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š Advice and resources for thriving and surviving graduate school
Awesome Grad School

Advice and guidebook for thriving and surviving Ph.D. and graduate school. But first, what is grad. school?
General Advice
- Prof. Casey Fiesler: "Should You Get a PhD?"
- Bad Reasons: You're good at school; You don't know what else to do; You want to make money; You want prestige.
- Good Reasons: You want to be a professor; You love academic writing; You want to add new knowledge to the world; You want a research career.
- James Arvanitakis: "How to survive a PhD"
- Nick Feamster: "Managing your advisor"
- Austin Z. Henley: "Lessons from my PhD"
- Lead or be led; Topic sentences; Get excited; Unmotivated details; Slides versus speaker; Managers as input/output machines; Daily progress tracking
- Andrej Karpathy: "A Survival Guide to a PhD"
- Maithra Raghu: "Reflections on my (Machine Learning) PhD Journey"
- Sebastian Ruder: "10 Tips for Research and a PhD"
- Aijaz A. Shaikh: "5 secrets to surviving (and thriving in) a PhD program"
- Jennifer Snodgrass: "7 Hard Truths and a Few Lies"
- Stephen Sterns: "Modest Advice"
- Terence Tao: "Career Advice"
- Lucy A. Taylor: "Twenty things I wish Iād known when I started my PhD"
- David A. Patterson: "Your Students Are Your Legacy"
Doing Research as Undergraduate Students
Internships (as a PhD student)
- Polo Chau: 7 Benefits of Internship
- "7 Ps of internships": People, Practice, Paper, Patent, Product, Publicity, Payment
- Anne Meyer-Miner: Engaging Employers Early in Grad Student Training
- "Anne Meyer-Minor describes the mutual benefits that occur when company managers collaborate with academics in the career development of advanced-degree trainees."
Paper Writing
- Prof. Devi Parikh, Georgia Tech: Planning paper writing
- Prof. Christos Faloutsos, CMU: Lessons from 1K rejected research papers
- How to create crown jewel figures (fig 1), pick paper title, tool name, write abstract (start with rhetorical question), think like reviewers (relevance, novelty, technical quality, presentation)
- Maxwell Forbes (UWash): Making a Figure 1
- Prof. Diyi Yang, Georgia Tech: Paper Clinic for checking paper structure, organiziation, overall impression
- Prof. Stevie Chancellor, University of Minnesota: How to Write More with Less Stress by Writing Every Day
- Toward a good scientific writing
- Terry Tao's advice
- Writing a Scientific Paper
- The Serial Mentor
- Perfecting Your Scientific Writing: Tips & Tricks
- Improving your scientific writing: a short guide
- Knuth Mathematical Writing Guide
- Three Sins of Authors in Computer Science and Math
- How to write a great research paper
- Notes on writing
- Adam Wierman: Advising
- How to Write a Good Article
- Ten simple Rules for Responsible referencing
- Tips for being concise in academic writing
Paper Accepted, Then What?
Handling Paper Rejections
Research Novelty
- Michael Black: Novelty in Science: A guide for reviewers
- Reviewers regularly mistake complexity, difficulty, and technicality for novelty. A better way is to replace novelty with beauty.
Conferences
- 7 reasons why every PhD student should attend academic conferences; Alessandra Bassey
- The Great Benefits of Attending Academic Conferences; Miguel Otero-Iglesias
- Navigating your first academic conference; Joshua C. Palmer
Giving Talks
Department Seminars and Events
- Why seminars are important to the graduate experience
- Why invited talks are important
- Participating in graduate seminar discussions
Ph.D. Syllabi
- Eric Gilbert
- Mor Naaman
- Jon Froehlich
- Collection of Lab Handbooks
- Graduating advising philosophy, David Darmofal