
Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student - GmeSalazar
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mblum/research/pdf/grad.html
======
Create
How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years
in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified
to find other possibilities?" \-- H. Schopper

Given that cheap and disposable trainees — PhD students and postdocs — fuel
the entire scientific research enterprise, it is not surprising that few
inside the system seem interested in change. A system complicit in this sort
of exploitation is at best indifferent and at worst cruel.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7766377](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7766377)

~~~
jasonzemos
_but finally be qualified to find other possibilities_

I've always thought of legends like Manuel Blum and the institutions he's
advised such as Shafi Goldwasser, Micali, Adleman -- and even _their_ students
-- as people who transcend this notion of the PhD as a mantle piece for their
résumé. You can tell by the relevance and pointedness of their papers. These
people are plugged in. They're solving really interesting problems in really
elegant ways. You can tell a lot of love goes into their work.

It's not their job to market the field to people unlike themselves. I see
inspiration in Dr. Blum's writing for people who truly want to _philosophize_
like he does. It's your job to love thinking and working on the problems as
much as them, and be good like them. When your contribution is cited and
useful to others these notions of being "exploited" by "the system" must be
secondary. If one feels that way one can go the Larry & Sergey route and
change the world that way too.

I don't think there is a _finally_ for any of the names I mentioned here when
it comes to computer science.

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kneth
My best advice to graduate students: enjoy!

If you're lucky, you have an advisor that teaches you much more than science
and research. My advisor taught a lot about how to work in a political
environment (yeah, universities are highly political environments).

If you are very lucky, you have an advisor that asks you to teach. By teaching
undergraduate student, you learn all the small details of your scientific
area. I was lecturing in physical chemistry as a graduate student - and even
supervising undergraduates - and after a couple of years I knew all the
fundamentals of physical chemistry by heart. That knowledge helped me through
writing my thesis.

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yanowitz
Great read, even for this grad school drop out.

Being wrong (or failing to arrive at an answer) is, when my ego doesn't get in
way, amazing.

Until reading this article, I thought of it mainly as an opportunity to
improve my knowledge base (which is why I also enjoy, "I don't know about
that, please explain.")

But, the bigger win is when you improve your process of analyzing and solving.
I suppose I have stumbled into that approach unconsciously but to make it
explicit is far more powerful.

Now, where else can I go apply that...

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dkarapetyan
His advice about research and published work applies to software as well. Just
because someone published that shiny new framework before you and got lots of
upvotes does not mean you should despair. You should look at and learn from it
and ask yourself how you could have approached the problem differently. You
will learn a lot and chances are pretty high there is still something unique
in your work that can be factored out and either published on its own or
integrated into the more popular framework.

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tgb
Does anyone know how to answer this question:

How do I know when a proof is worth learning?

A lot of times I can get by with just an intuition that the statement _ought_
to be true and some knowledge of what the proof uses but without a full
understanding of the proof. But that's not something to be done every time.
Any advice on knowing when I can or can't skip a proof?

~~~
dkarapetyan
Proofs are not just about knowing whether something is true or not. Any good
proof will reveal techniques that can be applied in other situations even when
the assumptions don't quite hold. If you think those techniques might be
applicable to your work then you should study the proof. No one else can make
this distinction other than you.

~~~
tgb
Thanks for that reply but I think you've avoided answering the question. Maybe
there's no good answer, but I was looking for heuristics to judge ahead of
time how valuable the insight from reading a proof is. After all, reading one
can be quite a bit of work so ideally I'd never read proofs that aren't
insughtful, but which ones those are is hard to judg in advance for me. Maybe
not so hard to judge for someon more experienced than me, though.

~~~
mtdewcmu
Look for clues to what other people thought of the proof. Did the paper appear
at a prestigious conference, etc? Your opinion will probably be predicted by
other peoples' opinions.

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mtdewcmu
"CLAUDE SHANNON once told me..."

Name dropper. :)

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johnrds
The best advice to beginning graduate students is: Don't do it. Graduate
school is the modern incarnation of The Emperor's New Clothes.

~~~
norswap
I think you're getting downvoted because you didn't substantiate. So, why
shouldn't one do it? What do you mean "it's the emperor new clothes"?

~~~
pedrosorio
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes)

~~~
norswap
I knew what the expression meant, just wondering why he made that claim.

