
Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student - Manuel Blum (CMU) - chromophore
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mblum/research/pdf/grad.html
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anatoly
There's a lot of filler in there, but one advice that I found interesting was
to write right back what you're reading (I take it to refer to technical
material and not exposition - e.g. proofs and definitions). Anyone has any
experience with trying that?

(I've tried this with math books before, but it always felt too tedious to
keep up. But I suspect I may have tried to hard, going for a nicely formatted
shortened exposition of the entire material; I didn't try to simply jot proofs
and formulas down as I was reading them).

~~~
physcab
Yeah this is something I do frequently. I discovered it while studying for my
qualifying exam. When I first took the exam, I failed using the same study
methods I used in undergrad. I realized the scope of information I had to know
was much too broad to be able cram or understand through past homework
problems. So as I went through my study materials I wrote down the material
after reading in designated sections, keeping the summaries to just one page.
Then during further review I used these pages of notes. The second time I took
the exam I got 100%.

~~~
JimmyL
When I would study for exams, I found the process of writing notes would be
almost more useful than the process of reviewing them. The process of writing
notes made me boil the concepts down into more discrete forms, and the
physical action of writing helped with the memorization. A few days before an
exam, I would often find myself re-reading my old notes and condensing them
down into briefer notes, eliminating full explanations of concepts in favor of
keywords or mental links to the full note sets.

The net result was that when I was in my exams, I would find myself mentally
looking at my notes, and finding a formula or something would just be a matter
of 'reading' them.

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pkrumins
I found this article extremely insightful and decided to prepare it for the
print so that I could read it more carefully and add some notes on the
margins.

While I was doing it, I realized how awfully true was the fact that science
people _can't_ write.

No disrespect to Mr. Blum, but really, what is going on with the writing in
this article? New line every several words, unconsistent emphasis, various
writing styles, quick abbreviations in some places, but not in others,
inconsistent division in paragraphs, several misspellings.

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simplegeek
When I was a kid, my father (an EE guy) used to tell me the importance of
writing while reading. I mostly ignored that in my career and now a very smart
person(Manuel Blum) has validated it. I hope there aren't many things (as told
by my father) that I would want other smart people to validate ;(

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yters
Did not realize this: "the median of n integers can be found with just O(n)
comparisons."

Must figure this out!

~~~
sparky
There are a couple linear-time selection algorithms, some randomized and some
not. An example of the latter is described here (
<http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/161/960130.html> ). The constant factor is
non-trivial here (<= 24n comparisons for this one) but for large datasets it
will eventually be faster than sorting.

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bowman
"Scrolls must be read like the Torah from one end to the other." - Associating
Islam with being outdated can be good for your demographic I guess.

~~~
chumsley
Er... what? Are you perhaps confusing the Torah (Jewish scripture) with the
Koran (Islamic scripture)?

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TriinT
I used to love to read these essays on how to be a good and productive grad
student... until I came to grad school. Same with phdcomics.

~~~
Maro
phdcomics is funny, but not if you're phd student =)

~~~
pierrefar
They're still funny even years after I finished my PhD :)

~~~
Maro
But were they funny when you were doing it? I mean they're funny, but they're
so negative I don't like to read them. At one point another PhD student
printed out and put up one of them (it was the one which had a time plot about
how you get more and more demotivated over time), and I actually took it down.

~~~
swolchok
One of my fellow grad students related a tale in which he was his advisor was
telling him to work on something and he wanted to know whether his advisor was
going to help. His advisor's reply: "Let me consult Ph.D. Comics." (Said
advisor has a sense of humor.)

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modelic3
This is actually quite good advice. It's not overly preachy and it's not
overly poetic.

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jmtame
Advice to a beginning graduate student: do a start up instead ;)

~~~
Ardit20
Why?

~~~
jmtame
why not?

~~~
Ardit20
Well, perhaps because some might be more interested in say digging in Egypt to
undercover archaeological sites, or maybe they interested in being a doctor,
or perhaps a lawyer, or maybe they would rather do research on how they can
make machines think, or a million of other things which have not much to do
with starting your own business, to start with anyway.

So will you now tell me why they should start a business instead?

~~~
mechanical_fish
Because it will take you years and years of effort just to get the advanced
degree that will enable you to _try_ many of these lines of work, [1] at which
point you may discover that you don't especially like them.

I can tell you about this experience at great length if you really want. ;)

(Dabbling in medicine or law is particularly expensive, because... it's
expensive. You have to go into massive debt, on _top_ of your potentially
massive college debt, before you figure out that medicine or law can be a
really miserable line of work. At least I didn't do that -- my years of career
trial-and-error were cash-flow positive, though I didn't exactly live like a
prince on my grad-student and postdoc salaries...)

Meanwhile, you don't have to do years and years of academic hoop-jumping
before learning whether or not you'd enjoy starting a business, or working at
a startup. (Or working at a big company, for that matter.) You can learn a lot
just by trying it. You don't even have to wait for graduation.

\---

[1] Beware: You may think that you can learn whether you'd enjoy (e.g.)
archaeology by volunteering to help on a dig, or by being a grad student in
archaeology. And that _is_ a good idea. But enjoying life as a grad student or
intern is not the same as enjoying a career in a given field. In many fields,
professors spend most of their time raising money, managing people, playing
political games, and writing papers and proposals, not digging holes,
performing calculations, or building neat stuff in the lab.

~~~
physcab
I think you're leaving out a very important aspect of graduate school, which
is simply the ability to experiment and find out what you truly love to do.
You can be pigeonholed into a business you don't particularly like, just like
you can with a graduate project. But I feel like graduate school offers you
much more flexibility and time to figure your shit out, at which point by the
end you atleast have a solid credential to back up your work ethic.

~~~
blackguardx
I am a new grad student after spending a few years in industry. My advice for
people who don't know what they want to do is to go straight to work. Don't go
to grad school. It is much nicer to figure out what you want to do while
earning $60k+ than $18k.

~~~
physcab
I don't feel like money is the issue though. When you're working for a company
your job is to produce something for them--something that moves the company
forward. In grad school, your work is much more selfish. You have ample time
to think about problems in ways that only you can solve.

