Some advice to research graduate students
About Career
- So long, and
thanks for the Ph.D.! (everything I wanted to know about
C.S. graduate school at the beginning but didn't learn until later),
by Ronald T. Azuma at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
- An
insider's guide to choosing a graduate adviser and research projects
in laboratory sciences, by Marshall Lev Dermer at University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
- How to succeed in graduate school: a guide for students and
advisors, by Marie desJardins, (part 1
and part
2), appeared in ACM Crossroads Magazine, 1(2), winter 1994, and
1(3), spring 1995.
-
Graduate school survival guide, by Wanda Pratt at Stanford
University.
- How
to be terrible graduate student, by Graeme Hirst, University of
Toronto.
- Networking on
the network: a guide to professional skills for PhD students, by
Phil Agre at University of California, Los Angeles.
- Graduate
study in the computer and mathematical sciences: a survival
manual, by Dianne O'Leary at the University of Maryland, College
Park.
About Research
About Writing
- You need to learn LaTeX if you haven't. It's a
typesetting system that people use for writing scientific papers and
it's portable on all platforms I know. Use pdflatex, which
directly generates pdf files as the format has become the de
facto standard on the internet today. I found the following three
books that I have extremely handy whenever I write papers:
- Leslie Lamport, LaTeX:
a document preparation system, user's guide and reference manual,
2nd edition, ISBN 0-201-52983-1.
- Frank Mittelbach, Michel Goossens, Johannes Braams, David
Carlisle, Chris Rowley, the
LaTeX companion, 2nd edition, ISBN 0-201-36299-6. (I got the
first edition).
- J. Kenneth Shultis, LaTeX
notes: practical tips for preparing technical documents, ISBN
0-131-20973-6.
- Form a habit of collecting bibliographies in a bibtex
archive or a set of them, each for a different subject. Keep them
close at your arm's reach, because every time you write a paper you'll
need to make references to the related work done in your area. This is
a test of your organization skills. You'll need to keep reading papers
and brushing upon the latest development in your research area. Having
an up-to-date copy of the bibliographies will turn out to be a big
time saver.
- The elements of style
by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White is a book you have to have, if
you consider writing will play a significant role in your career. The
book is free online. Buy it if you have to; it's a good
investment.
- The writing guidelines
compiled by David Kotz at Dartmouth College contains a useful
collection of tips for writing scientific papers.
- Common
errors in technical writing, by John Owens at the University of
California at Davis, makes another list of things to be remembered
when writing papers.
- "Get to the point!", says Jonathan Shewchuk at the Unversity of
California at Berkeley in his article "three sins of authors in
computer science and math".
- Ready to type your thesis? Kasper van Wijk at the Geophysics
Department prepared a set of thesis
templates in LaTex that conform to the thesis guidelines set by
the graduate office. You'll find quite a lot of information on thesis
writing with LaTex online, for example, from a google search for "latex
writing thesis".
About Presentations
About Everything Else
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