Name: how to educate yourself like a PhD student: make a personal curriculum with me 🤍
Uploaded: 2025-09-21 22:00:36
Duration: 14 min 59 s

Question 1

How do I make a personal curriculum like a PhD student?

Accepted Answer

I start by choosing what I actually want to learn and what I want to be good at by the end of the semester. Then I organize them into “majors” (directly related to my work) and “minors” (extracurriculars). After that, I build a syllabus, collect references, and set a weekly schedule with homework and deadlines.

Question 2

What should I include in a personal curriculum syllabus?

Accepted Answer

For my syllabus, I keep it simple: schedule, course objectives, references, and modules. I also set a realistic study block (I’m aiming for about 1 hour and 30 minutes of deep learning per course session). It’s tentative at first, but having the framework helps me stop feeling so aimless.

Question 3

How do you choose majors and minors for self-study?

Accepted Answer

My majors are the subjects that are highly related to my physics research, like statistical mechanics and soft matter topics. My minors are the things I still care about but aren’t my dissertation—like Korean and learning the business side of YouTube. I also try not to overwhelm myself because it’s just one semester, and I can always move other interests to a future “term.”

Question 4

How do I stay accountable when I’m not enrolled in a real class?

Accepted Answer

I assign myself homework, like summarizing readings or deriving something, and I give myself deadlines. I also put everything into a database so I can see what’s due and when. And honestly, discussing with friends/peers helps a lot with retaining what I learned.

Question 5

What resources do you use to self-educate in grad school?

Accepted Answer

For research topics, I rely on papers I haven’t read yet and I pull more as needed from Google Scholar. For statistical mechanics, I use Cardar’s book, MIT OpenCourseWare notes, and other texts like Pathria. For Korean, I’m using Talk To Me In Korean (and paying for it definitely motivates me to actually do it).

Question 6

Can ChatGPT help me create a personal curriculum?

Accepted Answer

Yes— I literally used ChatGPT to help name a course and draft a syllabus outline. I treated it like a starting point, then I checked the modules and adjusted them to fit what I actually need. For resources, I still verify everything because not all suggested references are automatically legit.

Question 7

How do you schedule a personal curriculum during a busy PhD?

Accepted Answer

I assign specific days like it’s a real semester: for example, I put one physics course on Mondays/Wednesdays and statistical mechanics on Tuesdays/Thursdays. Then Korean is on Fridays/Sundays, and YouTube/content creation is on Saturdays. Having fixed days makes it feel real, and it keeps me from letting the week disappear.

how to educate yourself like a PhD student: make a personal curriculum with me 🤍

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