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Written by: Profacgillies Edited by: Elizabeth Stannard Gromisch Published Jun 4, 2010 Think you're not clever enough to get a PhD? Maybe you think you're too clever to fail to get a PhD. Success is much about how you approach it as your innate academic ability and intelligence. Here are 10 top tips on how to get a PhD distilled from over 15 years of successful PhD supervision.
3. Set Milestones
It's all about the planning--see my other articles on planning for your PhD study and outlining your research proposal. The specific tip here is that getting a PhD is a long process, so set
yourself milestones. Most programs have a mid-program review, sometimes in the form of a progression from MPhil to PhD. But use more milestones, so set yourself more interim goals, in the form of seminars presentations and publications along the way. This is especially important for part time students where the end point can seem a very long way away and distractions such as the day job, the kids and even the washing can seem more urgent if not more important.
See the complete Bright Hub Guide to Earning a PhD
7. Know Why You are Doing Things as Well as What You are Doing
One of the things I expect to be able to do with a PhD thesis is to point to any sentence and ask the student "Why? Where is your evidence for that action or assertion?" What you do needs to have a rationale, and what you assert needs to have an evidence base. At lower levels of education, the answer may well be because my tutor or professor told me to do it that way, or that this was the correct answer. No longer. First you need to know why, second you need to able to justify why, and thirdly, you need to record why in your written thesis.
Financial Engineering
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