Should staying up late and working overtime really become the normal life rhythm of graduate students?

"Research is bitter and research is tiring", and staying up late and working overtime is almost a compulsory course for every researcher and graduate student. The life of many researchers may be 007. Although it is illegal to work in 996 recently, it doesn't seem to matter to researchers, because some people emphasize that doing scientific research should be like this. It seems that staying up late and working overtime really has to be the norm to make your scientific research progress? That was not the case. Just like those "top student" in most people's eyes, except for high IQ, others are probably not due to hard work overtime, but to self-discipline and reasonable time arrangement. Many times, graduate students go astray. What we should pursue more is efficiency and quality, so that we can finish our work, do a good job in scientific research and become masters of time management.

1. Reasonable management at any time during the postgraduate period

During the postgraduate period, the time is neither short nor short, and three years can easily pass at your fingertips. Even for doctors, many people still think that five years is too short to do too much. As a graduate student, there should be a qualitative change in the view of time, and the value of time should be considered instead of spending a period of time. Perhaps we have heard the report that some students have made some achievements in moral, intellectual, physical and aesthetic aspects when they graduated from their master's/doctoral degrees, but on the other hand, some people can't even meet the basic graduation requirements, which is an extravagant hope. These excellent graduate students, besides working as hard as most people, all have a common feature, that is, they have their own work plan and can arrange their work consciously.

Many graduate students always expect to work long hours to determine their grades. They mistakenly thought it was hard work, so they worked overtime until late at night. Even some laboratories and tutors think so. It is ridiculous to force the time. Not working overtime means not working hard. However, is this really the case? I'm afraid not at all. Both tutors and students should pursue efficiency and quality. The accumulation of quantity is often meaningless, "wasting people and money". The crazy output and overtime work of the previous day is not a highly completed work, but often a whole body of fatigue, which leads to the waste of good time the next day and the next few days, and it is impossible to cheer up and come up with the best working condition.

In fact, everyone can be a "master of time management". The key to improving efficiency lies in how you manage it: experimental records should be made well: every graduate student will issue experimental record books at the beginning of enrollment, which will run through the whole research and study. Remember to record the contents and results of the experiment after finishing your homework every day. On the one hand, summarize the previous content to prevent forgetting it later; On the other hand, plan the next day's work, what you need to do and what you need to prepare, so that you can start the next day's work in an orderly way and save time. Develop good recording habits, just like keeping a diary every day, I believe it will get twice the result with half the effort!

2. Learn to be "refined" and forbid "stupid"

The study during the postgraduate period is no longer like the undergraduate course. No one will specialize in teaching and explaining, but more is self-study. At first, many people didn't adapt, but the sooner you master the ability of autonomous learning and purposeful learning, the better your scientific research career will be.

A. purposeful learning

Graduate students should learn to get exactly what they need, but not everything. In the end, many things can't be learned, and the research on yourself is actually worthless. For example, literature reading is an important channel for graduate students to acquire knowledge. But many people are doing nothing or only completing the task of reporting once, forgetting the original intention. The literature is very long, so it is impossible to cover everything like reading a novel, but we should learn from it. First, if you don't understand a certain knowledge point and need to learn from the literature, you can read the review articles. However, if the selected articles are produced by authoritative magazines, the number of reviews does not need to be too much, and two articles are enough, so you must read them intensively. In addition to the summary, you can also look at the introduction of other articles, which highly refines the research fields involved and helps to understand them quickly. Secondly, if you just want to know an experimental method and apply it to your own research, you can just read the method part of the article directly, go straight to the subject and get the experimental conditions and process. Third, if you want to know the conclusion of the research results of the article and report it, you need to match pictures with the results of the article. In this process, imagine yourself as the author of the article with your own thinking, and understand the topic design and logical direction of others, which will be of great help to your thinking! Graduate students have to learn more than one or two things, and it is impossible to cover everything, but they must read intensively in some aspects to supplement what they need. Without it, they will make rapid progress!

B. Learn to use tools to help learning

First of all, for example, when reading SCI papers, some graduate students don't study them from a scientific point of view, but regard them as articles for CET-6 reading study. They don't know the words one by one, and stay at the stage of learning them. Although English proficiency is a great obstacle to reading foreign literature, it is not the biggest obstacle. Translation tools such as Google Academic Translation, Zhiyun Literature Reading Translation, and Salad Word Search can improve the efficiency of literature reading without memorizing words. In fact, if you read too much, you will naturally know them. In addition, we should learn to manage articles, so as to have the effect of reading. The easiest way is to use Endnote, because it will be used when writing articles, and it will be more convenient to insert references. There are many helpful tools for reading articles and many tools for writing articles. Don't be content with poor English and don't want to write SCI articles. For example, there are some tools, such as programming check grammar and AI writing assistant, which can help improve the quality of writing. A lot of research and study depend on ourselves, and no one will guide and help solve any problems, so learn to get resources by yourself. The official WeChat account is the best resource for many scientific researches. For example, in the 360-person library, a large number of people share their experiences and knowledge selflessly. Even Li Li is the source of our free learning resources. Finally, I want to emphasize that learning things as professionally as possible and mastering the content and technology of your own research direction will benefit for a long time. Exquisite study replaces stupid study, saving time and improving efficiency!

Find the right rhythm

Finding the right rhythm, to put it bluntly, is to arrange scientific research work in a rhythmic and planned way. At the beginning of graduate school, it may be far away from graduation, so we take it lightly and have no plan, which leads to confusion in follow-up research and failure to complete the project, which will have an impact on graduation. It is not advisable to take a step-by-step attitude. Because of this, when the task can't be completed, I try my best to work overtime and stay up late, but the quality of the completion is not good, and I indulge myself in my spare time.

As the saying goes, "Do the right thing at the right time, step by step, and do the right thing at the right time". Therefore, we should pay attention to long-term vision and plan our scientific research career in advance. The three years of graduate students can be divided into three stages. First, in addition to completing some courses and obtaining credits, what must be completed is to learn experimental techniques well, read more literature and master the basic research content in this field. It is also very important to determine and open the topic, communicate with the tutor more, and the sooner you determine the topic, the better. At least you should start your own research and get some pre-experimental results before the end of the first research. Second, if you concentrate on your own project, you may encounter many problems. Learn to communicate with others and learn how to solve them. This is probably the busiest stage. In the process of doing research, we should constantly sort out the experimental methods and results, form logical ideas, and keep communication with each other at all times, so that at the end of the research, we can quickly sort out and form a paper and bear fruitful results. Third, completing the submission and revision of the paper and ensuring that the research results are published in half the time are related to whether the graduation requirements are met. In addition, many people will participate in recruitment frequently at this stage, so remember not to miss the school recruitment. Finally, set aside three months to finish the graduation thesis and prepare for the defense. Although this is a general plan, at least there will be a goal to promote our progress in the future. On this basis, we can complete self-transcendence and self-cultivation.

Although it takes a lot of time to do research, it is not just by sacrificing time and energy that you can get results and graduate smoothly. Learn to use time reasonably, manage time reasonably and manage your own initiative, so as to get twice the result with half the effort and free your own time. Finally, I hope all graduate students and doctoral students will have a happy and sunny research career!

In the next section, we will officially start the systematic histological analysis, starting with the transcription group, and then more exciting! ! !