Surviving the PhD program

As I am nearing the end of the longest phase of my academic life, I wanted to put together all resources that are useful to keep one going during the frustrating times of a PhD program. I truly believe that keeping a positive emotional state and using our energies in the right direction is the key to getting through the program. I am grateful to have a good support of friends and family but the internet is a great place to seek support in times of trouble. Here are some of the most useful links that I found.

• Dissertation Writers Toolkit : A great resource for those who are procrastinating on writing. This webpage also contains tons of other helpful material, like balanced-life chart, tools on staying organized, positive affirmations on writing and so on.
• Life is easier when you can laugh at yourself. Here are some daily affirmations for doctoral students. But I stayed away from PhD comics as much as I could.
• The Thesis Whisperer is another useful blog, that helped me realize I was not alone in some of my struggles. In fact my struggles are perfectly normal for a PhD student.
• Here are some productivity tricks for graduate students that I found useful. In fact, following one of the suggestions from this page, I purchased multiple chargers for my laptop so I could save time on getting started with my day.
• The 3-month thesis is also a good resource for thesis writing

Trailing Slash in rsync command

Just making a quick reference to the rysnc manual in order to synchronize directories

The command used to copy folders is as follows:

rsync -avz foo:src/bar /data/tmp

This command copies the directory bar in /data/tmp .. 

meaning at the end of this command, you will have /data/tmp/bar folder

If you just want to sync the folders then use the trailing slash like this

rsync -avz foo:src/bar/ /data/tmp 

Now only the contents of bar will be copied into /data/tmp folder;

 you will not find a folder called bar in /data/tmp