PhD Skoltech Annual Review Disclaimer for the new readers: I am Daryna, the author of this channel, and I am doing PhD at Skolkovo Institue of Science and Technology which is in Moscow. My PhD is connected with NLP, so that's why I have this channel — to share interesting things that I found out during my research and diving in more deeply in NLP topic. The majority of posts are indeed about NLP, but sometimes I also like to share my personal insights about my going PhD. This posts is of such type. As a PhD student, we have annual evaluation where we share with the committee our progress and are decided to continue our studies or not. For me, it is also time to retrospect the past year in terms of some insights not about research, but about life. There was a similar post last year (but in Russian, sorry🙈). So, I would like to continue the tradition. Here are the second PhD Annual Insights 2021. 1. The main outcome of the outgoing year — science is about collaboration and team work. During my first year, I was working on my topic only by myself (only communicating with my advisor). As a result, the progress of work was changing pretty slowly. The things changed rapidly when I was involved in the project with team of post-doc, researchers and even newly joint Master students. We managed to do a lot of work in less than a year that finished in quite good publications (thanks a lot everybody for that🙏). My point here will be — if you are working alone and struggling with the progress, try to find collaborations with your colleagues in the lab, in other labs, with other research groups. If you look at the most cited/popular papers, they were made by a group of researches. Actually, the whole science is a result of a huge collaborations of people through out time and distance. 2. To write a paper is a huge work. More specifically, the path from an idea and to the final version of the accepted paper with, for example, github repo with code — is a pretty long way of hard work. Last year I wrote that if you have a material and experiments to write about, it is quite easy to write a paper. For submission. But when you are lucky and your paper was accepted, for me, it was like to write one more paper. And then you need to put together and make pretty and workable your code, create a presentation, present the presentation, and discuss it on the conference. That was really like one more project. So, that pieces of paper of about 4-8 pages are the result of tone of work. Be ready and aware of it. 3. Following the previous statement, to be a researcher — to be proactive. Yes, your supervisor can give you tasks and help with direction, but the responsibility of really making work to be done is all on you. If you want your idea to be indeed implemented in live, you are the one who can make it possible. In joint work with your team. 4. To do something even a small piece of work is better than to do nothing at all. It is just a rule of life in general. Just. Remember. This. 5. However, of course, the path to the successful work and a result with submission is fulfilled with obstacles, failures, and disappointments. It can be total chaos wit times when you do not know at all what to do next or even do not have a will to do anything. It is absolutely ok. To make such times easier, I found the way to organize the life outside of my work — make a routine, include sports, eat healthy food, spend time with hobbies. Yes, your work, your research occupies a huge and important part of your life. But you are not only your work. My advice will be to realize yourself outside of your research, so that when some part of your life, work, will be disordered, another part of your life will bring you joy and energy to live.