Rise to the Top: The Habits and Mindset of Top 0.1% PhD Students.

Hi Andy! Just wanted to say that I passed my Ph.D. defense yesterday and that your videos have been so incredibly helpful in providing me with some useful advice over the years. So grateful for your videos and keep doing what you're doing!!

There is a major quality crisis in science right now due to overpublishing. And this is particularly because of people in nanotechnology and material sciences who publish small experiments that don't add any value to the scientific community. I was in the nanotechnology field for a while and to be honest I don't understand why someone would want to defend a dissertation on 100 ways to synthesize magnetic nanoparticles, for example. It is the level of work of a skillful technician, not an independent researcher.

"Try to find that skill that everyone needs, and no one wants to get, and try to get that" ... And then, after long days of imprecations, you'll discover that there was a reason that no one wanted to get that skill

In mathematics, we always list authors in alphabetical order, no matter what their contribution is, which can be a little frustrating if your coathors always come before you even if you wrote most of the paper. It is not fun to be always "et. al."

In an isolated Ph.D., sometimes the only interaction is with some guy on youtube (Andy).

Ahahahaha I had to make sure that my playback speed wasn't actually 1.5x. Amazing. Thanks for sharing all your wisdom with the rest of us!

Man u r awesome, Even thought I am not a PhD student yet, I am constantly watching ur videos . Thank you. May you be blessed

I have to admit that the more I watch your channel, the more I think: get the hell out of it asap. Sunday late afternoon here (Netherlands), spring arrived today, and I'm basically (still) surviving: finalizing the lay-out of my dissertation (having no means to outsource); working on an job application (temporary contract); preparing the 4 courses I'm teaching at the moment (another temporary contract). Anyhow, thanks for the content!

I’m finishing my PhD soon. I have 4 first-author papers published, including in Molecular Ecology and Current Biology, but no middle-author papers.

These are amazing tips! Thanks so much.

Great advice! Thanks 👍🙏🙂

This is genuinely good advice, Dr.

In my field (data visualization), the top conference (ieee vis) has several tracks that have quick turn-around (workshops, short papers, late-breaking. With Arxiv, the opportunity for wider feedback has increased for many fields. Good advice, Andy!

Super helpful! Thank you 😊

Great content, as always 👏🏾👏🏾

At least in the US, I would say your advice about getting published in a top journal is spot on. Everyone I know in my field who published 1st author in Nature, Science or PNAS as a phd or post doc landed a job as a tenure-track professor, usually at a top university. In my experience, "cheese" publications as you put it are not as helpful at all, at least not directly. Even things like "Q1" publications are less clear. Certainly you want lots of 1st author pubs in top journals, but in my field what counts as top doesn't always track stuff like impact factor or scimago rankings (it requires talking to top people in the field to know what are the top journals that people respect).

Thank you for the advice

Andy, thanks for another interesting video! I've used the design of your communication award (downscaled) for live CAD modeling on a lecture about 3D printing (and printed it during the lecture) :)

Thanks for your honesty

It's a shame Schekman's advice and open criticism hasn't changed anything about publishing in the sciences. As it stands, the only real motivation I see for people to go into Academia is to work on a certain problem that they don't have the opportunity to in private industry.