Best practices and success principles for PhD students and early career researchers — Whenever a new student, intern, or research assistant joins my lab, I often find myself repeating a lot of our lab’s best practices. One of the most common and most frustrating occurrences is receiving an email entitled `Dear prof, please read through the attached paper, the deadline is tomorrow’. My experiences as a PhD student at the University of Antwerp in Belgium; in my current position as the head of the Audio, music, affective computing and AI lab (AMAAI) at Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), and director of the SUTD Game Lab, have inspired me to write down some best practices for the early career researcher.