What advice would you give to someone who is about to start a PhD program?

How to be a successful PhD student? How to start your doctoral research with practical tips and tricks?

I may not be the right person to give you advice, but based on my experiences of doing a PhD from one of the IITs, I can give you a few suggestions - 

1. Choose your PhD guide/supervisor properly. This is the single most important thing you MUST consider. See whether your potential guide is active in research, how many journal articles he is publishing in a year and what is the quality of them based on impact factors, are his publications repetitive? Does he give time to his PhD students? Does he give a new idea? Does he travel abroad for conferences and is he known in his field? What is his nature - too tough or friendly? Is he a womaniser and gives favours to girl students? In how many years his previous students get PhD? I know a professor who takes a minimum of 10 years to give a PhD and his students sometimes get to see 3 world cups! 

Where are the alumni PhD students now? Are they getting permanent positions after post-docs in India or have they entered into a perpetual cycle of post-docs?

I would suggest a mid-career professor with current good academic records. Young recently joined professors would be most enthusiastic and you can learn a lot from them while setting up the lab but after PhD, you may struggle with the very limited known value of a recommendation letter, on the other hand, an old and about to retire professor can't give you anything new and you won't enjoy the journey much. I made a mistake in choosing the wrong guide and you should not do that.

2. Once you have selected your guide, go through his website for his research publications. Start from recent ones, read the abstract and conclusions first, then for each unknown word/concept google it. Try to understand the concepts and aim of the work, try to find out if you could have taken inspiration from the current work and design some experiments.

3. READ, READ, READ - at least for the first 2.5 years of your PhD because after that you would get very little time to even open many research publications. Learn how to search publications using keywords on a topic in Scopus, Web of Science, SciFinder and Google Scholar. Learn how to give citations to a paper. Learn how to use double inverted commas, AND, OR, NOT in effectively searching the publications in Scopus.

4. Learn to write scientifically. The more you read more you will develop this. Doing experiments or simulations and generating data is not enough for PhD, analysing them and writing them in a structured way of - Introduction - Methodology- Results and Discussion - Analysis - Conclusions, is very important.

5. Help the seniors. Don't just close your ears and sit in the lab. By helping and working with seniors and colleagues, you would learn much more than you would just by reading and making mistakes. Take lab responsibilities, like managing chemical inventory, software repository, safety manager etc. which will give you immense knowledge from all sides possible.

Meet the guide once every week and give him updates on what papers you are reading and ask him for his input.

6. If you are an experimentalist, learn computational techniques and vice versa. Don't just limit yourself to anything.

7. Participate in conferences. PRESENT. This is the most important skill you need to gather in your PhD which is formally called "good verbal and written communication along with good presentation skills". Write progress reports each month and submit them to guide, be excited to present your literature survey and work in group meetings, and learn to make good power point slides which are not only attractive but also effective in grabbing attention. 

Learn a new technique online. Set alerts in google scholar for all the relevant scientists in your area, so that whenever they publish a new article, you get an email.

8. Don't forget to read your basics even during PhD because that will save you a lot when you will go into the job market. Indian students will enter into PhD programme by clearing NET/GATE/JEST/INSPIRE, but by the time the student reaches 5th year, he/she forgets almost everything basics that is taught in bachelors and masters level, so attempt GATE/NET exam every year for practice and read the basics of your subject too. You will never know how much that would help you in your PhD too. Once I was stuck in a question that a reviewer asked me and I could answer that one in my revised manuscript, only because I had my basics intact and got my paper published in a peer-reviewed international journal.

9. Don't forget to enjoy your research. Enjoy on weekdays, and don't be in lab on Sundays, because anyhow you have to do that in your final years.