This is a list of practical tips for philosophy PhD students who want to make a career out of academia. As I write this, I am a last year PhD student and have very consciously treated my PhD as an apprenticeship in being an academic. When I began, I conscientiously went looking for advice on how to do well. I found and read lots of articles called things like ‘ten top tips for PhD students’. They had two things in common: they were all aimed either at science students, or PhD students in general (often with a bias towards science), and they were all incredibly vague.

This was very frustrating. I had managed to get into a well respected PhD program; I didn’t really need anyone to tell that me it was good idea to use a calendar, meet with my supervisor, or not work too hard (these all appear as real advice on this list, which comes up if you Google ‘PhD advice’).

What I wanted was straightforward, practical advice, ideally aimed at Philosophy students, covering things I might not have thought of. So after three years of PhD study, here is an attempt at some advice. It is a list of things you can do, mostly pretty easily, which might help.

This list is not exhaustive or comprehensive, and is certainly not a complete guide to doing a PhD or becoming an academic. Suggested additions and corrections are very welcome—just email me at hugo.heagren@kcl.ac.uk.

See also the British Philosophical Association’s resources for early career philosophers and the Daily Nous thread on this guide as well as the whole category of posts on professionalism.

Work

• Use a reference manager. Seriously. Any one will do. Ideally one which can connect to (Bib)L^aT_eX.¹ Whenever people new to graduate study ask me for advice, I tell them this first. If you don’t know which to use, use Zotero.
• Keep templates for emails you (will) send a lot, and use them when you do so. Some examples:
  • Beginning of term email to students in your seminar/lecture group. Include the guide to sending good emails (or a rewritten/updated equivalent appropriates for your institution and country).
  • Email to a student who isn’t coming to class.
  • Email two weeks before essay hand in with writing advice and hand-in information.
• Keep notes on pretty much everything. It’s easy to write something down, especially on a computer. If you’ve written it down, the worst that can happen is that you never look at it again. But if you don’t write it down the worst that can happen is that you want to look at it again, and can’t.²
• Maintain a list of ideas for papers/books you want to write. Never remove, only add.
• If you take on a job with billable hours (admin, building academic websites, typesetting etc.) do nothing for free. Charge for your time reading emails. You are definitely the only person who cares about whether you are charging for 11 hours rather 10.5.
• Use the right quotes.
• Find out as early as possible exactly what your department will pay for vis a vis things like travel to conferences and overnight accommodation. Some are very generous (and others are not). This information is often quite difficult to pin down, and generally the most reliable sources will be other, more senior, grad students (there is usually a grad student whatsapp group and/or mailing list which is good for this kind of thing). Sometimes money is allotted along very fine-grained lines, with different pots for conference attendance, research visits (e.g. a studentship/professorship) and other research expenses.
• Submit work to lots of conferences (and similar things). It’s generally free to submit and often free or cheap to go, and as a graduate student conferences are a great way to get feedback on your work, build you CV and meet other people in your area.
• Try to publish things. Ideally, you want to leave your PhD with a couple of publications (though this is hard and is not a requirement!) See Daniel Muñoz’ advice on this topic.
• Buy your own board pens. They are always going missing, and having your own is helpful. I think these are the best ones, and they’re refillable.

• Use a password manager. They’re free and easy to use. You will need to sign up for so many things during your studies, and managing all the logins gets old quickly. I recommend not using the one which comes built into your computer, because they often don’t have very good backup/export functions, and passwords are one thing you definitely want to be able to easily copy over onto your next machine. Install one with good backup support, or use a cloud-based one. I use passwordstore.

  Some people seem to believe that using a password manager makes them vulnerable to attack, because someone could steal their laptop and thus obtain all the passwords. This is not true; all password managers use strong encryption which would take a hacker millions of years to break. You are at much greater risk if you use the same password for everything, because many small companies won’t have very good security, and so getting your account with them hacked means an attacker has your password for everything else (even the companies with better security).

• Subscribe to Philos-L—it’s an excellent way to hear about conferences and talks.
• Buy a second laptop charger and leave it at campus, so that you don’t have to lug it to work and back every day. Do the same for any other small things you can, just to make your commute a bit easier (nice coffee cup, water bottle, etc.).
• You’ll often come across texts which are hosted on PDCnet and which you can’t access. These same texts (same journal, same PDF) are often also on JSTOR for free.
• You should know about Anna’s archive.

Presentations and papers

• Whenever you distribute your papers/chapters/writing, use PDF. Everyone can open and use them. This is literally what PDF was designed to do. Don’t use google docs, word, doc(x) or plain text. Not everyone can open these, and they all have pretty severe limitations which PDFs don’t. If you write in L^aT_eX, your should get PDFs out the other end by default.
  • How to export a Word doc to PDF
  • How to export a Google doc to PDF
  • How to export a Pages doc to PDF
• Make your presentations in PDF (for similar reasons). Everyone can open and use them. PDFs don’t (really/practically) support fancy transitions between slides,³ but if your talk gets significantly worse without the transitions, it wasn’t a good talk to begin with.
• Design your presentations with accessibility and simplicity in mind. Don’t use complicated transitions, strange fonts or flashing lights unless necessary (in philosophy, it is very rarely necessary, unless you’re doing maths/logic with lots of symbols).

Computers

• Learn to touch type. It’s worth it, really, trust me. There are a few different free courses online. I used this one. I did it over a winter break, doing an hour lesson every morning for a couple of weeks. It’s so worth it. I can now confidently type a quote out of a book lying beside my laptop without looking at the keys or the screen.
• Ensure your computer has a proper PDF reader. PDF is a very powerful format⁴ and a lot of software won’t let you see all that some PDFs have to offer. This is true of the default readers of mac and windows. The industry standard is Adobe Acrobat, which is free and available for mac and windows machines⁵ if you’re on Linux you can probably look after yourself, but personally I recommend Okular.
• Explore how Outlook works. All universities these days use Outlook for email, and academia lives and dies by email. You will spend a lot of time using Outlook-based software (whether you like that idea or not!) so have a look at it. Some cool things:
  • Searching for people by their name
  • Contacts lists. During term I have a list for each group I'm teaching—it makes mass emails much easier.
  • Rules for managing email automatically (filtering, auto-deleting etc.). I use this to keep Philos-L in a separate inbox.
• Learn the basics of L^aT_eX (if you’re a logician or a philosopher of maths/science, learn more). Eventually, it will be useful, and you will be glad you learned it when you did rather than doing it on the hoof.
  • When I learned, I found this Wikibook the best learning resource. The Overleaf documentation is also good.
  • Personally, the most significant thing I’ve got out of L^aT_eX is its capacity to automate my referencing. Far and away the best tool for this is Biblatex. I strongly recommend learning how to use Biblatex. There's some Overleaf documentation here.
• Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography is an excellent, free resource on making your documents beautiful and readable (both of which they should be!).
• If you use L^aT_eX a lot, or submit to lots of journals which do, then every time you do so, make and keep a template file, with all the right settings and macros, for the next time you need to submit to that journal. By the time you are old and grey like me, you’ll thank yourself. This is especially relevant for people who work in logic, phil. math. and phil. sci., where the journals often have quite strict L^aT_eX-related policies.

• Recognise, right now, that your computer (laptop, desktop etc.) is temporary but the data on it is not. In other words: during your academic career there will come a point (probably in the next few years) where you need to use a new machine, but with the same data/files on it. If you stay in academia this will happen many times. Work out how you manage this transition in advance. There are basically two approaches:

  1. Don’t actually keep anything on the computer itself and use a cloud service (Google Drive, One Drive, Dropbox etc.) instead. Personally I don’t recommend this. Cloud services are expensive for large amounts of data, often don’t have much flexibility, and don’t allow you to work on planes (early career academics spend a surprising amount of time on planes!). They are also generally run by large companies who want to steal your data.
  2. Keep everything on the computer and learn to backup and restore your data. This will probably be (marginally) more complex but I think it’s worth it.

  Clearly I prefer 2 to 1. But doing 1 is definitely better than doing neither!

• Write an email signature. It looks professional and your students may find it helpful. It should contain any relevant information, but don’t overdo it. As with many such things, the best way to judge this is to look at the signatures of those around you, and see which you find useful/professional and which you find annoying. Depending on your needs, you might include:

  • Your pronouns.
  • Your name (perhaps with a pronunciation guide).
  • A gentle indication to students of how to address you (e.g. prefixing your name with ‘Dr’ or ‘Professor’, if this sort of thing matters to you/your institution).
  • Your office hours and their location.
  • Your website (see below).
  • Brief indications of interesting positions you currently hold. e.g. ‘Research assistant: big-research-centre.com’. These really should be brief!

  It is (or was once) widely conventional to begin your signature with ‘--’ with the rest following on the next line.⁶

Website

At some point in your third or fourth year, setup a simple website with enough information about you to look professional. Some good examples of such websites:

• elisewoodard.org
• willsharpphilosophy.com
• hugoheagren.com (me!)

Your website should:

• Be at an address which is as close to your name as possible (all the above are good examples of this).
• Work equally well on desktop computers or mobile phones/tablets (portrait and landscape).
• Make it very obvious how to contact you.
• List all your academic achievements, especially your publications.
• Include an obvious way to download a PDF of your CV.
• Probably not include much else, unless there is other relevant stuff you really want to include.

Don’t worry too much about how you set it up. I wrote mine from scratch in plain HTML, but in this I am an exception. Using Squarespace, Wix, html5up, webnode or a similar builder is fine so long as you are confident in how to update the site in the future.

See also two Philosopher’s Cocoon posts with some helpful discussion:

• putting together a good academic website?
• job market boot camp, part 11: how to cultivate a professional online presence.

Travel

• If you live in a city with a reasonable transport network (like the tube in london, or the metro in new york), check if you can get a student discount, or even better, a student-discounted travelcard (tends to end up cheaper) if you travel around the city a lot. TFL do one for london and it’s great.
• Get a passport if you don’t have one already!
• Buy a good suitcase. if you’re doing it right, you’ll use it a lot.
• Buy a universal travel adaptor.
• Many universities offer travel insurance to all academic staff for things like conferences and you’ll become academic staff once you start teaching (i.e. during your phd). Find out if your institution offers travel insurance and if so how to sign up for it. Note though that it tends to be fairly basic, so if you have complex health needs or unusual risks, you might need something extra.

Useful bookmarks

List of bookmarks in my web browser I regularly use (some may not apply to your institution):

• outlook.office.com/mail
• PhD program handbook.
• Undergraduate program handbook (for when undergrads email me asking about their course).
• My timetable.
• List(s) of office hours (for faculty and for TAs)
• List(s) of available courses/modules.
• Library search page.⁷
• PhilPapers (I use ‘pp’ as a philpapers search keyword).
• The web printing page.
• My current institution’s virtual classroom/learning service (blackboard, canvas, keats, etc.).
• Site where I log hours for the work I do for the university.
• Branding guide for my institution (internal web page with fonts, logos, templates, etc.). This is useful for cover letters.

Finally

Give back a bit to the academic community. For example, you could keep notes on practical things which helped you during your time as a graduate student and then post them to your website when if you get a job.⁸