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Comment by mdwelsh | Hacker News Reader

Pretty amazing memoir. Does a nice job of capturing the ups and downs of the grad student experience. Phil - consider distilling this down as a blog post or two - lots of good lessons here, but given the length they might be lost on most or your potential readers.

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hi matt - wow, i was gonna email you tomorrow, but HN scooped me.

re: distilling -- my main intention in writing this memoir wasn't to provide advice, since it's hard for me to determine how much facets of my experience generalize. i do have plans to convert the "lessons learned" section from the epilogue into a talk, though.

i have this other article from the beginning of my third year that's more of the "advice" type, although again, I'm wary of making generalizations about Ph.D. life: http://pgbovine.net/PhD-life.htm

(other fun fact - i used one of your blog quotes as the title slide of my Ph.D. oral defense)

Oh, that was from you, too?

I just read this a few days ago (was actually recommended here on HN [1]) and thought it was terrific.

That might be one of my biggest problems in science - I have a hard time memorizing people's names.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4141353

Turns out the author wrote about that problem, too [1]. The advice is mostly on how memorize names when you get introduced personally, but admittedly this is an even more important problem. Recommended read.

[1] http://www.pgbovine.net/on-names.htm

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