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Comment by cyberlurker | Hacker News Reader

All of these tips are good, but the “get excited” one has been my secret weapon through life.

A professor in undergrad gave me the tip to get excited or even feign interest when reading dense written material in order to retain more.

After trying it throughout a difficult class I was amazed at how well it worked. I applied it to every other academic thing I didn’t want to do and noticed immediately how much easier and enjoyable school was. I still use the “fake excitement” trick for my work all the time.

Also, it’s kind of like a Trojan excitement because after I fake the intense interest I do genuinely become interested more often than not.

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It's hard to remain excited when so many professors don't prepare for lectures, teach outdated material, rely on question banks for exams, and play the part of ball-breakers. I went back to school for a different degree program in my 30s with a fresh perspective and a much bigger drive from 15 years ago when I did my first two degrees. Mind you that it was during COVID but what did I get? A bunch of "read these chapters, take these exams" kind of lectures. The current education model is shot, particularly the PhD degree where you practically grind out nonsense for years on end only for your advisor to collect the funds and stick their name on top of your papers.

> stick their name on top of your papers.

Maybe you have a more independent mindset having gone into a PhD program a little later than most, but the whole point of a PhD program (at least in the sciences) is that it’s an apprenticeship. You study under an established researcher using their grant, so it’s not “your” paper. You are supposed to work together using grant money from your advisor.

If you have obtained grant funding on your own and are working independently on a novel research project you thought of yourself, then you can call it your paper. But that scenario usually doesn’t happen, because it’s hard to come by funding without a good proposal, and it’s hard to write or qualify for a grant without the training one gets in a PhD program.

If you are working using grant money, lab equipment, lab space, data, models, software, or methods acquired and developed in your advisor’s lab, then even if you write an entire paper yourself it’s still both your names that go on the paper. I’ve had a few like that and was glad to share the credit, because it wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

I totally disagree with you. Giving a single word "guidance" and pretending to read a manuscript is not enough to qualify for authorship in most journals submission guidelines. Likewise, all the thing about money, lab space etc. (which in my case is funded by a national scholarship, not my supervisor) has nothing to do with research ideas, which is what papers are about. If people who are making my live easier as a grad student were to be giving authorship, the secretary and the cleaning lady would both rank higher than the head the lab. I'm putting the name of my supervisor because I'm forced to and because I belong to his lab but anyone who worked with him knows his involvement in lot of papers is close to 0.

So if someone has done the research and wrote the paper it is normal he got credit as first author for it. Whatever money is lying around isn't writing paper by itself. The monetary compensation is meager enough not to be robbed on top of that of what we created.

In my field (experimental plasma physics) the general convention is that the PI's name goes last on the paper, while the first author is the one who did the bulk of the work and wrote the manuscript, with the other coauthors usually playing small supporting roles.

This field also tends to have very large grants (~$10-100mn/yr) that support dozens of researchers, because of the large centralized facilities, so it's easier for students to have some self-direction.

There seems to be an increasing expectation that undergraduate education should be like high school. By the time you start studying at university you should be able to study independently. The lecturer isn’t there to entertain you or to hold your hand.

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