Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student (2001)

nnicoraga about 4 hours ago 15 commentsRead Article on cs.cmu.edu

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john_strinlai•about 3 hours ago

>Consider writing what you read as you read it.

i would add a clarification for today's students: by hand.

typing doesn't appear to have the same power, at least for myself and my students that ive talked to about it.

jamesforestwest•about 3 hours ago

I don't know, it really depends on the person. Writing things out by hand doesn't help me, and I don't see any difference at all between handwriting and typing

sssilver•about 2 hours ago

I'm not saying this is what's happening to you, but in my case this is exactly what I believed for many years.

And then it turned out that typing-vs-hand-writing benefits being equal was in fact due to how atrophied my hand-writing skills were.

I've learned that once I got back into fluent hand-writing in a flow-state, the benefits for learning, memorizing, and understanding, were so overwhelmingly superior to keyboard-typing, that I resented the cognitive handicap I had placed upon myself for literal decades.

Now I always carry a tiny spiraled notebook and a Rotring pen. They're as indispensable and practically useful to me as my smartphone.

ChickeNES•about 2 hours ago

I just...could never see myself EVER going back to using a pen or pencil (in fact, I would need to dig for one, I don't even have one at my desk at the moment). What exactly are you even writing that you need to carry a notebook on your person at all times? For me it was the opposite, I complained I would never use cursive in college/as an adult, and that I would just type everything...which is exactly what happened. Hell, outside of doctor's forms and signatures for those, I can't really recall the last time I even needed to pick up a pen or pencil.

nine_k•about 1 hour ago

Writing by hand is harder and slower. This gives you time to ponder, understand the important point better, try to formulate it shorter and thus search for and extract the key points. IOW, it forces you to study what you write, not just register.

cidd•about 2 hours ago

Many software engineers in the bay area from abroad pursued Master's or Ph.D. degrees in the US to qualify for the additional 20,000 cap-exempt H-1B visa slots.

dang•about 3 hours ago

Related. Others?

Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7997158 - July 2014 (15 comments)

Manuel Blum: Advice to a beginning graduate student - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2037676 - Dec 2010 (16 comments)

Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student - Manuel Blum (CMU) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=832729 - Sept 2009 (32 comments)

qubex•about 3 hours ago

I remember reading this as an undergraduate student already enrolled in LSE. My God how the times have changed.

ktallett•about 3 hours ago

The key is to make the most of the opportunity and don't take poor treatment as the norm. It is always unacceptable. Plus at some point you will potentially be the world's most knowledgeable person on your very niche area, appreciate that and run with it.

BugsJustFindMe•about 2 hours ago

My advice to a prospective graduate student is that if you can do literally anything else with your life, do that instead. The cost of going through graduate school is only worthwhile if you really need to be there to be happy in your life. Too many people wind up there for not great reasons, and it hurts them both emotionally and financially compared to having done something else.

remywang•about 2 hours ago

This can be good advice if worded a different way: only go to grad school if you really love doing research. If you love research, then the right graduate program is the best place for that. Getting a PhD was the hardest thing I’ve ever done but I don’t regret a single day of it.

nolamark•about 1 hour ago

I agree, but...

The challenge is how do you really know if you love doing research, committing to graduate school, before really doing research? It is hard to know how the sausage is made without spending/doing time at a meat-processing plant. My undergraduate experience doing research, including be published, was much different than the graduate experience. And graduate experience was much different than the assistant professor experience.

It took me two trips to grad school to get a PhD. The first on their terms, I burned out. The second, on my terms, was a much better/different experience.

linguae•about 1 hour ago

I had the same experience; grad school is the best preparation for grad school. I had wonderful experiences participating in NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduate projects during two of my summers as an undergrad, and I also had a wonderful eight-month internship in a research lab at a major Japanese IT company, but grad school was a different beast, even though I was a grad student at the place I did my NSF REUs. The internships felt like the “demo version” of the real thing.

Come to think of it, I had similar whiplash in industry of full-time jobs being far more stressful than my internships, which I now realize were more-or-less “demo versions.”

To make a long story short, after grad school and working as a researcher in industry for nearly a decade before becoming a professor at a community college (where the emphasis is teaching), I learned that I love doing research as a hobby but not as a career, where there are many pressures.

dieselgate•about 1 hour ago

I understand your argument for people who pursue research degrees but there are plenty of non-research professional programs that people should be encouraged to pursue if relevant for their goals. E.g. masters in teaching

senderista•about 1 hour ago

Were you the guy in the PL lab that was playing Nightwish?