I really struggle with acquiring and retaining information and knowledge (eg. findings of studies, overview of the field, and other vitally important stuff) on my PhD. I am about to enter my final year and can't believe how scatty my notes are and how disorganised and uncertain the knowledge feels in my head... compared to at undergrad when everything was so neatly written up and organised - ready to revise from. I still know what I learnt back then, whereas my learning over the past 2 years just feels so messy and incomplete. I think I must be doing something wrong.

Does anyone who has experience of doing their PhD have any tips or advice? Do you use cue cards, write extensive notes and organise them very carefully? I feel embarrassed saying this as I was a really organised learner before. Now it seems to have fallen apart (I think stemming from the lack of structure) and I really need to change things NOW. I don't think my supervisors are aware of how rubbish I've been, as I still produce good work (eg. run my studies, analyse the data properly). It is just when I come to write up things could get very challenging. Please help!

I tend to note things like that as a draft named under a chapter that I feel that is best suited for the subject. This means that when I start analysing my data I can easily access the notes I took earlier and can elaborate on it.

i could have wrote this post. Good to think about though, employing strategies from my undergrad maybe.

I feel like I don't remember what I read, there is too much information out there and I could spend forever making notes

Hi everyone,

Tudor for my Intro, Lit review and methods chapters, I made notes in notebooks (the old fashioned way) and felt that these could have been better. When it came to data it was a bit different because to keep on top of all of the data I had to make tables, summaries and keep coded transcripts, plus initial analyses as digital documents.

Then once I went back to final discussion and analysis, I used the scrappy notebook system again. On retrospect it wasn't always scrappy, (we are all our own harshest critics) sometimes it was well done and other times not (depending on life and the PhD at the time). I felt totally inadequate about it all for quite some time.

While writing up however, especially through the final drafting stages I have become more confident in my knowledge of the topic. For me this happened at the stage when you have to keep on going back and comparing notes and original drafts with what you are saying as you finalise things at the end points. There are times in the process when data just seems to swim about, as do references but these don't last and you do become more confident.

You notice it towards the end when your supervisors are making suggestions for clarification and you go "oh no, it can't be said that way, because that would imply this or that and that isn't what the data says". At that point you realise you do know a bit about it. Take care, its a mucky stage but it passes. :)

I think most people are a bit like you Tutor - I don't know anyone who has made notes throughout their PhD. Most people in my field keep detailed lab books of experiments, data on spreadsheets and then just keep a pile of paper (physical or online) with maybe a few notes or highlights on these.

My strategy was to read when designing experiments, to make sure I considered the parameters and controls carefully, and then read when writing up. This is how I have learnt to work. I agree though, I am still more familiar with a lot of my undergraduate stuff than I am with my PhD stuff, because I revised it for exams, but I've never done that with my PhD reading, so I'm not going to remember it in the same way. Now if I need something, I just search for it in my papers in Mendeley, so it doesn't really matter if I can remember it in detail or not. I don't think taking the same undergraduate approach would be helpful, because there is just so much more you need to know at PhD level, you can't possibly remember it all in detail.

I also agree with Pjlu though, anything I wrote about in my thesis I'm still very familiar with due to the countless revisions required as I was researching and writing it. And you definitely get to stage where you know the literature better that your supervisors do and can make better suggestions that they can.

Hi everyone -

Thank you! You all seem to be saying something similar here, which allays my fears somewhat! I do look forward to when I am focusing more on writing and less on the data collection. But the writing part will come later.

Thanks as always everyone. Love this forum!