Getting started as a PhD student | Hacker News Reader

Getting started as a PhD student

matt-welsh.blogspot.com

27 pointshiteshiitk12 comments

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/

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 :-)

The Not So Short Introduction to LATEX2ε

http://www.google.co.nz/search?q=lshort&ie=utf-8&oe=...

For the general LaTeX user, the WikiBook on LaTeX is pretty useful.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX

At the beginning I learned most of it from the Not-so-short introduction (link in another reply to your comment), but LaTeX is too large an animal to handle it with a reference manual. I find most of the answers I need on the web.

Also, you probably will have to present your research at seminars/conferences etc.; I'd suggest you take a look at the Beamer document class for LaTeX.

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.

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!!!!

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