By the Resource Committee of Research Insights Club

It does not matter if the documentation of your PhD journey is in a single master document, whether it is Google Docs, or LaTex, or scattered across several apps and platforms. The how is less important. The key insight is to document the essentials of your PhD journey in the first place.  

In the following, we share some key insights that are important to note down – namely reading, meetings, experiments, networking – with minimal overhead while reaping many benefits.  

When planning and organizing the timeline for a 5-6 year PhD, there are two effective ways to structure it: by academic years or by specific semesters. In the year-based approach, you can divide your PhD journey into stages like “Year 1,” “Year 2,” and so forth, with each year representing the progression of coursework, research milestones, and dissertation work. Alternatively, you can organize it by semester or term—for example, “Fall 2022 to Summer 2023” for each academic cycle. This semester-based structure can offer a more granular view of goals and timelines, helping to outline specific objectives and tasks for each term. Either approach allows you to track your progress systematically, adapt to any shifts in your research trajectory, and clearly mark the completion of various phases within your PhD journey. 

Each semester can be further organized into sub-categories to keep track of specific academic responsibilities and activities. Key sections might include Coursework (for classes and academic assignments), Research Projects (for ongoing experiments, data analysis, and findings), and Undergraduate Projects (if mentoring or assisting undergrad students) and TA-ship (for classes you are assisting as a teaching assistant). Additional categories could cover Collaborations (joint work with other researchers or labs) and Mentorship (guidance provided to younger students or peers). This structure ensures that every academic aspect of the semester is systematically organized and easy to access.