

Getting started as a PhD student - hiteshiitk
http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/09/getting-started-as-phd-student.html

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petercooper
Anyone seriously interested in this line of enquiry might find my summary of
"Getting What You Came For," one of the most popular "getting a PhD" guides,
interesting: <http://peterc.org/pedia/getting-what-you-came-for/>

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RK
Can you clarify what he means by _get on committees_ in the quote "Tattoo this
list somewhere you won’t forget to look. (1) Publish academic papers. (2) Go
to conferences. (3) Get on committees"? I'm (hopefully) quite near the end of
my PhD and have no idea what the committees part is supposed to mean.

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alatkins
He'd be referring to conference organising committees (open a conference
procedings and look in the frontmatter).

They're often used as a measure of peer esteem for academic performance
evaluations (far less significant that publications, obviously), and would no
doubt be useful when trying to land a post-doc.

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Lewisham
I read it as program committees, but I guess PC is a subset of conference
committee.

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merraksh
A technical suggestion: learn to use LaTeX as soon as you can, and consider
having BibTeX collections of the papers you read.

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zerokyuu
As a graduate student looking to learn LaTeX, I'm curious if you know of any
decent first references? I've had to work in it before and learned enough to
get by, but am looking to learn more.

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alatkins
I would highly recommend taking the time to learn LyX [<http://www.lyx.org>]
rather than LaTeX itself _unless_ your dissertation will contain a lot of
equations. LyX is now a pretty mature piece of software that makes working
with LaTeX very easy while still giving you access to all of its advantages.

In any regard, for the love of god, please don't use Word or OO.org, you WILL
regret it :-)

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bravura
I've always found that "Networking on the Network"
(<http://vlsicad.ucsd.edu/Research/Advice/network.html>) is just a great guide
that deep dives into many aspects of success in the research. The paper
contains a lot more steak than the linked blog post.

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Maven911
another very important point in your graduate studies is to get regular
feedback on your draft thesis and research, all to often have i heard of the
stories where a prof would finally take the time to review the work properly
and the feedback to the student would be that they did something incorrectly
which invalidates months sometimes years of research!!!!

