive.

An effective PhD student shouldn’t need to chuck their entire life at the PhD. Instead, learn how you work best and use this knowledge to find a work pattern which boosts your productivity. Along with figuring out whether you prefer to start work earlier or later in the day, I personally found it useful to figure out how long I could sit at my desk before my productivity starting dropping. On the topic of working hours and productivity: no, PhDs don’t need caffeine .

Taking frequent breaks are great, not just for your productivity but also your sanity. By breaks I mean everything from a five minute walk through to a proper holiday away from work.

If you realise you’ve started procrastinating, take a break: reading a few pages of a fiction book or taking a short walk can do wonders for PhD motivation and your mental health. Breaks are particularly important for anyone starting to feel the potential effects of burnout. In fact it may be worth reading my whole post about PhD burnout .

PhD Burnout: Managing Energy, Stress, Anxiety & Your Mental Health

Beyond daily walks, take days off when you feel like you need them. While you no longer enjoy months off in a row like undergraduates, do be sure to take holidays too: yes PhDs should definitely take holiday. Here is how much annual leave I used up for holidays throughout my whole PhD .

4. Start Thinking About Publishing

Clearly you’re not going to be in a position to publish original research for quite some time (as first author at least), but your first year is often filled with a lot of reading. In addition to using this reading to help with your project direction, you could turn this into a writing exercise which can be useful for three key reasons:

• Boost your understanding of the topic. Writing things down in your own words will strengthen your comprehension.
• It can form the basis for the literature review in your thesis. Always useful! Also handy for any early stage milestones that your university has. Mine had a checkpoint at nine months where it can be pretty handy to demonstrate that you have some idea about your research field!
• A relatively easy and early publication: a review article. It’ll really help give you confidence in the publishing process.

One of the best research groups I collaborated with during my PhD had an initiative where all first year PhD students should try to publish a review article. I think this is a great idea and wish I’d considered it myself so consider publishing a review article a top tip for new PhD students!

Before I tried submitting my own first original research article , which wasn’t until over two years into the PhD, I found the whole publishing process quite overwhelming and intimidating. Had I dipped my toes in early with a review article I’d have realised it wasn’t as complicated as I suspected (as with most unknowns) and instead probably tried to submit my own research much sooner. I’ve since written an entire series of guides about publishing your own paper, check it out here:

Writing an academic journal paper

5. Get Some Good Habits Started

There’s no better time to get some good habits established than when you’re just getting started with your PhD.

Have a think about what kind of habits you’d like to have by the end of your first year as a PhD student and start putting plans in place to work towards them.

Good habits may include:

• Using a calendar so as to not be late to meetings or lab bookings
• Reflecting on times that you procrastinate and instead pushing yourself to take proper breaks
• Healthy and low-cost eating habits . Nothing is more important than your health, and what you eat is a key part of keeping yourself healthy. At least in the UK it can get really expensive really quickly if you buy prepared food (cafes, restaurants, takeaways) for all of your meals. Instead, I strongly suggest starting to cook for yourself. It is much cheaper and usually more healthy. I wrote a series of posts about cooking during a PhD, check them all out here:

Save money as a student: cook delicious & nutritious meals on a budget!

• Getting a good amount of sleep. I won’t prescribe how much sleep to get or when your bed time should be (I’m not your parent!) but just know that getting into a regular sleeping pattern to stay fully rested will do wonders during your PhD. I already mentioned how caffeine consumption is not a prerequisite for those of working in research and sleeping enough so that you don’t feel tired is a good starting point.
• Doing regular exercise . Try to make it something that you enjoy so that you stick with it. Want to be uber efficient? Combine it with your commute: I cycled to work during my PhD . Bonus points for any exercise which is sociable.

6. Get Involved

As interesting as your research may be, your PhD shouldn’t all be about working on your own in the lab. Take the opportunities presented to you. Such as:

• Collaborations. Working with other people can be much more fun than working on your own and could lead to some interesting developments for your own project.
• Presenting at meetings and conferences. It is a great experience. Scared of presenting? Even more reason to get started.
• Side projects. Got another idea you want to try? Give it a go!
• Make connections. I don’t want to bore you with networking spiel, instead I’ll just say that making connections (or hopefully friends!) with lots of people around your department, university or elsewhere can really enrich your PhD experience.
• Learn new skills. Not just “boring” lab stuff like analytical techniques, think about anything else in life you’ve always wanted to try. For instance you can join student sports clubs and societies like any other students at university. I tried scuba diving and gliding during my PhD and I’m so pleased that I got involved. Read my whole post here about opportunities during your PhD:

How to make the most of opportunities

7. Enjoy It!

There is no doubting that a PhD can be tough at times but do try to enjoy it and remind yourself how lucky you are!

As a PhD student you’re in an enormously privileged position. You’re getting paid to be a student, which in itself is pretty great but on top of that you get to become an expert in a topic you find interesting. It is pretty amazing really. My final tip for new PhD students is to savour the PhD experience. The years will fly by before you know it, so make sure to take a breath once in a while to appreciate where you’ve got to and where you’re going.

A Quick Summary of Tips for New PhD Students

• Set up regular meetings with your supervisor(s)
• Don’t work too hard
• Work smart and take breaks
• Start thinking about publishing
• Get some good habits going
• Get involved
• Most importantly: enjoy it!

Good luck to all you PhD students, new and old. Hopefully these tips for new PhD students help give you some ideas to make your PhD a more pleasant experience. Do you have any other ideas for tips to help out PhD students? Let me know.

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Watch CBS News

Why is looking at a solar eclipse dangerous without special glasses? Eye doctors explain.

By Sara Moniuszko

Edited By Allison Elyse Gualtieri

Updated on: April 8, 2024 / 8:54 AM EDT / CBS News

The solar eclipse will be visible for millions of Americans on April 8, 2024, making many excited to see it — but how you watch it matters, since it can be dangerous for your eyes. 

A  solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes between the sun and Earth, blocking the sun's light . When the moon blocks some of the sun, it's a partial solar eclipse, but when moon lines up with the sun, blocking all of its light, a total solar eclipse occurs,  NASA explains . Either way, you need eye protection when viewing.

"The solar eclipse will be beautiful, so I hope that everyone experiences it — but they need to experience it in the right way," said Dr. Jason P. Brinton, an ophthalmologist and medical director at Brinton Vision in St. Louis.

Here's what to know to stay safe.

Why is looking at a solar eclipse dangerous?

Looking at the sun — even when it's partially covered like during an eclipse — can cause eye damage.

There is no safe dose of solar ultraviolet rays or infrared radiation, said  Dr. Yehia Hashad , an ophthalmologist, retinal specialist and the chief medical officer at eye health company Bausch + Lomb.

"A very small dose could cause harm to some people," he said. "That's why we say the partial eclipse could also be damaging. And that's why we protect our eyes with the partial as well as with the full sun."

Some say that during a total eclipse, it's safe to view the brief period time when the moon completely blocks the sun without eye protection. But experts warn against it. 

"Totality of the eclipse lasts only about 1 to 3 minutes based on geographic location, and bright sunlight suddenly can appear as the moon continues to move," notes an eclipse viewing guide published in JAMA , adding, "even a few seconds of viewing the sun during an eclipse" can temporarily or permanently damage your vision. 

Do I need special glasses for eclipse viewing?

Yes.  Eclipse glasses are needed to protect your eyes if you want to look at the eclipse.

Regular sunglasses aren't protective enough for eclipse viewing — even if you stack more than one. 

"There's no amount of sunglasses that people can put on that will make up for the filtering that the ISO standard filters and the eclipse glasses provide," Brinton said.

You also shouldn't look at the eclipse through a camera lens, phone, binoculars or telescope, according to NASA, even while wearing eclipse glasses. The solar rays can burn through the lens and cause serious eye injury.

Eclipse glasses must comply with the  ISO 12312-2 international safety standard , according to NASA, and should have an "ISO" label printed on them to show they comply. The American Astronomical Society  has a list  of approved solar viewers.

Can't find these, or they're sold out near you? You can also  make homemade viewers ,   which allow you to observe the eclipse indirectly — just don't accidentally look at the sun while using one.

How to keep kids safe during the solar eclipse

Since this eclipse is expected to occur around the time of dismissal for many schools across the country, it may be tempting for students to view it without the proper safety precautions while getting to and from their buses. That's why some school districts are  canceling classes early so kids can enjoy the event safely with their families.

Dr. Avnish Deobhakta, vitreoretinal surgeon at New York Eye and Ear Infirmary at Mount Sinai, said parents should also be careful because it can be difficult for children to listen or keep solar eclipse glasses on. 

"You want to actually, in my opinion, kind of avoid them even looking at the eclipse, if possible," he said. "Never look directly at the sun, always wear the right eclipse sunglasses if you are going to look at the sun and make sure that those are coming from a reliable source."

Brinton recommends everyone starts their eclipse "viewing" early, by looking at professional photos and videos of an eclipse online or visiting a local planetarium. 

That way, you "have an idea of what to expect," he said. 

He also recommends the foundation  Prevent Blindness , which has resources for families about eclipse safety.

What happens if you look at a solar eclipse without eclipse glasses?

While your eyes likely won't hurt in the moment if you look at the eclipse without protection, due to lowered brightness and where damage occurs in the eye, beware: The rays can still cause damage .

The harm may not be apparent immediately. Sometimes trouble starts to appear one to a few days following the event. It could affect just one or both eyes.

And while some will regain normal visual function, sometimes the damage is permanent. 

"Often there will be some recovery of the vision in the first few months after it, but sometimes there is no recovery and sometimes there's a degree to which it is permanent," Brinton said. 

How long do you have to look at the eclipse to damage your eyes?

Any amount of time looking at the eclipse without protection is too long, experts say. 

"If someone briefly looks at the eclipse, if it's extremely brief, in some cases there won't be damage. But damage can happen even within a fraction of a second in some cases," Brinton said. He said he's had patients who have suffered from solar retinopathy, the official name for the condition.

Deobhakta treated a patient who watched the 2017 solar eclipse for 20 seconds without proper eye protection. She now has permanent damage in the shape of a crescent that interferes with her vision. 

"The crescent that is burned into the retina, the patient sees as black in her visual field," he said. "The visual deficit that she has will never go away."

How to know if you've damaged your eyes from looking at the eclipse

Signs and symptoms of eye damage following an eclipse viewing include headaches, blurred vision, dark spots, changes to how you see color, lines and shapes. 

Unfortunately, there isn't a treatment for solar retinopathy.

"Seeing an eye care professional to solidify the diagnosis and for education I think is reasonable," Brinton said, but added, "right now there is nothing that we do for this. Just wait and give it time and the body does tend to heal up a measure of it."

Sara Moniuszko is a health and lifestyle reporter at CBSNews.com. Previously, she wrote for USA Today, where she was selected to help launch the newspaper's wellness vertical. She now covers breaking and trending news for CBS News' HealthWatch.

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Blended families are common. Here are tips to help stepsiblings get along

Maria Godoy

The Science of Siblings is a new series exploring the ways our siblings can influence us, from our money and our mental health all the way down to our very molecules. We'll be sharing these stories over the next several weeks.

Stepsiblings get a distorted rap in popular culture. On the one hand, you've got Cinderella and her evil stepsisters. On the other, there's The Brady Bunch , where six stepsiblings get along almost ridiculously well.

" The Brady Bunch did not help us when it comes to what to do in stepfamilies. It really didn't," says Caroline Sanner, an assistant professor of family science at Virginia Tech who studies stepfamily relationships.

"It sets a lot of folks up for disappointment at best," she says.

Sanner and other researchers say that since The Brady Bunch aired in the 1970s, they've learned a lot about what works and what doesn't work to help stepsiblings get along. And while some of their advice might seem obvious, the rest might surprise you. Here are a few of their research-backed tips.

Take things slowly

"Becoming a stepfamily is a process. It is not an event. It takes time," says Patricia Papernow , a psychologist who has written three books about blended families and spent decades educating therapists and others on stepfamily research.

Papernow says when new couples fall in love, they can get wrapped up in the excitement. "They want to form a family," she says, "and oftentimes they charge ahead." But she says that can be too much change, too fast for the children from their prior unions.

Special Series

The science of siblings.

"One of the dilemmas is that as the rate of change goes up, kids' well-being goes down. Kids need to go much more slowly," Papernow says.

Lisa Garrard and Kirsten Brandt James say their parents went the opposite of slowly when they fell in love in the early 1970s. Lisa's dad and Kirsten's mom were both widowed, with three children each (not unlike the Brady Bunch family). They started dating one summer when Kirsten's mom took her girls to visit family back in Texas. Within two short months, they were married.

"I was shocked," says Kirsten. For her, the marriage meant a move from her home in California to Texas, a new house with new stepsiblings and a new school.

"I cried," she says. "I was like, 'You're kidding me. You're ruining my life. ' "

Lisa says that feeling was very much shared on the other side of the aisle.

"We weren't going anywhere, but it was still shocking to us," she recalls.

Despite that whirlwind start to their stepfamily, Lisa and Kirsten both agree that, some 50 years later, all six stepsiblings are as close as can be. They Zoom weekly to catch up.

"I love them all. They're all my siblings," says Kirsten — no "step" prefix needed.

And that lifelong bonding may have something to do with the fact that their parents did a lot of other things right.

Create new family rituals

Research has shown that it's important for parents to create new family rituals that encourage everyone in the stepfamily to bond. Kirsten and Lisa's parents took that seriously.

"We had to go to church on Sunday as a family. We [went] on vacation as a family. We're eating as a family. It was very family-oriented," Lisa says.

Papernow says spending time together, especially on fun activities, helps stepfamilies create "a sense of we."

For Lisa and Kirsten's family, most of this happened after their parents' marriage. But Sanner says ideally, the biological parents can start creating opportunities for their respective children to bond while they are still in the dating phase — once they are relatively sure that their new partner is going to stick around, of course. She says it's best to start off with low-stakes opportunities for the kids to get to know each other, like ice skating or going to the park together. That way, they can discover shared interests they might have — whether it's music or sports or video games — without the pressure of already being stepsiblings.

"Introducing them much earlier can allow that process to occur over a more natural timeline," the way friendships naturally do, Sanner says.

Preserve one-on-one time with your biological child

While it's important to foster new relationships within the stepfamily, it's just as vital for a parent to carve out one-on-one time with their biological child, Sanner says.

"From the kids' perspectives, so much is changing when stepfamilies are being formed. Their parent is developing relationships with their new partner and also with their partner's kids," she says.

And that can add to the stress and insecurity the biological kid may be feeling.

"That can create feelings of jealousy, but that often comes from something much deeper, which is a feeling of loss, or grief, or feeling really anxious about the ways in which your relationship with your parent is changing," Sanner says.

A gunman stole his twin from him. This is what he's learned about grieving a sibling

Larry Ganong , an emeritus professor of human development and family science at the University of Missouri and longtime stepfamily researcher, notes that all siblings fight over resources, whether it's a parent's attention or who gets the bigger room or bigger slice of dessert. But he says in stepfamilies, there are often bigger issues at the root of these conflicts. "Issues like, 'Am I loved? Do I belong here? What's my place? Who am I in comparison to these other people?' Those sorts of big issues are there," Ganong says.

When kids feel loved and secure in their relationship with their biological parent, "it allows kids to relax a little bit, and they're maybe less in a competitive mode with their stepsiblings and more open to bonding," says Ganong, who is currently writing a book with Sanner and professor emerita Marilyn Coleman of the University of Missouri on successful strategies for stepfamily relationships.

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At the heart of this cozy coffee shop lies a big sister's love for her little brother, don't force the bonding.

While it's important to create the opportunities for stepsiblings to bond, Sanner says kids should be given some choice in whether and how to participate.

"There's so much in this transition that they're not in control of, and feeling kind of forced to bond with these new family members can be really overwhelming" for kids, Sanner says. "Allowing them to go at their own pace, really honoring their feelings and the speed at which they want to bond, allows them to be much more receptive to bonding with their stepsiblings. Whereas if it feels forced, no one wants to be in a relationship with someone where it feels forced."

Stepmom Kiley Thompson took this to heart when one of her two soon-to-be stepsons, Finlay, refused to attend her wedding to his dad, Mark Mitchell.

"It was about two weeks before the wedding that I said to Mark, "Let him make the choice. This is his choice. He is adamant about it. We cannot force him. And if we do force him, it will set the stage for more resentment further on down the line. "

Finlay was 11 at the time and didn't attend. Now, seven years later, Thompson says they've grown close.

These twin brothers are identical, but their autism isn't

"Stepparenting is not a short game," Thompson says. "This is a long game. If you're in for the long term with your new husband or wife, you have to be even longer in there for your stepkids. "

Ganong says parents in a stepfamily often want everyone to bond and for things to "normalize" quickly. But the reality is that close relationships take time to develop — sometimes years. He says adolescents will often take longer to adjust than younger children.

Leave the discipline to the biological parent

Being there for your stepchild means building a healthy relationship with them. But research is clear that the relationship can turn toxic if a stepparent is allowed to discipline their stepchild before they've had time to develop a caring, trusting relationship, Papernow says.

"In fact, what works is the parent retains the disciplinary role," she says. "The stepparent has lots of input to the parent outside of the kids' earshot."

That's very different from the advice that is often given to what Papernow calls "first-time families," where you want the parents to back each other up. But she says it's important to understand that stepfamilies are fundamentally different structures than first-time families, and what works in first-time families can backfire in stepfamilies.

Another example? While biological parents are used to hearing that you're not your child's friend, research suggests a friendly support system is what stepparents should try to be.

• The order your siblings were born in may play a role in identity and sexuality

"Stepparents need to focus on what I call connection, not correction — building a new relationship, not setting rules," Papernow says.

Kirsten and Lisa's parents didn't have this research on discipline to guide them, yet they took this approach. Lisa says their respective biological parent would be in charge of handing out any "super heavy-handed" discipline. "Like being five minutes past curfew one night got me a month grounded — that came from my father," she says.

It's a big change. Validate the child's feelings about it

Lisa and Kirsten's parents were both widowed. Things can get more complicated when the stepfamily forms as a result of divorce, which is now more common.

Sanner says it's important for the stepparent to reassure their stepchild that they're not trying to replace their other parent, by saying explicitly: "I know that all of this change might be really hard. And I just want you to know that I'm on your side, and I'm not here to parent you or be some kind of parent figure."

She says creating a more positive relationship between a stepparent and stepchild is vital, because it makes it more likely that stepsiblings will get along too.

It's also important for the biological parent to validate their kid's feelings of loss and displacement in a stepfamily, because oftentimes, this is at the root of conflict with their stepsiblings, Sanner says.

National Siblings Day is a celebration born of love — and grief

For example, Sanner's research with Ganong has found that shared physical space — whether it's bedroom space or who gets to hang out in the basement — is one of the biggest sources of conflict among stepsiblings. Acknowledging what your child is feeling can be really powerful, even if you don't have all the answers, she says.

Sanner says when stepsiblings and stepfamilies are given the time and space "to really find their own pattern of development, instead of forcing a mold upon them, that's where we see positive outcomes."

She says the end result might not look like a traditional relationship between biological siblings, and that's OK, too.

Ganong agrees. He advises families not to assume they have to re-create the nuclear family experience of a first marriage. " I would like them to approach their new family thinking creatively, asking, 'What works for us? Who are we? What do we need?'"

He says stepfamilies are different, but that difference can also be a strength.

More from the Science of Siblings series:

• In the womb, a brother's hormones can shape a sister's future
• These identical twins both grew up with autism, but took very different paths
• Science of Siblings
• healthy realtionships
• step siblings
• step families

Why dentists say you shouldn’t rinse after brushing

The question:

Is it true that you shouldn’t rinse after brushing your teeth?

The science:

Viral TikTok videos have challenged the way many people brush their teeth. Their advice: Brush your teeth with a fluoride-containing toothpaste and spit — but don’t rinse.

Dental experts agree. They recommend brushing at least twice a day with a fluoride-containing toothpaste to help prevent cavities. And they say skipping the rinse after brushing allows the fluoride to stay on the teeth, providing added protection.

Those who prefer to rinse should rinse lightly with a small amount of water such as a sip from the hand or delay the rinse by about 20 minutes, said Brittany Seymour , a spokeswoman for the American Dental Association (ADA) and an associate professor at Harvard School of Dental Medicine.

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A 1999 study of more than 2,800 teenagers — age 15 and 16 — in the United Kingdom found that those who rinsed with a cup of water after brushing had an average of almost four decayed, missing or filled teeth compared with about three for those who did not rinse at all. Those who rinsed with less water, for example from their hand, had about 3.62 bad teeth.

Skipping the rinse is not essential for people with healthy teeth, but those who eat a high-sugar diet or are prone to cavities may need extra help from the fluoride, said Margherita Fontana , a professor at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry. “When you rinse, you are basically rinsing away the active ingredients of the toothpaste that you just put on your teeth,” she said.

Another option for those who want to rinse after brushing is to follow up with a mouthwash containing fluoride, Fontana said.

Dental plaque is covered with certain acid-producing bacteria that, with help from a sugar-rich diet and poor oral hygiene, can cause cavities. Fluoride , a mineral, helps prevent cavities by protecting the teeth — primarily by helping to replace minerals that have been lost from the protective enamel and to reduce the amount of minerals the enamel loses.

While fluoride is essential for protecting teeth, ingesting excessive amounts may increase the risk of fluoride toxicity . Ingesting too much fluoride over an extended period during tooth development in early childhood can cause white spots to form on the permanent teeth, a cosmetic condition called fluorosis , but it is usually mild in the United States.

Dental experts say the amount of fluoride that would be left on your teeth after brushing is safe, though children should always be supervised when brushing to make sure they do not ingest too much of it.

What else you should know:

The same brushing habits are suggested for children.

Fluoride-containing toothpaste is recommended as soon as they cut their teeth. For children younger than 3, caregivers should brush the teeth with a smear of toothpaste “ the size of a grain of rice ,” and those age 3 to 6 should be given no more than a pea-size amount, according to the ADA and the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry (AAPD).

Then parents and caregivers should have their children spit out as much as possible to avoid swallowing it, but keep the remaining fluoride on their children’s teeth to help protect against cavities, said Scott Cashion , a pediatric dentist and president of the AAPD.

“We recommend that they spit it out but try not to rinse it,” he said. “When they go off to bed, if there's fluoride on those teeth, it's going to help protect them through the night.”

The bottom line:

Skipping the rinse after brushing with a fluoride-containing toothpaste — or rinsing lightly or delaying the rinse — allows the fluoride to stay on the teeth, providing added protection.

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Some Colleges Will Soon Charge $100,000 a Year. How Did This Happen?

Some Vanderbilt students will have $100,000 in total expenses for the 2024-25 school year. The school doesn’t really want to talk about it.

By Ron Lieber

Reporting from Vanderbilt University in Nashville

It was only a matter of time before a college would have the nerve to quote its cost of attendance at nearly $100,000 a year. This spring, we’re catching our first glimpse of it.

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Open this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.

One letter to a newly admitted Vanderbilt University engineering student showed an all-in price — room, board, personal expenses, a high-octane laptop — of $98,426. A student making three trips home to Los Angeles or London from the Nashville campus during the year could hit six figures.

This eye-popping sum is an anomaly. Only a tiny fraction of college-going students will pay anything close to this anytime soon, and about 35 percent of Vanderbilt students — those who get neither need-based nor merit aid — pay the full list price.

But a few dozen other colleges and universities that reject the vast majority of applicants will probably arrive at this threshold within a few years. Their willingness to cross it raises two questions for anyone shopping for college: How did this happen, and can it possibly be worth it?

Who Pays What

According to the College Board, the average 2023-24 list price for tuition, fees, housing and food was $56,190 at private, nonprofit four-year schools. At four-year public colleges, in-state students saw an average $24,030 sticker price.

That’s not what many people pay, though, not even close. As of the 2019-20 school year, according to federal data that the College Board used in a 2023 report , 39 percent of in-state students attending two-year colleges full time received enough grant aid to cover all of their tuition and fees (though not their living expenses, which can make getting through school enormously difficult). At four-year public schools, 31 percent paid nothing for tuition and fees while 18 percent of students at private colleges and universities qualified for the same deal.

Those private colleges continue to provide hefty discounts for people of all sorts of incomes. A National Association of College and University Business Officers study showed private nonprofit colleges and universities lowering their tuition prices by 56 percent from the rack rate during the 2022-23 school year.

Vanderbilt provides discounts, too, and its financial aid is extraordinarily generous. This year, it announced that families with income of $150,000 or less would pay no tuition in most instances .

Still, over 2,000 students there who get no need-based or merit aid will soon pay $100,000 or more. Why does Vanderbilt need all of that money?

Where the Money Goes

At a few small liberal arts colleges with enormous endowments, even $100,000 would not cover the average cost of educating a student, according to the schools. Williams College says it spends roughly $50,000 more per student than its list price, for instance.

In other words, everyone is getting a subsidy. Perhaps its list price should be over $100,000, too, so that its endowment is not offering unneeded help to wealthy families. Or, perhaps, a price that high would scare away low-income applicants who do not realize that they might get a free ride there.

According to Vanderbilt, its spending per undergraduate is $119,000. “The gap between the price and cost of attendance is funded by our endowment and the generous philanthropy of donors and alumni,” Brett Sweet, vice chancellor for finance, said in an emailed statement.

No one at the school would meet with me to break this figure down or get on the phone to talk about it. But Vanderbilt’s financial statements offer clues to how it spends money. In the 2023 fiscal year, 52 percent of its operating expenses went to faculty, staff and student salaries and wages, plus fringe benefits.

Robert B. Archibald and David H. Feldman, two academics who wrote “ Why Does College Cost So Much? ,” explained in their book why labor costs were so tricky at these institutions.

“The critical factors are that higher education is a personal service, that it has not experienced much labor-saving productivity growth, and that the wages of the highly educated workers so important at colleges and universities have soared,” they said. “These are economywide factors. They have little to do with any pathology in higher education.”

Critics of the industry still believe that a kind of administrative bloat has set in, driving up tuition with outsize salaries. But what is bloat, really?

Administrators oversee compliance, like the laws that have made it possible for disabled people to get to and through college and keep schools from discriminating against women. If we don’t like regulation, we can vote for different legislators.

Similarly, families in a free market can make alternative choices if they want fewer mental health practitioners and their bosses, computer network administrators, academic advisers or career counselors. And yet the first (prescreened) question that Vanderbilt’s chancellor, Daniel Diermeier, answered on family weekend this past fall was about whether Vanderbilt should invest even more in career advising in the wake of the school’s five-spot decline in the annual U.S. News rankings .

Is It Worth It?

If many families are not exactly lining up for a cut-rate residential undergraduate education, they’re still asking plenty of good questions about value. So is a $400,000 college education ever worth it?

It depends, and you knew that answer was coming, right?

Most college shoppers wonder about income outcomes, and it’s possible to search by undergraduate major on the federal government’s College Scorecard website . This program-level data exists for alumni who are four years out from graduation, though only for those who received any federal financial aid.

Vanderbilt’s biomedical/medical engineering majors have median earnings of $94,340 four years out. English language and literature majors are earning $53,767.

Those are fine results, but are they exclusive to Vanderbilt? “You could get an engineering degree at a state flagship university that’s just as valuable as something you’d get at Vanderbilt,” said Julian Treves , a financial adviser and college specialist whose newsletter tipped me off to the goings-on there.

I spent a few days trying to get Vanderbilt’s vice provost for university enrollment affairs, Douglas L. Christiansen , to talk to me and answer these questions squarely and more expansively, but I did not succeed. A university spokeswoman sent me some generalities in his name. “We are committed to excellence at all levels, from the quality of our faculty, programming, facilities and research labs to the services we provide to support the academic, emotional and social well-being of our students,” went the statement.

In anticipation of the absence of a substantive reply, I attended a group information session for 125 or so prospective students and asked there, too. The senior admissions officer who took the question refused to answer. I’d never seen that before, and I’ve been to these sessions at dozens of schools over the years.

But really, why should an actor in a competitive marketplace answer that question if the person doesn’t absolutely have to? Without publicly available, industrywide quantitative data on quality — happiness scores, customer satisfaction, measures of learning, return on friendship, the strength of career networks — the list price alone serves as a signal of excellence, to some shoppers at least.

And thousands of applicants respond to the signal each year by volunteering to pay the list price, even as the school rejects the vast majority of applicants. Or maybe they volunteer precisely because Vanderbilt and schools like it reject the vast majority of applicants.

So a $100,000 list price is not our highest-priority outrage. The spectacle of wealthy people freely purchasing luxury services is nothing new, even if it is a totally worthy object of scrutiny (and an understudied phenomenon by academics themselves, ahem).

What is a problem, then? Brent Joseph Evans , an associate professor of public policy and higher education at Vanderbilt’s college of education and human development, started his career as an admissions officer at the University of Virginia. There, he sold the institution to boarding school students in New England and teenagers in the Appalachian foothills.

The former group might pay $100,000 per year, though many of them won’t get into the Vanderbilts of the world in the first place. They will surely find their way somewhere.

But that latter group? Professor Evans is worried about their access to any school at all.

“We should care about whether they get into a state university system at a low cost and find a well-paying career that can keep them in the middle class,” he said. “I do think that sometimes any tension over what elite colleges are doing moves us away from what we should be caring about as a society.”

Read by Ron Lieber

Audio produced by Parin Behrooz .

An earlier version of this article misstated the surname of Vanderbilt’s vice provost for university enrollment affairs. He is Douglas L. Christiansen, not Christensen.

How we handle corrections

Ron Lieber has been the Your Money columnist since 2008 and has written five books, most recently “The Price You Pay for College.” More about Ron Lieber

Your last-minute guide to Monday's total solar eclipse

A total solar eclipse will cross North America on Monday , offering millions a rare opportunity to see afternoon skies temporarily darken as the moon blocks the face of the sun.

Tune into NBC News NOW as Lester Holt hosts a two-hour special at 2 p.m. ET Monday from Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

The eclipse's path fortuitously cuts across Mexico, 15 U.S. states and a small part of eastern Canada. In all other states in the continental U.S., viewers will be treated to a partial solar eclipse, with the moon appearing to take a bite out of the sun and obscuring part of its light.

Here’s everything you need to know about the rare celestial event.

What is a solar eclipse?

Solar eclipses occur when the sun, moon and Earth align. The moon passes between Earth and sun, temporarily blocking the sun’s light and casting a shadow on Earth.

A total solar eclipse is when the moon fully obscures the sun, whereas a partial solar eclipse means it blocks just a portion of the sun’s face.

Solar eclipses occur only with the new moon. Because the moon’s orbit around Earth is tilted, the three bodies don’t always line up in a way that creates an eclipse.

“Imagine if the moon’s orbit were in the plane of Earth’s orbit around the sun — if that were the case, then every new moon, you’d have a total solar eclipse and every full moon, you’d have a lunar eclipse,” Neil DeGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, told NBC News. “So, because things don’t always align, it lends to the rarity of the event and the specialness of the event.”

Where and when will the eclipse be visible?

This year’s eclipse will follow a slightly wider path over more populated areas of the continental U.S. than other total solar eclipses have in the recent past.

NASA estimates that 31.6 million people live within what’s known as the path of totality, where the total solar eclipse will be visible. An additional 150 million people live within 200 miles of the path, according to the agency.

The path travels through Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Tiny parts of Michigan and Tennessee will also be able to witness totality if conditions are clear.

After the eclipse crosses into Canada, it will pass over southern Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton, at the eastern end of Nova Scotia.

Those outside the path of totality can still take part in the astronomical event by viewing a partial solar eclipse — visible throughout all 48 states of the contiguous U.S. — or a NASA livestream.

The timing, including how long totality lasts, depends on the location, but some spots will see the moon fully cover the sun for up to 4 minutes and 28 seconds.

Below is a list of timings for some cities along the path of totality, as  provided by NASA . A number of other resources, including NationalEclipse.com  and  TimeandDate.com , can also help people plan.

• Dallas: Partial eclipse begins at 12:23 p.m. CT and totality at 1:40 p.m.
• Little Rock, Arkansas: Partial eclipse begins at 12:33 p.m. CT and totality at 1:51 p.m.
• Cleveland: Partial eclipse begins at 1:59 p.m. ET and totality at 3:13 p.m.
• Buffalo, New York: Partial eclipse begins at 2:04 p.m. ET and totality at 3:18 p.m.
• Lancaster, New Hampshire: Partial eclipse begins at 2:16 p.m. ET and totality at 3:27 p.m.

How to safely view a solar eclipse

It is never safe to gaze directly at the sun, even when it is partly or mostly covered by the moon. Special eclipse glasses or  pinhole projectors  are required to safely view solar eclipses and prevent eye damage. Failing to take the proper precautions can result in severe eye injury,  according to NASA .

Eclipse glasses are thousands of times darker than normal sunglasses and specially made to enable wearers to look at the sun during these kinds of celestial events.

Sky-watchers should also never view any part of the sun through binoculars, telescopes or camera lenses unless they have specific solar filters attached. Eclipse glasses should not be used with these devices, as they will not provide adequate protection.

However, during the few minutes of totality, when the moon is fully blocking the sun, it is safe to look with the naked eye.

Beware of fake eclipse glasses. On legitimate pairs, the lenses should have a silver appearance on the front and be black on the inside. The manufacturer’s name and address should be clearly labeled, and they should not be torn or punctured. Check, as well, for the ISO logo and the code “IS 12312-2” printed on the inside.

If you don’t have eclipse glasses, you can make a homemade pinhole projector, which lets sunlight in through a small hole, focuses it and projects it onto a piece of paper, wall or other surface to create an image of the sun that is safe to look at. 

All you need is two pieces of white cardboard or plain white paper, aluminum foil and a pin or thumbtack. Cut a 1- to 2-inch square or rectangle out of the center of a piece of white paper or cardboard. Tape aluminum foil over that cut-out shape, then use a pin or thumbtack to poke a tiny hole in the foil.

During the eclipse, place a second piece of white paper or cardboard on the ground as a screen and hold the projector with the foil facing up and your back to the sun. Adjusting how far you hold the projector from the second piece of paper will alter the size of the image on the makeshift screen.

What to look for while viewing the total solar eclipse

For people along the path of totality, there are some fun milestones to keep track of as the total solar eclipse unfolds.

As the eclipse progresses and the sun gets thinner in the sky, it will start to get eerily dark, according to Tyson.

When the last beams of sunlight are about to become obscured, look out for the “diamond ring effect”: The sun’s atmosphere will appear as an illuminated halo, and the last light still visible will look like the diamond of a giant ring.

As the sunlight decreases even further, an effect known as Baily’s beads will be created by the moon’s rugged terrain. Tiny “beads” of light will be visible for only a few seconds around the dark moon, as the last bits of sunlight peer through the moon’s mountains and valleys.

When the moon is fully blocking the sun, it is safe to remove eclipse glasses and look at the total solar eclipse with the naked eye.

Some lucky sky-watchers may even catch a glimpse of a comet .

Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks — nicknamed the “ devil comet ” because an eruption last year left it with two distinct trails of gas and ice in the shape of devil horns — is currently visible from the Northern Hemisphere as it swings through the inner solar system.

The comet can be seen in the early evenings by gazing toward the west-northwest horizon. During the eclipse, when skies darken during totality, it may be possible to see the comet near Jupiter, but its visibility will depend on whether it’s in the middle of an outburst and thus brighter than normal.

Most likely, all eyes will be on the alignment of the moon and sun.

“Most people won’t even notice,” Tyson said. “But if you know to look, it’s there.”

When is the next solar eclipse?

The next total solar eclipse will be in 2026, but it will mostly pass over the Arctic Ocean, with some visibility in Greenland, Iceland, Portugal and northern Spain. In 2027, a total solar eclipse will be visible in Spain and a swath of northern Africa.

The next total solar eclipse visible from North America will be in 2033, but only over Alaska. Then in 2044, a total solar eclipse will cross Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, parts of Canada and Greenland.

The next total solar eclipse to cross the continental U.S. coast-to-coast in will occur in 2045. The path of totality for that eclipse will cut through California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia and Florida.

Denise Chow is a reporter for NBC News Science focused on general science and climate change.

Lucas Thompson is a content producer for the NBC News Climate Unit.