Welcome! We are a group of PhD candidates at the University of Technology Sydney and we have no idea what we are doing. When we started out, we lived under the impression that mostly everyone else had been briefed about a doing a doctorate. We all came from different backgrounds and held assumptions about others; they had some inside knowledge or life experience that made them so much more ready to do this program. How else would you explain how effortlessly they seem to doing a doctorate? However, the more we talked the more we realised how untrue that was. The questions of "how do I calculate dilutions again" and "did I turn the fish tank pump off?" (the answer was no and I spent many hours mopping my lab and was down one pump) kept coming. And after one specially idiotic question, Kathryn pulled out 'She's going to be a doctor one day'. And so, that became our phrase. Mostly stated in various degrees of confusion.

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And the more we talked (and googled) our different questions, we realised there wasn't information about the stuff we think matters online. We saw blogs from other PhD students discussing what stats they ran on their data, their amazing field work, maybe a mistake made and a lesson learned. But we felt that something was missing. Exactly how brutal is the publishing world? How do I even pick a journal? Is this something I have to pay for? What stats do I need to know before starting a PhD? Do I even need to know stats? What about coding? What about supervisors? How do I manage multiple supervisors? So many questions that expand beyond the Scientific Method. And so, we're starting a blog about all the stuff we wish we knew and currently don't know (advise welcome).

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Please meet the contributers of "We're going to be doctors someday?"