sciatrix

Posted by Jeremy Fox

https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2026/09/14/did-you-start-your-phd-by-reading-and-thinking-widely-and-exhaustively-for-a-year/

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In his classic “Modest advice to graduate students,” Steve Stearns advises PhD students (emphasis added):

When you first arrive, read and think widely and exhaustively for a year. Assume that everything you read is bullshit until the author manages to convince you that it isn’t. If you do not understand something, don’t feel bad – it’s not your fault, it’s the author’s. He didn’t write clearly enough.

If some authority figure tells you that you aren’t accomplishing anything because you aren’t taking courses and you aren’t gathering data, tell him what you’re up to. If he persists, tell him to bug off, because you know what you’re doing, dammit.

This is a hard stage to get through because you will feel guilty about not getting going on your own research. You will continually be asking yourself, “What am I doing here?” Be patient. This stage is critical to your personal development and to maintaining the flow of new ideas into science. Here you decide what constitutes an important problem. You must arrive at this decision independently for two reasons. First, if someone hands you a problem, you won’t feel that it is yours, you won’t have that possessiveness that makes you want to work on it, defend it, fight for it, and make it come out beautifully. Secondly, your PhD work will shape your future. It is your choice of a field in which to carry out a life’s work. It is also important to the dynamic of science that your entry be well thought out. This is one point where you can start a whole new area of research. Remember, what sense does it make to start gathering data if you don’t know – and I mean really know – why you’re doing it?

I did this.

The specific way in which I did it dates me. (Attention conservation notice: I’m now going to tell you about my grad school reading habits. If you’d rather not read about them, skip to the end where I pose some questions for readers.) When I started in Peter Morin’s lab in 1995, he had personal subscriptions to hard copies of a bunch of leading general science and general ecology journals: Science, Nature, I think maybe PNAS?, Ecology, Ecological Monographs, Am Nat, JAE, JEcol, LNO, Oikos, Evolution, and I think maybe Ecol Appl and JApplEcol?* He also had many years worth of back issues of most of these journals on the shelves in his office. Whenever a new issue of any of those journals arrived, he’d put it on a desk in the lab. I’d grab it, look at the table of contents, and see if any paper titles sounded interesting. I’d photocopy the interesting-sounding ones and read them, carefully, underlining and making marginal notes. Sometimes, I’d also go to Peter’s office and browse through back issues looking for interesting papers. I spent literally the entire first year of my PhD doing almost nothing but reading (not quite: I also conducted a side project Peter handed me, that ended up becoming one chapter of my dissertation).

Now, I only read a minority of the papers in any given issue of any given journal. And I was most likely to read papers about community ecology rather than any other subject, since that’s what I was most interested in. But I definitely didn’t focus my reading on papers relevant to my own project, because I literally had no idea what my project was going to be. That’s why I was reading–to come up with a project idea!

I also did the assigned readings and other work for my various graduate courses. There were several of these, and they mostly had nothing to do with my own project, or even with community ecology. Peter’s courses on community ecology and multivariate stats were the most directly relevant to my own project, but even those courses covered a bunch of topics and statistical techniques unrelated to the project I eventually chose. I also took David Ehrenfeld’s conservation ecology course, much of which I’d characterize more as conservation-adjacent humanities rather than ecology sensu stricto.** I took Jody Hey’s evolution course. And I took population genetics from Peter Smouse and Adam Eyre-Walker. (edit: oops, forgot that I also took an ANOVA course from a stats prof.)

This breadth of reading and coursework early in my PhD definitely worked for me, in ways both more and less concrete, and more and less predictable:

Concrete and predictable: I aced my oral comprehensive exam.

Concrete and unpredictable: Years later, as a postdoc in 2001, I followed the biodiversity-ecosystem function literature, and so I read my colleague Andy Hector’s work with Michel Loreau on additive partitioning of selection and complementarity effects with interest. They analogized the selection effect of biodiversity on ecosystem function to the effect of natural selection in evolution, as quantified by the Price equation. I thought to myself “The Price equation? I feel like I read something about that back in grad school.” I went back and found the paper I recalled reading: Frank 1997, the lead article in the issue of Evolution in which it appeared. I’d read it because it was the lead article in Evolution; I assumed that meant it was important and I’d better read it.*** I didn’t really recall what Frank 1997 said, though, so I reread it. I still didn’t really understand it, so I reread it again, and I also looked up a bunch of other papers on the Price equation. Eventually, I did understand it, at which point I realized that Loreau and Hector’s additive partition wasn’t really analogous to the Price equation and that the reasons why it was disanalogous were interesting. So I wrote a paper on that. Then I started wondering, how would you apply the Price equation to analyzing biodiversity-ecosystem function relationships? So I figured out how to do that, which led to a whole series of papers, the first of which remains one of the best papers I’ve ever written. In summary: in grad school a paper I read just because I was trying to read broadly, that was totally unrelated to anything I was working on at the time, turned out to provide the foundation for a big line of research for me. Chance really does favor the prepared mind!

Concrete and semi-predictable: I’m a blogger now. I got into blogging by accident. But once I got into it, the fact that I turned out to be pretty good at it was no accident at all. The way in which I blog–writing in a dilettantish way about a pretty wide range of topics–owes a lot to the fact that I spent the first year of my PhD reading and thinking widely and exhaustively.**** When I’m not blogging about random stuff I first learned something about early on in grad school, I’m blogging about random stuff that I’ve learned about since then because I’ve retained the habit of reading about a lot of random stuff.

Non-concrete and predictable: As you’d expect, all that time I spent reading and thinking very broadly definitely shaped the kind of scientist I am, my general scientific worldview, and how I go about my work. How could it not? So it was predictable that I’d end up as the general sort of scientist I am, but the consequences of being that sort of scientist are kind of vague and non-specific. I mean, I guess at some level it’s because of all that reading I did in my first year of grad school that, when Am Nat receives a manuscript that’s a bit unusual or off-the-wall, I’m often the editor who gets assigned to handle it? And if I hadn’t done all that reading, I guess I probably wouldn’t have written something of an off-the-wall book about ecology and ecologists? It’s definitely the sort of book you write when your knowledge of ecology (and other fields) is a mile wide and an inch deep much less than a mile deep. But besides the Price equation stuff, I can’t point to any research I’ve done that’s directly traceable to some specific paper I read early in grad school.

So that’s my story. Now share yours! Did you read and think widely and exhaustively for a year when you started your PhD? If you supervise PhD students, do you first have them read and think widely and exhaustively for a year?***** If so, how widely? Looking forward to your comments. I encourage you to comment using the post’s commenting system, but you can also use the anonymous Google form below.

*I think he got EcoLetts too, but EcoLetts didn’t start publishing until 1998.

**For instance, we read Wendell Berry.

***I was right to assume this.

****They also owe a lot to the fact that my undergraduate degree is from a liberal arts college. To this day I am both glad and proud to have gotten a BA, not a BSc. Only about a 1/4 of my undergraduate coursework was science classes.

*****I don’t, in large part because Canadian PhDs are shorter than US PhDs. Canadian PhDs are only supposed to be 4 years, though they can and do sometimes go a bit longer. PhD students at my uni also have to defend their research proposal by the end of their first 12 months in the program, and ordinarily are expected to start collecting preliminary data during their first summer (so, about 8 months into their program). Plus, most of our PhD students have less time to read than I did as a grad student, because they work ~15 hours/week as TAs, which I didn’t have to do early on during my own graduate program because I had a fellowship. So my PhD students tend to have only 4 months or so for open-ended reading and thinking before they need to start focusing their reading and thinking quite narrowly on their planned research projects.

https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2026/09/14/did-you-start-your-phd-by-reading-and-thinking-widely-and-exhaustively-for-a-year/

http://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/?p=79452