To: new-phds@cc.gatech.edu, slush@cc.gatech.edu
Subject: [slush] Things New PhDs Should Start Doing
Things New PhDs Should Start Doing
by Idris Hsi
Last Edited: August 26, 2002.
There are a number of things that I wished I'd known to do in my very
first year as a graduate student. While I'm not out yet, I thought I
would write up a short list of things that PhD students should start doing
from the start to save themselves a lot of pain later on in their careers.
Some of this is covered in Robert Peters' "Getting What You Came For"
which was recommended reading when I took CS 7001. You'll probably find
similar graduate student pages and graduate advice pages that have lots of
useful advice for how to get out here:
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/student.services/phd/phd-advice/
What I've listed in this document are 10 activities that you should be
starting from Day 1 of your PhD career to save yourself lots of grief
later on. I've also written it with an emphasis for those PhD students
interested in doing research after graduation but there are some useful
tips for those of you walking the hard path to eventually find a teaching
position at the college/university level.
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1. Keep a Research Diary:
========================
I keep a file on my main work computer where I write up meetings with my
advisor, good ideas that I've had about my research, bad ideas that I've
had about my research, problems that I've encountered, talks that I've had
with other professors or colleagues, and even emails about research that I
copy into the diary in a different font. I started doing this recently
when I realized that over the years I'd filled a box with notes that I had
no way of searching intelligently. I wish I had started earlier. Every
now and then a wacky idea that I threw away at the time will turn out to
be informative. This is also a good place to make notes of your anxieties
about the program and so on just to clarify the problems that you think
you're having. Hopefully after you've graduated, you can look back on
your recorded angst and laugh.
In your early years, you should be generating ideas about potential thesis
topics. Even if you're brainstorming, you should write them down. Most
of them will not go anywhere or will not be relevant or accomplishable in
your time frame. Eventually one will lead you down the right track.
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2. Maintain an Electronic Bibliography:
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Whether you use BibTek or EndNote or design your own database, you should
keep track of the papers and books that you read whether it's in your area
or not. This may not seem like an issue for you now but wait til you get
into the 300 paper range and are trying to remember the name of the
authors who wrote about applying design patterns to multithreaded
real-time applications in 1994 so you can cite them in a paper that you're
writing. I know that EndNote and BibTek also has add-on tools that work
with word processors to do things like automatically generate
bibliographies and citations after inserting fields in your document.
Very useful when you're writing your proposal or dissertation.
I also use EndNote as my database for storing my notes of a research
paper's key points. It saves time rereading the actual paper and it
generates more key terms for searching on this database.
As a corollary to this, go to an Office Depot type store and spend the $8
or so to get a big box of file folders to store your papers. The best
organization scheme that I've seen seems to be alphabetical by first
author. Some students maintain libraries of .pdf files on their computers
as a way of storing research.
===========================
3. Know Your Search Engines:
===========================
There are three very useful search engines that you should be aware of in
doing literature searches.
Georgia Tech has a campus subscription to the IEEE Digital Library that
only requires your standard GTEL login and password. It's located here:
http://gtel.gatech.edu:2172/Xplore/DynWel.jsp
The other major repository of literature is ACM's Digital Library. This
requires a membership in the ACM but it's something you should think about
anyhow if you intend a long career in computer science. It's located here
but you need an ID and a password to get to the cool areas:
http://portal.acm.org/
The last is a research site maintained by NEC and keeps a very nice
database of publications, sometimes with links to the actual files. It
also will show you a graph showing the time distribution of your searches.
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs/
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4. An Archiving System for Useful Info:
======================================
Emails, Papers, Revisions of Papers, Classwork, Lecture Notes, Meeting
Notes, and so on will eventually swamp you in a Sargasso Sea of
Information where nothing useful escapes. It's very useful to design a
good filing and organizing system very early on, both virtually and
physically. The more work you do now, the more work you'll save yourself
later on when you need to find something.
==================================================
5. Learn The Composition of your Research Community
==================================================
Who are the famous researchers in your area? Who are or were the most
influential people in the field? Which conferences are first tier?
Where are the major centers of work in your area in the world? Which
journals should you be reading regularly? What are the current research
trends or sexy topics that are getting funding? What are the niches of
specialization and who's in them? You must know this like the back of
your hand eventually. Some of this you will get by osmosis from your
advisor, your colleagues, or persistent visits to conferences and meeting
these people in person. It's good to begin taking notes early on these
things to help you with your later career and job search.
As a corollary to that, you should also know something about the work
being done at your own university. I had the uncomfortable experience
once of being at a conference and having someone ask me about the work of
a colleague that was strongly related to my own that I didn't know about.
Doh!!
Slightly more difficult to learn are the various political nuances and
biases associated with various conferences, publications, and
organizations. If your advisor is anything like mine, he or she will have
a particular feel for these things and will often throw away statements
like "They're not interested in this style of work. We should try this
conference instead." Make sure to follow up these statements with
clarification questions. Don't take things for granted. Academia is
often extremely political. It's good to know the history and climate of
your field.
=======================================
6. Document Useful Learning Experiences:
=======================================
I had the painful recent experience of having to relearn programming and
Java to build some analysis tools after a long hiatus of doing theoretical
research. This is not the first time I've had to relearn something but
this time the learning curve finally hit. I now have a document of how to
do things like install Java, the stupid system peculiarities that I had to
overcome, what I did to solve bugs as they came up, and so on. I'm also
developing a web page of useful code fragments - documentation headers,
loop structures, try/catch things - that I use over and over again.
Eventually, if I ever teach a programming course (or have to relearn Java
again), I'll have teaching materials ready. This is also a good thing to
do with classes that you TA to keep a memory of what worked and what
didn't. An example is below:
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/cs4301_99_spring/TANotes.htm
This document itself is a form of writing up a process that may be useful
to me later in life as an advisor or for passing on to other graduate
students. What you want to document is anything that took a tremendous
amount of searching or effort to learn. It could be as small as how to
install print drivers on your Windows machine to interface with the
Colleges or as large as how to set up research that involves human
subjects. Documentation is very useful for saving you (or someone else)
effort later on.
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7. Keep a Professional Home Page:
================================
My home page is not a great example of a professional home page because
it's a hybrid page (personal and professional interests) but it has all
the right stuff except one:
A picture of me.
Personal and contact info.
My research interests - what I'm working on and why.
Current and previous project affiliations.
My academic history - (previous degrees)
Electronic versions of papers that I've published.
A current Curriculum Vitae - The Academic Resume - I don't
have one yet because I'm a slacker. Don't be me!
Here are two very good examples of what else you should have and how it
could look:
http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/anton/
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Gregory.Abowd/
A spare example but extremely functional is here:
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~spencer/
When you go to conferences or start communicating with people either in or
outside your college these days, the first thing that they will do if they
are interested in you or your work is go to your home page to find out
more about your work or about your history. I've seen faculty candidates
get derided in review meetings for having an inferior web page. In the
21st century, your home page is your virtual "public face" - the first
thing people will see when they're checking you out. Don't let it be
"Under Construction".
=========================
8. Maintain an Updated CV:
=========================
If you volunteer for a committee, a conference, take an internship,
publish, or do any of a number of things that should go on a CV, update it
immediately. This is probably a no-brainer for everyone that's not me.
Argh.
Along those lines, you should look at other CVs and see what they're
filled with - it's not just about your publications although they are the
most important component of your academic resume. Which leads me to my
next point.
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9. Get Involved Early On:
========================
Volunteering for conferences, serving on the various college committees,
helping at college activities, attending faculty candidate talks, giving
research talks, giving and attending research demos, going to the
occasional corporate mixer, and so on are all things that you should be
doing as early as possible. Being a TA to a professor in an area of
interest (and doing a good job) is also a very good way to meet faculty.
This public involvement serves two purposes. One, you're getting exposure
to the facets of academic life that are not related to research but can be
very important in the intangible ways. Two, you're making contacts
(networking) and hopefully making a good impression on the people that you
meet. It's important to develop a positive professional image to your
colleagues and especially the faculty. This is a lesson that holds true
wherever you go. It's also good CV filler. Faculties looking to hire
candidates also look at how useful that person was to their community.
==================================
10. Develop Research Meta-awareness
==================================
One of the most useful skills you can have leaving graduate school is the
ability to think objectively and critically about a problem or its
proposed solution. You need to learn what is good research from problem
statement to validation, how to recognize good research whether it's in
your area or not, and how to recognize when you're looking at bad research
(either because of irrelevance or implementation). The worst thing I did
when I started as a graduate student is to treat the process like an
undergraduate student - waiting for someone to tell me what to do and how
to do it. Learning how to reflect actively on what was going on around me
was one of the most painful and rewarding things that I've learned over
the years. Simply being able to recognize intuitively the difference
between a solved research problem (even outside my area) and unsolved one
is tremendous. Being able to recognize the difference between a tractable
and intractable unsolved research problem will help steer you away from
the Rocks of Despair when you're looking for your thesis topic. Your
advisor will guide you through this a little but you need to learn this
for yourself if you want a career as anything other than someone's
research assistant.
To develop this skill you need to maintain an extra level of awareness when
you're pursuing any of your academic activities - reading, writing,
conversing with colleagues, attending conferences, and so on. This 'extra
sense' should be asking questions in the back of your mind like "Is this
work important?", "Does it tackle the problem in the right way?", "Do I
believe the validation?", "What are the implications of this work?", and
"What can I learn from this research (or person)?".
I believe the difference between a competent researcher and an innovative
one, either at the student or faculty level, is how good they are at
recognizing good problems.
This is the first draft of this document, if you have any comments,
additions, or corrections, please feel free to mail me.
Idris H. Hsi H: (404) 206-9619
College of Computing W: (404) 385-1101
331190 Georgia Tech Station
Atlanta, GA 30332-1365
Home Page: www.cc.gatech.edu/people/home/idris
