Hello and welcome to this special bonus episode of the PhD Life Coach, where I'm going to be telling you the 10 lessons I learned playing Stardew Valley that I think will help you in your PhD. Now, if you've never played Stardew Valley, don't like commute games, don't switch off. There's still going to be tons of value for you here, and you might even find a new game to play.

If you love Stardew Valley, you're going see a lot of familiar ideas and think about them in a way that I think you won't have thought about them before. So Stardew Valley is essentially a farming simulator game. You inherit a small farm from your grandfather and you get to grow crops and develop the farm and answer challenges as you go along.

It's not something I ever thought I'd enjoy. I'm not a big computer gamer, I have to say. But my fiance and stepdaughters play it, and they have got me slightly obsessed. So let's go. 

So the first thing you have to do in Stardew Valley is pick what farm you want to base your game in. And they all have different qualities. The Hilltop Farm is known to be challenging, but it's got lots of mining opportunities. There's monsters at the Wilderness Farm. Forest Farm has lots of forageables, but less space for farming and things like that.

And it's the same when you are choosing where to do your PhD. You could go to a research intensive institution where you've got super high flying supervisors, loads of resource, really big team. You could go somewhere smaller or with a more up and coming supervisor. where perhaps you're more limited on resource, but you get more one-to-one attention and support.

You might go somewhere with a really diverse range of subjects. For example, if you want to do more interdisciplinary work. There's no right answer here, but you need to think about what are your goals, what are your strengths, and what do you need support with so that you can pick the farm or the university that works for you. I'm going to pick the Four Corners Farm because it has a little bit of everything. 

So we're waking up on the first day of our PhD, the first day of our farm, and as you can see, we come out. And to be honest, it's all a bit of a mess. It's tricky to know where to start. We could clear some of this green stuff that's in the way that's filling everything. We could decide that we want to chop down some of this wood, even maybe chop down some of the trees.

But it's really hard to know exactly what to do. So lesson two is stuff everywhere is normal. Not knowing what to do first is normal. You're not meant to know at this stage of your PhD, but what I would always recommend is to get something planted. So in Stardew Valley, you might have noticed when we woke up, there was a little parcel.

You get given 15 parsnip seeds to start yourself off, and you get a little instruction up here that tells you that you need to plant these in tilled soil. And so what I always advise to people who are starting out in Stardew is to get something planted quickly. So you could spend ages clearing all this stuff, but the best thing is to get something in the ground and going.

And I think the same is true in your PhD. Try and get something planned where you can be actually working on it and seeing some progress early on. Now, that might be doing a small lit review on a really constrained area of research or planning a short presentation about the options there could be for your methodology, for example, but something that feels concrete so that even if you do nothing else in your first few weeks, you get that thing done.

We are going to give these a little water. so that they will grow. And you can see I could have spent all day wandering around seeing what was going on, clearing all the mess, getting organized, all of those things. But actually they're growing now. It's 8:30 in the morning, you can see up in the corner there and I've done something productive for the day. So lesson two, get something planted and try not to worry about the fact that everything's everywhere because that's normal.

Now I've brought you to a different farm, one that I am not very much further on with, a few days further on with, to show you lesson three. And lesson three is don't plant too much too early. You can see I've actually planted quite a lot of vegetables in this. Some of them are actually ready to harvest already.

So look, I've got some hot peppers, but I'm still at the very beginnings of my farm career here. I'm still a very new PhD student, and what that means is I've got a rubbish watering can. I have to water one plant at a time. I don't have any sprinklers yet, and I've planted so many things that I actually just get really stressed and bored trying to maintain all of these different things. 

There is a time in your career when juggling multiple projects will be an important part of what you do. The beginning of your PhD is not that time. So try to limit what things you plant in those early stages, because at some stage you're going to have to water them all. Now, later on you might decide to introduce some new projects when you've got a better watering can, when you've upgraded it, when you've got sprinklers. In academia, I think sprinklers are known as PhD students and postdocs, i e people that can keep your projects watered and working while you are doing something else, but at the moment, really try and constrain and just plant a few things that you can focus on. I'm going to leave these because it's boring.

Lesson four is play according to your goals. There's a whole bunch of different ways that you can play Stardew Valley. You can focus on fishing in your ponds or in the rivers. You can focus more on foraging. There's all sorts of different things you can try and do. My fiance likes to industrialize everything, knock it down, replace it with concrete and get huge factories going. My youngest stepdaughter loves to make it all beautiful and spends a lot of time fishing. My eldest stepdaughter just likes spending everybody else's money and seeing if she can wind them up. Sorry, Jess, but it's true. Whatever your goals are, you can play Stardew in different ways.

You can spend different time in different parts of your farm and set yourself different challenges. And the same is true in your PhD, depending on whether you've come to do a PhD because you love the subject or because you want to be an academic or because you want to go into industry, set your goals, and set the things that you focus on depending on what you are trying to achieve. You don't have to do it all.

So I'm taking you now to what's called the Community Centre, which is a real cornerstone of early Stardew Valley playing. And in the Community Centre, there's a whole bunch of different challenges, things that you have to collect and you win things for doing them. So as an example, we're going to go over here to the fish tank.

So here, I'm collecting different fishes. You can see I've already got some of them. I still need a Tiger Trout there. I still need a Walleye to finish the night fishing bundle and if I manage to complete all of these, I get a glittering builder folder removed, which is quite a useful thing to happen. If we go in here to the boiler room, I've got different things I need to collect, and if I can just find either an emerald or a diamond, then I am nearly ready for the mine carts to be repaired, which means that I am able to get around town much faster. Now, for me, what the community center really represents is some of the cornerstone things during a PhD.

So regardless of what your goals are, there are certain things about doing a PhD that you either have to do to get the qualification itself or that will really set you up well regardless of what you want to do. So these might be publishing, doing original research. It might be getting funding.

Try and figure out what are the cornerstone things that everybody needs to do in your type of PhD and figure out how you can prioritize them. So as an example in Stardew in the Community Centre you are seen that I wandered up to this room over here, which has got crops in it. So I. But in the, when it comes summer, I need to make sure that at minimum I plant some tomatoes, some peppers, some blueberries, and some melons.

Because otherwise, I'm not going to be able to complete this. I might not plant many others, but I definitely need those. Figure out what those cornerstones are in your PhD. 

Be careful though, because lots of different opportunities are going to come your way. So in Stardew on Pierre's notice board here, there's no help required at the moment.

But often there'll be challenges posted on here saying, can you take a melon to Jody? Can you take a fish to Lewis? Or whatever? There's Lewis. Hi Lewis. And what you can find is that those challenges can really take up a lot of your time and distract you from some of the cornerstone activities of completing the Community Centre. So just be mindful that just cuz something's been stuck on a notice board, it doesn't mean you need to do it. That is true in Stardew and in your PhD.

Now that we've had a little wander round on the beach, I'm going to take you to another farm so that I can give you the remainder of the lessons that I've learned.

So now you'll already see we are waking up in a much fancier house. And I have the best outfit on in the world with my little pink cowboy hat. This is my husband, Alex. So things have progressed quite well. I even have a baby up here. Here's my baby. Gonna give him a cuddle. There we go. And that's him looked after for the day.

Easy, if only it were that easy. So you can see my farm looks very different than the ones we were in just now. I've got all my beehives, I've got flowers growing around the, I've got tea saplings around the lake. In my barn here, I've got all my animals. So here's my pigs and my sheep.

They're not very happy because they haven't gotten any hay, but I will deal with that later. So you can see that it's a really well developed farm. And the problem with this is it can be inspiring. It's like looking at a more senior PhD student's thesis. It can be super inspiring to see all the fish ponds that they've laid out, all the research that they've done, the articles that they've written.

It can be inspiring. It can also be super intimidating. You take a peek inside one of their barns and you see their lab work chugging away like this, and you're like, oh my goodness, I'm never going to be this far along. So lesson six is be cautious when you're looking at done PhDs, they are living in a completely different stage to you and remember that when you are judging yourself.

Try to remember to take inspiration rather than to make it mean something negative about you. 

Now, the other thing I want you to remember with that is that with games like this, there are things called “mods”. So you can put in your own little bits of computer program or that other people have written that give you certain advantages.

So, as an example, my fiance Andy, he has a tractor mod. So when I'm walking around manually collecting things like this, having to find my tools and individually get these little worms out the ground that I'm gonna dig up over here, he has a tractor. He can just blast through all this in two seconds flat.

That gives him massive advantages. And so sometimes when I look at his farm, I go, oh my goodness, I'm so behind. You've been playing for the same amount of time as I have, and you've got so much money and so much happening. But then I remember he is playing with different mods. 

Now in academia, those mods could be things like having parents who work in academia already. So you've always known this world. They can be things like being male, being white, being cisgender, heterosexual, all of these things that make it more likely that there are people similar to you working in your environment and more likely that people in academia will understand your culture and your norms and your behaviour.

So when you are looking at other people and you are comparing yourself to their work, just remember they have different mods to you and you don't necessarily even know what their mods are. But we are not all starting from a level playing field and we have to remember that when we are comparing our work to each other’s.

Now I've gone to the mines because I want to show you a couple of things that I have mods, and that's the other thing is to remember, we all have our own mods too. So the two mods I've had, you've already seen me using one of them, which is I have something called access to Chest Everywhere. So instead of having to walk up and find the wooden chest that's got the right things in, I can access them from everywhere.

I love it. It's a mod. It's a cheat. It's not part of the main game, but it really helps me and it stops me getting quite as frustrated. The other mod I have is really cute. I have, you see on the right hand side here, there's health bars and energy bars. I'm getting attacked by some monsters, and you'll see they don't really change.

They should go down. I used to play this game and I would get to these stages in the mines and I would be fighting away and I would lose track of time and realize I hadn't eaten any food and my little character would die in the mines. And when you die in the mines, you lose things out of your backpack, you lose energy, you get told off by the other villagers and things.

And my lovely fiance didn't like me being sad, and so he gave me a mod where my energy and health just completely replenishes itself. And you know what? I feel guilty about that for a while because it felt like I wasn't playing the game properly or whatever. But I decided in the end, you know what “this allows me to enjoy the game.

This allows me to have fun to play to my strengths”, and so I've decided I don't care. And it's similar, some of you listening to this may have disabilities where you get particular support with things. And sometimes I've had a lot of students in the past with disabilities who get certain arrangements, who feel guilty about using them.

They feel guilty about getting extensions or getting support in the laboratory or whatever it might be, because they feel that it, it sort of minimizes their achievements. 

I would really encourage you as lesson eight to remember to use whatever mods you need to use. This is your PhD, your goals, your individual human, wonderful self.

Use whatever mods you need, whatever support you need. If you feel stupid because you need your Mum to phone you in the morning and make sure you're out of bed because you're not so hot at that, who cares? Let's do what we need to do. Use whatever mods enable us to enjoy and thrive while we do our PhDs. 

And that also kind of relates to my lesson nine. So we are going to come out of the mine and we are going to jump in the mine cart because I've activated the mine carts in this farm. We're going to pop home and as I appear here in the bus stop, there's a bus that will take me to the desert. I've even in here got an obelisk  that takes me directly to the desert. I've got a boat elsewhere that will take me to Ginger Island. I've got this beautiful farm and I always thought I'd be perfectly happy with my game once I got to this stage, but actually there's elements at the beginning of Stardew that I really miss.

I miss working towards the Community Centre, having really clear defined goals, having to prioritize with my money because I didn't have loads of it. You see now I've got one half million G, so I've got tons of money at the moment. I can buy whatever I want and it takes some of the challenge away, to be honest.

So remember, whatever stage of the game you are at, whatever stage of Stardew or your PhD you are at, there's advantages and a disadvantages. And lesson nine is to learn to love the stage you are at. If you are at the beginning of your PhD where you are getting to do loads of reading and you're getting to really immerse yourself in something quite specific and you're not being pulled in 10 different directions, try not to spend time beating yourself up for the fact you're not further along. Try and take joy in the fact that you can focus on this one thing for now and really enjoy it. If you are towards the end and you are looking back on times that felt simpler and like you're way too busy, because you've got to write up, try and enjoy the fact that you have actually had this amazing experience and now you're in a position where you get to juggle lots of different things and you get to write it up and see it published. Try to enjoy the stage you're at. 

The final lesson from Stardew comes with a slightly shocking admission, which is that I have played an obscene amount of Stardew Valley.

Mum, I know you'll be listening to this. Please press stop now and don't listen to anymore. But I have played somewhere north of 300 hours of Stardew because the annoying thing with Steam is it shows you how many hours you've played. I would not think for a second I'd done that. If you'd said to me, you will play 300 hours of a computer game, I would laugh at you.

But the thing with Stardew Valley is to play one day takes about 20 minutes. And so it's so easy to go, you know what? I can play, I, I can squeeze another day in. Should we just have, do one more day and I want you to remember that. You can get a lot done when you accumulate things in 20 minute chunks.

So if you are finding that you don't feel like you're making any progress and you find it hard to get going on things, remember you are going to finish Stardew Valley and you are going to finish your PhD one day at a time. And if I can accumulate 300 hours of Stardew time by doing 20 minute days, one after the other, you can accumulate an enormous amount of research and writing and productivity one 20 minutes at a time. 

So I hope you've enjoyed my little tour of Stardew Valley and the 10 lessons that I've learned. How I hope you've had a wonderful holiday. You should be in the midst of it by now, so I hope you have time to enjoy yourself.

The merchant is waving goodbye and I am going to say goodbye too.