This talk is for young PhD students and would be PhD students to help them understand how to have a satisfying and successful PhD in Machine Learning Systems. While it draws on my own experience in my PhD, creating such things as bitsandbytes and developing QLoRA, I will mainly draw on research about academic success and general patterns that I saw in successful PhD students to provide perspective. Key questions I will talk about: What is my research style? What should I work on? How should I work on it? How do I get the resources that I need for my work? How do I stay motivated?