From writing papers, to giving presentations, to grad school humor. These are the top 42 books for PhD and graduate students. If you want to survive in graduate school, you must read these books. It is normal to feel lost in the vastness of a PhD project. Graduate school is a though place. You need [...]
Feeling like your Professor is like Gunnery Sergeant Hartman? Then these quotes might sound familiar. If you ladies leave my group, if you survive recruit training… you will be a weapon, you will be a minister of science, praying for research. But until that day you are pukes! You’re the lowest form of life [...]
(Photo: Bonolux) Dare to think big, because a paper in Nature makes you work harder than a paper for the neighborhood newspaper. Dare to approach a big name, because you need some godfathers in your network. Dare to say no, because it is your time, your project, your ideas.
At the end of your PhD, you are expected to be an expert in your narrow field. In fact, you should know more about your little field than your professor. On the other hand, your supervisor is expected to have the overview of a broader field where your project fits. What a professor is for [...]
(Photo: comic.lot23.com) Knowing how NOT to do something, does not imply that you know how to do it. You can learn either by trial and error or by following the wise advice (imitating) of someone. I have already made use of evolution to explain how cultural knowledge works. If you opt to use somebody’s experience you [...]
The motivation during your PhD is not constant, and it resembles the phases that entrepreneurs experience and that Tim Ferriss describes in his post Harnessing Entrepreneurial Manic Depression: Making The Rollercoaster Work for You. Tim provides great advice for entrepreneurs, but this can easily be adapted to research and PhD life. Phase 1: Uninformed optimism [...]
Mr. Big Shot came from a city nearby to this workshop. He just finished his talk and everybody is thinking that this guy is good, damn good. Immediately other big shots, wannabes, and douchebags approach him. They got him surrounded, but he looks to the emptiness, replying some aha’s and some yeah’s here and there. [...]
… which do not need to be overestimated. Today I had to tweak in a program some C function that was called from Java using JNI. It was about fixing some bug in a code I wrote myself, it should not be that difficult, right? Well, in my mind I imagined it as a tricky [...]
If you want to publish in Bioinformatics you should follow 3 unwritten rules: Submit a tool Give your tool a name Make it available through a web service The funny part comes when scientists, those that are known by their imagination and creativity, have to give a name to their precious tool. When faced with [...]
