You should be readying yourself for your first class at this stage in your journey. You may have an orientation to attend before, and we'll get to that, but this post aims to set you up for success leading up to your first classroom experience.
TL;DR: Prepping for success before your first class. This topic is broken into two posts. Check the headers for areas that may serve you, and return for the second half.
To recap the series of events that have landed you here, you have been accepted into a program (woot!) that you committed to (put a ring or at least a non-refundable deposit on it) and have confirmed your enrollment. Yay! Now you need to get acclimated, organized, and prepared to rock this thing (insert a The Mask scene leading to a musical number of epic-ness).
There's a lot to do to be ready and less time to do it. You'll need to familiarize yourself with the following:
College-provided digital environments such as the emailing system and class learning management system (LMS) such as D2L/Brightspace, Canvas, Blackboard, Sakai, etc.
Lay off the land (i.e., the campus) to locate your classes and student resources.
Digital textbook system (if the college uses one), to opt-in or opt-out (pending on if you prefer to buy your books independently or not).
Student Handbook (I recognize the likelihood that you read this might be marginal; I get it. As the nerd who read it, I know there's some useful information in there. Think of this as good practice for all those academic articles you will be immersed in soon).
Offices and contacts for each office you may need to engage with (realistically, you could tackle this on an as-needed basis, so there is no rush here).
No doubt, in the weeks leading up to your first class, you'll start receiving emails from the school concerning events, expectations, bookstore advertisements, and the like. Learn how to access everything, bookmark essential sites, and check your email regularly.
Getting Organized
Next, you'll need to organize yourself both digitally and physically. Now you might be thinking, "Dr. G., with all due respect, I'm good here. I know what to do and am ready to rock and roll (insert air guitar)." To which I would say, "That's awesome! I'm not suggesting you disrupt a system that has gotten to this point if it works well, BUT if your master's or bachelor's degree (if going directly to Ph.D. and passing GO) process got a little 'nutty' towards the end, this post might be worth your perusal. You have my full support to do as you see fit."
The digital organization includes storage systems for your computer and email files. You should be able to quickly access and know where any one file you need is (Trust me when I say this becomes a critical point come dissertation time. You'll have so many articles backlogged and citations to track that it becomes an insurmountable obstacle if you're not organized. So, with that in mind, it's best to build a system that works now that becomes second nature by the time you begin dissertating, which leads me to file naming and folder organization.
Exciting, right? If saving time and reducing stress is your jam, I've got a sweet, juicy information download for you (Pardon the pun).
Folder Organization for Doctoral Awesomeness:
Folder systems are whatever you make them to be. Accordingly, I am recommending the method that worked for me, BUT I strongly advise that you tailor this to a system that works for you and borrow whatever tactics make sense. (There's no sense in using a system you loathe because, eventually, you'll stop using it.)
Start by making your parent folder and call it whatever makes sense to you. You can call it "Doctor_Degree" or "School_Work" or something else entirely. E.g., I called mine the name of the school, degree, and the word "work" after it, using underscores instead of spaces (you'll see why this is important when we talk about file naming). Again, make this your own. Then open that puppy up. It's time to design the next layer of subfolders.
Let's add a "Classes" or "ClassWork" folder. All documents associated with a class will unsurprisingly go into its associated course folder as a new subfolder. Make a folder for each course (you can do this as you start each class, there's no need to make them all right now) using the course number or name of the class.
For example, if your first class is called PHD1001: Intro to Doctoral Research, you could label your folder "PHD1001" or "IntroToDoctoralResearch." I recommend using the course codes because they are consistent and, in most cases, already in numerical, sequential order, allowing the folders to be chronological when you open your "Classes" folder automatically.
You may also want to add a folder in your parent folder for other aspects of your education, such as:
Events
Colleague defenses (Note: Your program might encourage you to watch your peers during the big moments in their dissertations. If this is the case, ATTEND AS MANY AS YOUR SCHEDULE ALLOWS. Why? Great question! You'll have a VERY clear picture of what you're in for and get a feel for the dos and don'ts concerning defenses. I'll revisit this point when discussing the dissertation process later.)
Financial Aid or Bills
Clubs or Honors Chapters
A good ole miscellaneous folder (for the times there's not a clear home for a file)
Enrollment resources
Research resources (applicable to more than one class so they get a special home)
The last level of folders concerns the organization of each class. In this case, you have a couple of options here, and again, whichever makes sense for you is advisable. One option is to sort the class by each week of the term OR use the deliverable method. In case this is a new term, a deliverable (in the realm of project management) is the thing (technical term) you deliver (submit) to satisfy the terms of your original client contract (what we often call the Statement or Scope of Work, aka the SOW, in case you're interested).
When applying this to your classes, the deliverable would be the assignments you have due to satisfy the expectations of the course (i.e., earn a passing grade). The nice thing is you will have a clear idea of what you must do by the end of the term by reviewing the class syllabus. In either case, I advise also making a Class Resources" file for all the documents that outline the course or have information that applies to more than one assignment. The goal here is to be able to access any needed file within five mouse clicks.
You do want to go subfolder crazy, as that takes a lot of time, but scrolling through unsorted files is not ideal either. Use the same approach when organizing your emails; you'll be smooth sailing regarding your organizational prowess. Now that we're folder ready, let's talk about file naming conventions.
File Naming Conventions for Doctoral Awesomeness:
If this seems irrelevant to you or you have your naming convention system in a state that works well, please skip this section.
File naming is important because, ultimately, it either helps or hinders the searchability of your files and determines the likelihood that your files will remain intact (i.e., not corrupt) due to the presence of bad characters (not be confused with the Tasmanian Devil here, he's not bad, just chaotic neutral). If this is your first time hearing this, it might be worth sticking around to prevent a file-related disaster during crunch time. I take a page (literally, ba-dum-ch!) from Harvard's guidelines. By using a consistent method, you intuitively know what premutation of characters to enter to find your file using a search quickly. With every file name should be a string (ah, coding humor) of information that tells you:
What course is the file associated with
What the file is
When it was created (i.e., the date in YYYYMMDD format)
What version number of the file is (This number is for you. Your professor will not ask or care which version you give them. If you recall, your latest version is V05; you know not to bother opening V04 as things have changed since then, but now you can go back to older versions if you need to by versioning your files and saving changes as new versions.)
Special notes:
(1) For the love of all that is good in the universe, do not EVER name something "final." The minute you do, a change will present itself, and you'll end up with files like these:
(2) For images, I also like to include the pixel dimensions to quickly determine if an image will work when placed in specific locations without trial and error. E.g. for a MacBook 13" background image, add "_2560_1600".
One last note before moving on from here, let's talk "spec. chars." or fully referred to as special characters.
These little balls of fun can cause many issues opening your files because some computer systems cannot handle them. Without going ultimately down the rabbit hole (as I am NOT a programmer but am learning a language. Consequently, I ask for a bit of grace here if my metaphors are not perfect), your file names represent an identifier that is equated to a location or a bit on your storage drive be it an old school hard drive or its newer cousin the solid-state drive. Because the location is rooted in a code (like directions on a map telling the processor to "go here"), special characters can confuse the function of locating and opening the file.
With that said, here is the spec. chars. you need to avoid along with using a space in file names:
~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) ` ; : < > ? . , [ ] { } ' " |
Citation Magic
We've covered folder and file organization, but what if I told you there is a handy and free tool you can use to collect, organize, and format your citations? Magical, amirite? This tool will save you a lot of grief, and again I recommend it only because it helped me, and I'm hoping it helps you. It's called Zotero, and it is magical (really) for researchers. A colleague recommended it to me (Thank you, Bill!), and it improved my research life.
From class one, you must write and SOURCE your research, most likely a la APA7 or MLA, which requires a Liam-Neeson-like-particular-set-of-skills to execute it correctly. This tool allows you to input manually or, in some cases, scrape a website's metadata to autofill your citations in the correct formatting, saving you valuable time. Now it's not to say you won't need to check the citations before you submit to ensure everything is as it should be; you still need to check yourself (as the great Ice Cube said). As part of your prep. work, I recommend you download it or another version of the same type of automagical tool (TBF, there are others like Mendeley, Citavi, etc., but I don't have any experience with them.). Alright, let's move on to your environmental surroundings.
This point is an excellent opportunity to take some time to get your digital space ready to go. In the next part (4b), we'll finish preparing by discussing the physical workspace prepping you can do to fuel your focus! Til' next time!