In today's episode, we look at Sarah's expectations for the second year of her PhD, and what her main points of action and milestones will be. We look a bit further at the process of getting ethics approval at her university, and her plans for data collection. We also get an update on her proposal, and what getting this funding would mean for her for the rest of her PhD years.

We then look at the second year from a bit of a broader perspective: how is it different from the first year, and what are some of the common struggles in the second year of the PhD. We also talk about the famous two-year dip, and how COVID-19 has disrupted this (or not).

Finally, we look at what Eva remembers from her second year (which was 12 years ago). As she started to use a simple planning system in MS Word (with things she wanted to achieve on a monthly and weekly basis, as well as a log of what she did), she was able to browse these files and refresh her memories of what she did during the second year.

References

• Data collection - Ep. 72
• Data management, as part of the interview with Dr. Lena Karvovskaya - Ep. 45
• Defending a proposal - Ep. 84
• The valley of shit, or the dips of the PhD