CV Enhancing During a PhD – Practical Strategies to Avoid Burnout

Having moved from a small, insular university to a big and bustling department when I started my PhD, I seemed to find something exciting going on everywhere I turned – seminars, careers workshops, outreach events, etc. Falling victim to Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO), I blindly signed up to everything going. But as this started to eat into my time for experiments, I would compromise by working harder and longer – predictably, I ended up with “burnout”. It’s all too easy for PhD students to pick up on the mantra to “get involved in everything you can” but it’s more difficult to find advice on where to draw the line. Using these practical strategies however, you can avoid my mistakes and hopefully make the most of the extra-curricular spectrum on offer whilst still getting enough data for a stellar thesis.

Seminars:

Your institute may have several seminar streams happening at any one time, especially if it’s a broad, multi-disciplinary one, so it’s important to be strategic. Before I learnt to focus my interests, I used to fill notebooks with scribbled notes from talks that had little relation to my project – not surprisingly, I never read most of them again. Try to aim for the more specialist seminar series that fall within the same field as your PhD area – these are more likely to be useful and introduce you to potential collaborators. However, it can also be useful to go to a more broad-themed, open lecture every now and then to keep you in tune with new, emerging areas of science. It may be much better to attend fewer seminars and stay behind a little longer to pick up a few new contacts, than to keep having to dash out before the end to rescue the gel you left running. Make the most of the seminars you do go to by using them as a chance to critique the science – why did they use that method to address their hypothesis? Which controls did they need? Challenge yourself to ask a question or suggest an area of future research for the speaker.

Careers Workshops:

If your institution has a busy careers department, you may be inundated each week with the “What’s On” brochure. Whilst it’s true that many PhD students DON’T make the most of the careers services on offer, it is also possible to do too much. You can easily find yourself sitting bored in a workshop, hearing redundant information whilst daydreaming about that PCR you could be doing. Always ask yourself; is the information likely to be something I have heard before elsewhere? Can I get the information from another source? Events with external speakers, particularly from industry, are more likely to be useful as they offer valuable real-world perspectives and networking opportunities. Internally-organised events, however, are likely to be repeated each year and you may find the slides on your institution’s intranet pages.

Committees:

Being on a departmental or societal committee is a brilliant way to demonstrate responsibility and being able to work with others. Being on too many committees though will drain your time and resources and can lead to stresses all of their own. Remember that, more often than not, your duties will be more than those advertised on the job description and rarely less. It can be better to leave some flexibility so that you can “lean in” when important events crop up, than to spread yourself so thinly that you wonder if you are making any valuable contributions at all. Yes, committee positions look great on your CV, but remember that employers will be interested to see evidence of what you actually DID!

Teaching/supervision roles:

Have you ever got carried away when the PhD demonstrator spreadsheet goes live, and put your name down in every blank slot left? And then you wonder why you can never find a free afternoon for that “big experiment”. Being able to supervise students is an invaluable skill, but there are other ways of doing it that don’t eat up several hours or even days at a time. Choose areas most related to your field of study to save having to read too much background context beforehand. Consider tutoring on either a voluntary of private basis – you could limit this to a few hours a week, to fit in outside your main experimental time. There are also e-mentoring schemes where, from as little as 30 minutes a week, you can support GCSE/A Level students in their scientific aspirations.

Outreach activities:

Do you have a yen to ignite the public with your fascination for science? If so, you will find it hard to pass up any opportunity on the public events calendar to get involved, but these activities can be exhausting – both in the preparation and on the day itself. Go for long-established events where a lot of the organisation has been done for you and the roles are tried and tested. Events that require you to set up demonstrations from scratch will need more advance planning and lots of group meetings before a final idea is decided on. However, events where you talk about your own research can be good, after all you should know this inside-out and it is useful experience for your own lab meetings!

And remember…

Learn what works for you. Your ideal pattern won’t necessarily be the same as your colleagues. Everyone comes into a PhD from different backgrounds and has different gaps in their skills and knowledge. So if the rest of your lab troop off to a seminar which you’ve decided won’t be useful to you, don’t make a big thing of it – you don’t want to be thought of as someone who thinks their work is above everyone else’s. Equally, don’t be swayed when nobody else shows an interest in an event which you have earmarked as being potentially very useful for your development. People DO miss out on opportunities during their PhD, and then have few contacts and resources to draw on when it comes to finding the next job. Just make sure you still get those experiments done!