Nature journal has published an article under career view in 2006 from Georgia Chenevix-Trench,a principal research fellow at the Queensland,Institute of Medical Research, Royal Brisbane Hospital, Herston, Australia.She talks about what makes a good PhD student which i found it very interesting and might help many students who are pursuing or might take PhD in the furture.

Doing a PhD should be fun and rewarding, because you can spend all your working time discovering things and pursuing ideas — and getting paid for it, without any administrative responsibilities. Those who stick with a career in science do so because, despite the relatively poor pay, long hours and
lack of security, it is all we want to do.–Georgia Trench

I briefly outline some important points here:

1) Chosing a supervisor whose work you admire ,then only you enjoy working or else it will be burden.
2) One should take responsiblities of the project by working long days all week and most of the weekends as well .If research is your passion this should be easy, and if isn’t then you are in wrong place.
3) Take some weekends off to aviod burn out.
4) Reading literature in and around your field.
5) Plan your exxperiments and days properly.
6) Write your lab book everyday (which i wont and i should)
7) Develop good writing skills.Will make your scientific career rather easy.

Be creative. Think about what you are doing and why, and look for better ways to go. Don’t see your PhD as just a road map laid out by your supervisor.

To be successful you must be at least four of the following: smart, motivated, creative, hard-working, skilful and lucky.You can’t depend on luck, so you had better focus on the others.

–Georgia Chenevix-Trench,research fellow at the Queensland,Institute of Medical Research

For a detailed view of informative guide for PhD students click
here and see Guide for PhD students aiming for a successful career in science from main page,It is downloaded in word format.

Sometimes while reading those points one realize that these are very minor things but usually go unnoticed and hence we fail to implement it.Finally I want to thank Georgia Chenevix-Trench for pointing out some very valuable points for PhD students, which might go a long way in shaping their career.

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