Congratulations on completing your first year of Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics (in India). If you are like I was at this stage of life, you are probably all fired up, excited, beaming with enthusiam and passion, and can't wait to embark on "real" research projects. If you are wondering why, it's less to do with the fact that you will now get to live your dream(s), and more to do with the relief obtained by the realization that you are now free of any and every conventional paper and pen examination. Plus now you have both your family and a stranger, who's an expert on the fields you're interested in, to back you and support you through every up and down. There are three main things you need to do in order to make it to the next year:
1) Read.
2) Read.
3) Get addicted to coffee, and read.
That's about it. Although there are many who get creative with the last to-do. Regardless, this is the period when you will discover actual learning. The feelings associated with studying when there isn't the pressure of a written examination is just something I'm not qualified enough as a writer to put into words. I'll try to anyway. It's like you are trying to learn something new, and once you progress a bit, you start to wonder, like actually wonder, what was the point of what you just learnt. You become capable of motivating yourself to do it, no matter how boring it might be. And then the real magic happens. Towards the end of a particular topic, you begin to ask yourself how well you learnt what you were trying to learn. This question soon transitions to technical questions which you then try to answer, failing which you go back and read a little more, and try again. You basically do the same thing you've been doing your whole life, studying, practicing questions, trying to answer them, and studying again. Only this time, there are no practice questions available; you create them, and while doing so you sink into the horrendous realization that you are now doomed to become someone who you once abhorred, someone who sets questions for the less innocent to answer in a stipulated time. Welcome to academia! [This process is somewhat accelerated if you are given teaching assistant (TA) duties.]
It is not all fairies and flowers though. Other responsibilities start cropping up. Like TA duty, or weekly meetings with your supervisor, or actively taking part in academic discussions at stipulated times, or keeping up with what is going on in your field, all with you trying to learn foundational skills, which if you skim through, is bound to come back to bite you not in the far future. Well, then do you wish the conventional written examination system was better? Maybe. But you will never be able to convince yourself of that because between all the chaos, you always get to preserve an innate self of freedom, which even if non-existent from another soul's perspective, would never escape from the inner you. You keep telling yourself, "This freedom is what I had come looking for in a Ph.D. This is what brought me to research and will keep me going" [I'm not sure if this remains the case for very long, perhaps stay tuned for the next years?]. What helps, however, is that you find yourself learning things very fast now, something which would have happened from a very early age if we'd not been bounded by the machinery that examinations and grades are.
Apart from strict academic growth, you also find yourself maturing very quickly. Somehow you now have the ability to talk to strangers without batting an eye, or impromptu present an idea to an informal audience. You start exploring other things life has to offer, like art, or literature, or the worst of them, TV shows. In fact this is a wonderful time to explore personal growth, and decide what sort of colleague you want to be, because no matter what people think, doing a Ph.D. is no different than a job. Plus in most cases you get paid for it quite well too. Make sure to develop good social skills, etiquettes, manners, and most importantly ethics. [Disclaimer: Don't confuse this last piece of advice to mean that you should become stupid.]
Towards the latter part of the year, you may have already written/published some papers, or not. You may now be getting quite articulate with a lot of new skills. But then two big stones start hurtling towards you, and trust me, you cannot dodge them no matter how smart you are. First, you need to decide what your Ph.D. is going to be, what your thesis is going to be. You cannot just name a subject back from school. You are required to really formulate the problem(s) you wish to attack over the next few years, and systematically lay out a plan, for a committee to evaluate, how you're going to work towards solving said problems. I'm sure you can guess this means knowing a lot of stuff, stuff that other humans have done before you in the field. Recall the three things I told you that you must do in order to survive your second year. And truth be told, if you do follow the three steps, you're bound to run through this first boulder without a scratch. Or perhaps you'd lose part of your soul because of the other stone that's hurtling behind the earlier one and you don't see coming, a stone that's formed in your heart (or rather the brain, technicalities yada yada).
While you're reading and reading and learning and reading and reading and sleeping and learning, you make a very slow and painful discovery for yourself: every problem has already been solved in your field. The moment you enlighten yourself with something new, and have convinced yourself that you are enlightened enough, you would instinctively start to think of loopholes in and extensions of what you just learnt. Suddenly you find yourself penning down about 10 ideas in your notebook which could be potential publications, with atleast 3 of them being Nobel prize worthy. You skip sleep that day, wake up early anyway, and rush to your advisor's office to tell them about it. They immediately squash 5 of your ideas. That's okay, you still have 5 left, with 2 Nobel prizes, maybe a Dirac medal too. So they commend you on your research skills, and ask you to pursue those ideas. By pursuing an idea in research, I mean extensive literature review, in order to learn everything related to the problem in order to help one to solve it. But imagine the surprise when you, while researching ideas to apply to your idea, find that your idea had been stolen by someone else, and published, and even received a silver medal at some competition. You burst into rage, and decide to sue the person to hell. The only problem is that person or persons, is or are, already in hell. And there is your brain stone. Almost everything you innovate academically, has been innovated by cells that have de-innovated since.
This ends your second year, wondering where you forgot all your motivation and enthusiasm for the sciences. There you were thinking of changing the world, that you never realized that the changes you wanted to make, had been made long before you existed. Would you want to continue discovering things, into your next year, that had already been discovered, or would you want to discover what you can discover to frustrate a discoverer who'd come after you? It's simply red pill, blue pill time...