Hello Tildes,

I recently was accepted to my first PhD program, to one of my top choices. I am really quite excited about it.

So I wanted to ask you...

If you have a PhD:

• Are you glad you spent all that time pursuing it?
• What does having one allow you to do that not having one would prevent you from doing?
• Do you still maintain connections with your advisor(s) and/or fellow students?
• Are you proud of your research?
• Do you still look at research in that field?
• What do you do now?

If you pursuing a PhD, or have one and can answer these questions as your past self:

• Do you get along with your advisor?
• How much time do you spend looking at publications in your field?
• Is most of your new knowledge from these publications, or do you perhaps rely on books you have not yet read?
• How has your own funding (e.g. NSF fellowship) or lack thereof impacted what you do with your day?
• What do you anticipate doing after you finish?
• What (open source?) tools do you find the most useful in your work?
• How do you balance work/life?
• If you are/were a TA, how did you learn how to be an effective one?
• How do you make sure you are on track with your research goals?
• What are your biggest wins? Your biggest regrets?
• any other things you want to talk about?

Cheers!

I feel like I'm a bit slow, though I'm gaining practice. I cannot read two moderate or long-ish papers in one day. I guess part of that reason is that the field I'm mostly reading in is a field I'm new to, though in accordance with that what I'm reading often is kindo-of introductory material (linguistics, and Linguistics Handbook ed. Aronoff, 2017). A chapter is around the size of an average paper (around 25-30 pages). Another factor may be that I'm not a native speaker of English, but I think I do have a quite decent command of it especially when reading, enough to read through ~60 A4 pages in five-six hours, but I just can't do it.

So I wonder if I'm too slow or maybe exaggerating it a bit? How long does it take for you, and how many can you read, without skimming/skipping, in a "day"?