Ritesh Ojha is a Ph.D. student in operations research. He expects to graduate in July of 2024. We followed up with Ojha to get his insight and advice for new Georgia Tech graduate students. 

Create and adhere to a disciplined weekly schedule. “When I joined Georgia Tech as a master’s student, I felt overwhelmed with the course load in the first semester,” said Ojha. “I was working on three courses and a research project. To overcome these challenges, I developed a weekly schedule and disciplined myself to stick to it. I assigned a couple of days to work on my coursework, another couple of days to focus on internship-related preparations, and most importantly, I made sure I had a day for relaxing.”

According to Ojha, the key idea in graduate life is to have a semester goal and small weekly goals to steer the progress in the right direction. 

“The hope is that if we are disciplined and have enough buffer for activities that we love to do, we can be as close as possible to achieving our semester goals,” said Ojha.  

Focus on building a professional network early on. “Early on in my graduate life, I used to think that I was not ready to introduce myself to successful researchers in my area of research and that I would build my network once I had established myself,” said Ojha. “I was wrong. Attending conferences, talking to people in career fairs, introducing ourselves to peers from other institutions is a good way of building confidence and perspective about what we want to do.” 

Know what you want to accomplish. “It is important to have a big-picture idea of what you want to accomplish and an approximate daily plan to achieve this goal,” said Ojha. “Once this is done, all that matters is that you focus on the small, disciplined steps that lead you to your goal.” 

Do a summer internship. Throughout his graduate education, Ojha has done a couple of internships to get experience in the industry setting. 

“In my personal opinion, it was a good experience to work on my Ph.D. during the fall and spring and do an internship during the summer,” said Ojha. “It provides a good balance between ‘diving deep’ into academic research and understanding common practices in industry.” 

Give yourself a day off every week. “I don’t think there is a ‘one-works-for-all’ rule here,” said Ojha. “However, I do think that it is very important for everyone to have a day off from work each week to do something (different from work) that you love to do.” 

Don’t rush it. “It is very important that you are not in a hurry to reach your goal,” said Ojha. “The most important thing is to enjoy what you are doing with disciplined effort.”