I got this question after a lecture: What was the most challenging part for me in transitioning from undergraduate to postgraduate studies? I will discuss a research postgraduate degree for the rest of the post, but all this applies equally to a first industry job.

In undergraduate courses, someone gives you the package of what you need to know. A course might be challenging or even useless, but the lecturer (even a bad one) tells you what you will be tested on. They give you the scope of what you should read or watch and what they expect you to know at the end of the course. A good lecturer has carefully packaged the material for you.

But real life is not like this. In a postgraduate research degree, you are given an open-ended problem that you need to solve in a few years. But no one tells you upfront what you need to read, what you need to know, or the skills that you will have to acquire to solve the problem. There is no packaged set of notes that you can go through that will allow you to write the exam. (There isn’t an exam.)

Of course your supervisor is there and they help, especially initially, but at some point even they will not know what you should read or learn. There will be a point where the next step is unknown. Stated differently, you won’t know where to look next in order to know where to go next. You won’t know for sure whether you should read this chapter or that paper, or whether this will just end up being a waste of time. This is real life.

You need to acquire the skill to estimate whether something is worth digging into or not, without actually starting to dig. The struggle is that you won’t know what you need to know until you know it. You need to learn the skill of figuring out what is worth figuring out (before figuring it out).

Unfortunately, this is a skill that you will need to acquire on your own. No one can teach you how to ride a bicycle. For the task of learning how to figure out what is worth figuring out, there is no roadmap or recipe—you just need to get on the bike and ride. But I hope that knowing that this will happen makes it slightly better when it does (and you fall off the bike).

But here are a few tips or strategies:

  1. Learn to skim-read. No undergraduate lecturer would ever tell you to do this, but this is exactly what I tell my postgraduate students to do. You don’t need to understand every single point or equation to get the gist of the paper or book. If the book, paper or lecture video isn’t helping, drop it.

  2. Read with purpose and direction, trying to solve a problem. Do not say, “I don’t have a background in A and B so I should first acquire this before I start looking at the problem.” Rather, first try to understand the problem, and if you do not, read in order to understand the problem. Then, once you have understood the problem, try and solve it. If you cannot, then read in order to find a solution. Of course if you realise your background is completely inadequate, then go and do the full course on Coursera. But then you know why you are doing the course.

    Personally, I cannot read a textbook for its own sake. But when I know a chapter inside a textbook has part of the solution to the sub-sub-problem that I am currently facing, I am highly motivated to read it.

  3. Get role models who are tackling this problem of figuring out what is worth figuring out. If you have a good supervisor, they will illustrate how they do this (probably in a broken and frantic way). Other postgraduate students are often the best models. They are in the trenches with you. If they are slightly more senior, they have been through it. In a research master’s or doctoral degree in a good group, you will have the opportunity to observe your supervisor and other students closely.

For the first time in your life you will have to deal with problems that someone else has not figured out the answer beforehand and made sure that there is a correct answer. Your teachers in school did this for you. Your undergraduate lecturers did this for you. For the first time, there will be no exams: jay! But there will be no exams: boo! Why boo? Because if there was an exam, someone would have told you what would be in it. Life doesn’t have an exam. You’ll have to learn to figure out what is worth figuring out on your own. But this can also be a lot of fun!