Advice for Research Students

Over the years, I've written a lot of advice for students and others. Feel free to link to these pages.

I've also been answering questions on Quora lately. See also my technical tutorials.

A couple of writings that I like to recommend are Michael Nielsen's essay Principles of Effective Research and Phil Agre's opus Netwokring on the Network. This give a high-level perspective on how to build a research career: Nielsen writes about cultivating your own thinking, and Agre writes about cultivating your relationships with other researchers.

JHU students can also find a outdated collection of pointers to good advice (mostly compiled by me) in the CLSP FAQ, and a bigger collection here compiled by Tao Xie. And why not Google for career advice computer science graduate students?

Use your undergraduate education: "But you go to a great school, not for knowledge so much as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment's notice a new intellectual posture, for the art of entering quickly into another person's thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the habit of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage and mental soberness." -William Johnson Cory (1861)


This page online: http://cs.jhu.edu/~jason/advice
Jason Eisner - jason@cs.jhu.edu (suggestions welcome) Last Mod $Date: 2023/09/18 06:50:13 $