Managing your PhD

Content and goals

Stepping into the PhD candidate level of your career comes with a new set of challenges. After finishing your masters degree, you are now responsible for your own research project! While it is certainly thrilling, the workload and scope of such a project may be overwhelming. Besides the hard facts about your field of research, which you learned about during your university education, excellent research also requires soft skills like project management and good communication with your supervisor and peers. Furthermore, balancing the workload with your private life is important for your mental health. In this interactive workshop, you will learn how to use the most important tools that help you cope with this new set of challenges.

In this workshop you will learn about the following topics:

• don’t loose track: keep the bigger picture of your project in mind (and on your whiteboard)
• communication with your supervisor
• time management basics:
     - go with the flow: your energy phases
     - prioritizing your tasks: eisenhower
     - planning your day: the 60/40 rule
     - the pomodoro method
     - how efficient is perfect? Is being perfect efficient?: the pareto principle
• project management basics
     - the project management cycle
     - gantt charts
     - setting SMART goals and following through
     - agile project management
• dealing with crisis:
     - what kind of crisis may arise during your PhD and how you can deal with them
     - know when to quit: the sunken cost fallacy

Methods:

Mindmapping, theoretical input, practice units in group and individual work, peer-to-peer feedback, discussions