Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student (2001)
cs.cmu.edu
cs.cmu.edu
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.
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.
I find that digital solutions can never compare to the freehand drawing of diagrams, symbolic manipulation for solving math, etc.
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)
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.
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.
my phd was tough because my advisors was useless and i do regret it because i lost 4 years of industry high-salary pay. way more common than your experience i think.
Getting a PhD from a reputable university and working with an advisor and others who are the best in the world at their niche fields opens doors that one wouldn't even know of otherwise. It's one of the most reliable low risk ways of getting you and your family out of a lower middle class life.