Over at the Emacs subreddit, InstinctsInFlow says that he’s a PhD student in computer engineering who has been using Emacs for a couple of years because of its support for VHDL coding. He really likes Emacs and want to find better ways of using it so he asked for advice on using Emacs as a PhD student.
I found the answers in the comments to be particularly useful. InstinctsInFlow does his coding in Python so he was particularly interested in how to use Emacs with Python in an optimal manner. Everyone has an opinion on this, it seems, but the suggestions were all good.
The other thing that almost everyone mentioned was, of course, Org mode. If you’re a PhD student, you’re going to be doing a lot of writing. Writing that’s apt to include a bunch of mathematics and there are really only two choices1: Org mode or LaTeX. It’s certainly true that LaTeX gives you finer control but not much finer and in almost all cases Org is fine and it’s always easier.
There are some other good recommendations. If you’re interested in using Emacs for your PhD studies, take a look at the post. It’s short and has some good suggestions.
Footnotes:
Sorry, Word is a non-starter in the Irreal universe.