The advice I wish I'd had on day one

Most PhDs don't fail on the science — they drift on the structure around it. Sort this in your first months.

• Agree expectations with your supervisor early: meeting cadence, response times, authorship, and what a 'finished' chapter actually looks like.
• Read your institution's regulations: timelines, the go/no-go, required milestones, and whether your thesis is a monograph or article-based.
• Build your supervisory team deliberately — typically 1–2 promotors and 1–2 co-promotors. Know who decides what.
• Start the conversation about your external assessment committee early; good members get booked up a year ahead.

Your supervisors are your most important resource. Make every meeting count.

• Bring a one-page progress note and a short list of decisions you need — don't improvise.
• Send an agenda beforehand; capture action items with owners; share the notes afterwards.
• Meet regularly: every 3–6 months formally in the early years (more often informally), then at least yearly with the wider committee.
• Get substantive feedback in writing, and ask which comments are must-fix versus nice-to-have.

Writing is thinking. The single biggest predictor of finishing is writing regularly from the start.

• Write from day one — don't wait until you 'have results'. A few protected sessions a week beats rare marathons.
• Turn each study into a paper as you go; in an article-based thesis those papers become your chapters.
• Keep a research diary: decisions, dead ends and why you chose what you chose. Future-you will thank you.
• Write the introduction and general discussion last, once the studies have settled.

A study stalls silently. Make 'what's next' impossible to lose sight of.

• Plan backwards from your defense date and reserve the final 6–12 months for writing-up and revisions.
• Break each study into concrete tasks; review progress against your timeline every month.
• Resist scope creep. A PhD is a beginning, not your magnum opus — 'good and finished' beats 'perfect and unfinished'.
• Track every manuscript through the review lifecycle; revisions and resubmissions always take longer than you expect.

The end game rewards people who prepared for it months in advance.

• Confirm your committee composition against the rules well before submission.
• Circulate the full draft early enough for real feedback — not the week before the deadline.
• Prepare for the defense as a conversation about your contribution and its limits, not an exam to survive.

Burnout ends more PhDs than bad data. Protect the long game.

• A sustainable pace beats heroic sprints. Build in rest and keep a life outside the lab.
• Find peers — isolation is the quiet risk. Talk about setbacks; they're universal.
• Keep a 'done' list, not just a to-do list. Progress is easy to forget and worth celebrating.