Advice for Researchers

This page collects advice for current PhD students and researchers. Instead, if you are interested in joining my group, please see this advice for prospective students.

I’ve always enjoyed reading web pages about advice for graduate students. I think that, subsconsciously, I hope that if I read enough advice from other people, then I will someday feel that I know what I am doing. I will update this page if that ever happens.

Collections of Advice

I was delighted to find Jason Hong’s list of grad school advice, which contains almost all of my favorite essays.

Of these, my favourites are

• Richard Hamming’s classic lecture on You and Your Research. Amazingly, you can now find a video of Hamming himself delivering the lecture.

• Phil Agre’s essay on Networking on the Network. A theoretical framework for understanding professional networking and how research fields are born and grow.

• David Patterson’s series on “How to be a bad X”: How to Have a Bad Career in Research/Academia (video), How to Build a Bad Research Center, How to Be a Bad Professor (video)

Advice I’ve Written

I’ll admit that I enjoy writing advice for others, perhaps because it’s easier to make suggestions to others than to decide what to do for oneself.

• Principles of building research code
• How to give academic posters
• Advice posts from my blog

More Advice from Others

Here’s a list of newer or more local books that aren’t on Jason Hong’s list above:

• Alan Bundy of the School of Informatics has written a Researcher’s Bible on how to do a PhD.
• This recent advice from Mark Dredze and Hanna Wallach is very good, and has some points that are more specifically suited to machine learning, natural language processing, and related areas.
• Simon Peyton-Jones has good advice about giving talks, writing papers, and writing proposals.
• A PhD is Not Enough! has really useful advice about how to present yourself and take care of yourself intellectually.
• Apprentice to Genius is not an advice book, but a fascinating story of a mentorship chain in biomedical science and how they think about research.

Meta-Advice

Two final pieces of advice about how best to use all of the links above. Meta-advice, if you will. First, never blindly follow advice (including this sentence). For the advice above, you will need to remember that UK PhDs are shorter than US ones, so this affects how much you have time to do. But I think that most of the basic principles still apply.

Second: Do not attempt to read all of these links at once!