Advice for Research Students

Over the years, I've written a lot of advice for students and others. Feel free to link to these pages.

• For prospective graduate students
• For undergrads who want to get involved in research
• How to ask for a recommendation letter
• How should I prepare myself for grad school?
• Should I go straight to grad school?
• How to think about grad school interviews
   
• How to ask a question in class
• How to read a paper
• How to present a paper in reading group
• How far to go with double-blind review
• How to be a teaching assistant
   
• How to organize your files
• How to evaluate an advisor
• How to deal with an unresponsive or angry advisor
• How to find research problems
   
• Write the paper first (as an early step in the research)
• How to Capitalize a Title in {BibTeX}
• How to cite your own work without breaking anonymity
• How to prepare a talk
• How to meet with your dissertation committee
• How to write up a Ph.D. dissertation
• In defense of footnotes
• How to write an academic research statement (when applying for a faculty job)
• How to serve as program chair of a conference
• How to set up publication practices for a professional society: conferences/journals (2009, 2010), preprint policies (report 2017)
   
• How to use the CLSP massage chair

I've also been answering questions on Quora lately. See also my technical tutorials.

A couple of writings that I like to recommend are Michael Nielsen's essay Principles of Effective Research and Phil Agre's opus Netwokring on the Network. This give a high-level perspective on how to build a research career: Nielsen writes about cultivating your own thinking, and Agre writes about cultivating your relationships with other researchers.

JHU students can also find a outdated collection of pointers to good advice (mostly compiled by me) in the CLSP FAQ, and a bigger collection here compiled by Tao Xie. And why not Google for career advice computer science graduate students?

Use your undergraduate education: "But you go to a great school, not for knowledge so much as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment's notice a new intellectual posture, for the art of entering quickly into another person's thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the habit of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage and mental soberness." -William Johnson Cory (1861)