Technically I still have not experienced my first class as a PhD student because our only class today was canceled. I was really looking forward to it but hey, there’s still next week! I’m kind of biased because it’s on properties of galaxies and galaxies are my thing and apparently so do the majority of astrophysicist i.e. bigger competition for grants and fellowships. That fact scares me a little bit since I already have limited options as an international student. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself!

We only had our first year seminar and since it’s the first day, we just went over what we will be covering for the semester. It does not seem like a stressful class since its main purpose is for us to be prepared about adult PhD things e.g. doing presentations, submitting proposals, facilities and opportunities etc. However, the information overload is freaking me out a little bit so now I’m on a roll looking at the grants that I can eligible for. Most of them do not apply to me either so I have been scouring the internet as much as I can. Once I have a pretty good list, I’ll post them here.

I can’t really say much in terms of helpful advice, at least not yet, since I haven’t dove fully into the graduate student life, but a pretty good one that I keep on hearing is to love what you are doing. That seems pretty general, I know, but if you want to be competitive for research grants and post doc positions, you have to juggle your commitments wisely and that means having good time management skills. And there’s no other way to allot enough time to everything you want/need to do unless you actually love what you are doing.

-D