Publishing papers while keeping everything in balance: Practical advice for a productive graduate school experience

Pursuing a graduate degree is difficult. To succeed, students must overcome a myriad of ill-defined, and often unforeseen, challenges. One major obstacle lies in publishing their work. In this perspective, I provide a detailed description of my own working system that matured late in my graduate career but still paid dividends in terms of my publication record, funding success, and work-life balance. I also include brief vignettes of other topics that were crucial to my own scientific development. While I organized this essay as a series of “rules”—I don’t mean to imply that graduate school nor academia has a specific formula for success. Not only does it not, but as a first-year postdoctoral researcher, I can only speak to what works in graduate school through the lens of my own experiences. My experience is particularly relevant, however, because unlike many who have offered similar advice in the past, I drafted this perspective in the months that followed my degree. Rather, I offer these rules as a starting point for you to take, consider, and mold into your own framework. I am confident, however, that there is commonality among the ideas described here and the general habits of successful academics. In writing this perspective, I had three primary goals: (1) To add a more detailed, recent perspective to previous, more general essays on this topic. (2) To bridge an apparent disconnect between successful faculty and graduate students. Essentially, the advice in this essay may be obvious to a seasoned academic while simultaneously highly relevant, and interesting, to an early career student. And finally, (3) I hope to help dispel myths graduate students may hold about the innate talent or expertise needed to succeed in graduate school and to demystify the day-to-day work side of the equation. Simply put, I’m not a scientific outlier. But with good organizational skills, a diligent writing habit, and some invaluable mentoring, I made it to the light at the end of the tunnel (and into a career-progressing position). You can too.