Advice and guidebook for thriving and surviving Ph.D. and graduate school. But first, what is grad. school?
- Applying for PhD
- General Advice
- Job Search (Academia)
- Job Search (Industry)
- Giving Job Talks
- Post PhD Advice
- Doing Research as an Undergraduate Student
- Internships (as a PhD student)
- Meetings
- Paper Writing
- Paper Accepted, Then What?
- Writing Rebuttals
- Handling Paper Rejections
- Research Novelty
- Broadneing the Impact and Visibilty of Your Research
- Conferences
- Presenting Posters
- Department Seminars and Events
- Fellowship
- Ph.D. Syllabi
- Getting Help
- Academics Blogging about Academia
- Other Grad School Advice Pages and Sites Like Ours
- Dr. Scott Freitas: Optimizing Your Machine Learning PhD Applications for Success
- Is an ML PhD Right for Me?
- Finding the Ideal Advisor
- Understanding the Application Process
- Aligning your Post Graduation Objectives
- Boaz Barak: How to write “statements of purpose”
- Yisong Yue: How to Write Statements of Purpose for PhD & Fellowship Applications
- Roman Feiman on how to write statement of purpose (SoP)
- Polo Chau: How to help your recommendation letter writers submit on time?
- Gautam Kamath: How to Ask for a Letter of Recommendation
- Cornell University: Requesting Letters of Recommendation
- Chriselle Sy @ The Grad Cafe
- Jia-Bin Huang: How do you get a strong letter? 🤔
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Polo Chau: How to Choose PhD Advisor?
- Focus on the people you will interact with every day during your PhD study (e.g., advisor, lab mates). Research is important but without the right people, research won't happen!
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Casey Fiesler: Choosing a PhD Advisor | Questions to Ask to Find a Good PhD Supervisor
- Jimeng Sun: "Speed is Everything for AI research"
- 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"
- 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 I’d known when I started my PhD"
- David A. Patterson: "Your Students Are Your Legacy" Public slide version. ACM version, may be paywalled
- (1) Show initiative, for fortune favors the bold. (2) Sink or swim. (3) Educate your professor
- Remzi: "Graduate School: Keys To Success"
- Sophia Sun: "How to graduate your PhD when you have no hope"
- Fei-Fei Li: "De-Mystifying Good Research and Good Papers"
- Ben Lengerich: Thoughts from my Faculty Application Experience
- Elizabeth Bondi-Kelly: A blog about my experience on the CS faculty job market
- Daniel Seita: My Experience Applying for Faculty Positions
- Faculty Application : EECS Communication Lab
- Rose Cersonsky: Academic Jobs
- Arjun Raj: Thoughts on applying for faculty positions
- Workshop on Faculty Hiring Process — YouTube
- Faculty job talks: tips from the faculty — MIT EECS
- MIT Faculty Applicaiton Resources
- CS Faculty Interview Questions
- Guide to Professorspeak
- The academic job search for computer scientists in 10 questions
- 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."
- Yong Zheng-Xin: AI Research Internship Search as a CS PhD Student
- Devi Parikh, Georgia Tech: Planning paper writing
- Devi Parikh, Georgia Tech: Shortening papers to fit page limits
- 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
- Diyi Yang, Georgia Tech: Paper Clinic for checking paper structure, organiziation, overall impression
- 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
- Perfecting Your Scientific Writing: Tips & Tricks
- Improving your scientific writing: a short 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
- Marco Tulio Ribeiro: Writing, part 1 — the process
- Jia-Bin Huang: How to Write a Good Research Paper
- Sasha Rush: How to Write an "okay" research paper
- Casey Fiesler: what ACM copyright model should I choose?
- Jay Wang: arXiv submission instruction
- Jay Wang: tips and tricks to make ACM TAPS happy
- How we write rebuttals by Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra, Stefan Lee
- How to ML Rebuttal – A Brief Guide by Tim Rocktäschel and Jakob Foerster
- Jay Wang: How to mark up paper revisions with LaTeX?
- Aditya Parameswaran: "Coping with Rejection"
- Niklas Elmqvist: "Dealing with Rejection"
- Robert Kosara: "Dealing with Paper Rejections"
- 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.
- Marco Tulio Ribeiro: Coming up with research ideas
- Marco Tulio Ribeiro: Organizing and evaluating research ideas
- Polo Chau: Should PhD Students Have Websites?
- Yes, for multiple benefits. 1: craft professional brand. 2: enhance visibility. 3: facilitate sharing. 4: broaden audience.
- Ten Tips for Newcomers at an Academic/Industry Conference
- 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 (URL currently not accessible)
- Why seminars are important to the graduate experience
- Why invited talks are important
- Participating in graduate seminar discussions
- Dr. Scott Freitas: Tips & Tricks to Land a PhD Fellowship
- TL;DR
- Understanding the Benefits
- Comparing Fellowships
- Application Process
- Gaining the Edge
- Five tips for a successful Facebook Fellowship application from the people who review them
- Morgan Klaus Scheuerman: Tips for Applying to PhD Fellowships in HCI / Social Computing
- Jazette Johnson: 7 Tips for Applying for the Microsoft Research Ada Lovelace Fellowship
- Ada Lovelace Fellowship was discontinued, but the tips apply to other fellowships
- CS PhD fellowship list (CMU)
- CS PhD fellowship list (GT)
- Graduate Fellowship list (Johns Hopkins)