A Guide for Graduate Career

Sleep is really important

It gets your brain rest and helps you to solve difficult problems. It’s common that sometimes you are stuck in a problem for an hour in the night, but are able to solve in the next morning. Science experiments have proved that your brain will try to fix the problems in your mind automatically during the night. Staying up late therefore is absolutely a bad habit that reduce your efficiency.

Considering the big picture is the key

Create schedule of study. Getting an idea about everything I need to know and make a list in term of bullet points. Consider all points carefully and estimate the time you need for each part. Do not diving into something concrete when you know nothing about the field.

“What I can’t create, I don’t understand”

After reading a formula/derivation/proof, you should close the book or move the paper away and try to write down the most important bits, which will lead you to re-derive them at will.

Exercise > Reading

Simply reading sometimes may be boring. Try some exercieses, which will make you go back and read things you don’t konw.

Use your time well

Take part in some projects you are intersted in or start your own one from scratch. Contribute to Open source, make/improve a library. Create somehing cool. Document it well. Blog about it. These are the things people will care about a few year down the roal. None will care about you grades unless they are bad. Grades are an annoyance you have to deal with along the way.

Inner and outer loop

Spend more time in figuring out what problems are really important and worth solving before you start to solve problems. Do not do the incremental work(enhances something exist by making it more complex and gets a little bit extra). Be ambitious and focus on important problems in your field. It will force you out of the box, to think different, to confront the limitation and to innovate.

Responsibility

You are a member of a research community and your goal is to push the field forward. Do things other don’t do but should. In brief, do good job and try to make the world a little better place.

Ref: two great posts from A.Karpath A Survival Guide to a PhD Doing well in your courses