First Year of a PhD: What I Wish I Had Known

A year in, some observations for my future self and anyone else starting a research degree.

The literature review never ends

I spent the first three months feeling like I needed to read everything before I could start. This is a trap. You read enough to understand the problem space, you identify the gap, you start building — and you keep reading in parallel. The complete survey is something you write at the end, not before.

Supervisors are collaborators, not teachers

The relationship with a DPhil supervisor is nothing like undergraduate tutorials. Your supervisor is not going to set you tasks. The expectation is that you come to meetings with ideas, results, and questions. If you come with nothing, the meetings become painful for everyone.

Write constantly, even if it is terrible

The instinct is to wait until ideas are fully formed before writing. The opposite works better. Writing bad prose forces clarity faster than thinking in the abstract. Keep a research journal. Date every entry. You will mine it constantly when writing papers.

The infrastructure matters

Set up your reference manager (Zotero), version control (Git, even for LaTeX), and backup strategy in week one. Losing six months of notes because of a failed disk is not hypothetical — it happens.

The first-year review

Most doctoral programmes have a formal first-year review — a report and an oral examination to confirm you on the programme. Treat it seriously, not as a formality. It is a useful forcing function to produce a coherent research statement while the project is still shapeable.