The following post is written primarily for those who are applying for a PhD project where the funding is supplied by a research council, such as NERC. All PhD interviews are all different, and this post definitely won’t cover everything, but it should help you prepare for most eventualities.
If in doubt, go smart – but don’t worry, you can spend the next three years wearing jeans and a hoody. Photo credit: Alex France
KT Cooper is a PhD student in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol. A carbonate geochemist by training, she has just returned from a three-month secondment to Houston, Texas, USA working with Exxon Mobil.
Last week the newly formed Bristol Doctoral College hosted a postgraduate seminar entitled “Surviving the stress of a PhD” by James Hayton, PhD. My initial thoughts on attending a talk such as this were that it might be a little patronising (no one wants to hear about how someone’s PhD experience was a walk in the park) and would incorporate a re-hash of project management techniques such as Gantt charts, to-do lists and the like.
‘Tis the season of thesis writing! Well, in my office of fourth years (!) at least. By this stage of PhD life, most of us have our own ‘toolkit’ of computer applications that we’ve settled upon to complete the task, but in the first year or two, it’s a case of trying lots of options and finding the one that works best for your PhD and style of working.
Here, I’ve listed my top ten freely downloadable computer apps and accessible websites that have proved invaluable so far. I should mention that although I use a Mac, almost everything listed below has an equally useful Windows version (some entries are specific to petrology, so if you’re a non-geology PhD student, you can probably skip those bits…).
Click on the links below to go to each section
1) LaTeX
2) Detexify
3) Bibdesk
4) PDF to Word
5) R
6) Textwrangler
7) Tetlab/Trinity
8) Georoc database
9) Generic Mapping Tools (GMT)
10) MELTS
Sorcha McMahon – 3rd year PhD student
“New insights into deep mantle melts and the carbonatite-meliliitite connection”
1) The Twitter challenge: Your PhD in 140 characters
Investigating how strange igneous rocks called carbonatites may have formed, using both natural samples and high-pressure experiments [Read More]
