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

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.

More Advice from Others

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

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!