Well, here are a few tips for PhD students and ECR (Early Career Researchers): Enjoy doing research. It is fun and one of the few times in your career when it is solely your work. To do a PhD is a privilege and not a chore. You will likely look back on it as one of the most useful things you did in your whole career. You will always hit a dip in your research. Know when that is happening, and find ways out of it. Change something in your approach. Re-ignite yourself with new topics or methods. Find a great new paper that has just been published. Fight the dip! Two years of a PhD pass by fast. Be ready for the “last year of research” spike. We often do research to repeat what others have done and add our little bit. You can’t add your little bit unless you have repeated the work of others. Validate and verify your work before you evaluate it. One slip, and everything can fall apart. Most people have flaws in initial version of their work, so don’t worry if you find flaws, it’s all part of refinement of your work. We are human, by the way! Be able to show an external person the work you have done in validating that what you have is correct. Always be ready to point to peer review work to show that something is correctly defined. Doodles with pen and paper are great for getting your mind in gear. Have a thick skin — both from your supervisors, others around you, and, most of all, peer reviewers and your external examiner. Most peer reviewers are trying to help you, while others are just nasty for the sake of it or have not created the paper that they wanted. Try to spot the bad/nasty reviewer and focus on the helpful reviewers. Few people see your failures, but most will see your successes. Know your successes when they arrive, and write them down as your progress. At the end of your work, you should be able to show the successes you had along the way. Have a vision for your work, and continually refine it. Define your own beliefs, ethics and standards for your work and stick to these, such as “I will not release drafts to review, until I have fully read them”, “I will return updates to drafts of comments from my supervisors within one week”, and “I will not publish in poor quality outlets”. Agree these with your supervisory team, and get them to commit to things from their side. Define missions within your work and strive for these, and when that mission is achieved, go on to the next one (unless your get to the end, of course). Don’t end up just being theoretical. A core part of a PhD is doing practical work, too. Make sure you code and experiment. Don’t spend one year doing a literature review. Get coding and run experiments. A thesis is not a chronological diary. It should be written with an aim to show some new novely or knowledge, and not the sequence of things you did in your research. Throughout your work, especially in the 2nd and 3rd year of a PhD, continually run small experiments and get some results. Have a hypothesis about experiments, and prove or disprove this. Know the top people in your field, and be able to quote their work. Be inspired by other researchers. Be humble about your own work, and help others. Ask for advice from others where your supervision team lack skills, such as contacting pure mathematicians or physicists. Don’t be shy in saying that you don’t understand something. Don’t ever copy and paste work from others into your own work. Rephrase in your own words. Don’t use AI tools for descriptions. The reader will typically spot these — as the writing style often changes. Be consistent in your writing style. Read the work of others — especially great science/technical writers — and understand the methods they use to engage readers. Define simple, practical and useful abstractions of the techniques you are defining. Abstract your work into other areas and get them to think in other ways around the methods you are defining … “let’s think about the li