Academic Diary

People love telling PhD students to “pick a topic you’re truly passionate about.” I disagree. Trends such as AI, geopolitics, climate adaptation and so on, shape publications and hiring, since departments need people who can teach in those areas. With enough time, most topics become interesting anyway. I’ve grown to enjoy subjects I once thought I’d hate; I had been underrating my versatility and my ability to build interest. In academia, practicality is often dismissed while ideals like “passion” and “impact” are oversold. It’s ultimately a survival game. Not always, but sometimes, researchers should be flexible and learn how to cultivate interest.

At my early conferences, I often thought, “What meaningless interactions. We’ll never talk again.” I soon learned the opposite: even brief conversations can become lasting assets. A PhD student you meet today might be in the very department you later apply to, either as a student or as a faculty member, and share insider tips for your job search. The stranger at last night’s dinner could become a future convenor who invites you to a panel. This may sound instrumental, but it’s simply how our symbiotic networks form and where unexpected, beautiful friendships sometimes begin. The key lesson I learned over the years is: don’t undervalue any interaction in academia. Cherish them, no matter how trivial they may feel in the moment.

Different schools can have very different vibes. Once you start your position, you realize the atmosphere of the school and department can shape your quality of life and your motivation to come to work, often more than you expected as a PhD student. A truly collegial environment usually reflects a healthy underlying philosophy: junior members aren’t exploited or pitted against each other for promotions, and people are genuinely friendly and supportive. Colleagues share their personal lives, celebrate each other’s achievements, and often feel more like friends or even “family.” When someone asks me about my life at RSM, the first thing I mention is how lovely our PhD students and many of my colleagues are, and how often we hang out like a group of college friends. It’s not something many job candidates list as a priority, but it can be one of the biggest perks a school offers.

One thing that many PhD students overlook, my past self included, is how important good planning is for an academic career. Students should plan ahead and think about what the key milestones of each year will be. These might include choosing a supervisor, securing strong teaching evaluations, presenting at major conferences, applying for a grant, starting to build a network outside the school, submitting a paper to a journal for the first time, gathering job application packages from recent graduates, joining a doctoral consortium, and eventually entering the job market. The earlier you start thinking about these milestones, the more prepared you will be, and the less uncertainty you will feel about your career trajectory. Don’t bury your head in the sand and just hope that everything will work out. Draw a map for your career so that you’re not caught off guard.

People often say that good training matters, but what does good training actually mean? Is it a quantitative supervisor who hands you data and an idea, sits next to you, checks your code, explains how to interpret the results, and helps revise every paragraph? Not really. In the end, students inevitably have to acquire methodological expertise and knowledge of the literature on their own, supported by coursework. From my point of view, the often untold core of good training is the tacit knowledge you need in order to publish: the subtle formatting conventions, which topics are likely to be promising in a few years, how to persuade your most unpredictable reviewers, how complex or simple the findings should be, and which factors beyond publications matter on the job market. These things are rarely transmitted across a formal meeting table, as they are shared over lunch, during a board game night, or in informal coffee chats. Attending a research-strong school simply means you have more people around who can share this kind of insight in small doses. If a student is not in one of those environments, they should actively try to build relationships with “more senior academic friends” outside their institution as early as possible.