Awesome Grad School 
Advice and guidebook for thriving and surviving Ph.D. and graduate school. But first, what is grad. school?
Table of contents
- Applying for PhD
- General Advice
- Post PhD Advice
- Doing Research as an Undergraduate Student
- Internships (as a PhD student)
- Paper Writing
- Paper Accepted, Then What?
- Writing Rebuttals
- Handling Paper Rejections
- Research Novelty
- Conferences
- Giving Talks
- Department Seminars and Events
- Fellowship
- Ph.D. Syllabi
- Getting Help
- Academics Blogging about Academia
- Other Grad School Advice Pages and Sites Like Ours
Applying for PhD
- Dr. Scott Freitas: Optimizing Your Machine Learning PhD Applications for Success
- Is an ML PhD Right for Me?
- Finding the Ideal Advisor
- Understanding the Application Process
- Aligning your Post Graduation Objectives
Statement of Purpose
- Prof. Boaz Barak: How to write βstatements of purposeβ
- Prof. Yisong Yue: How to Write Statements of Purpose for PhD & Fellowship Applications
- Prof. Roman Feiman on how to write statement of purpose (SoP)
Letters of Recommendation
- Prof. Gautam Kamath: How to Ask for a Letter of Recommendation
- Cornell University: Requesting Letters of Recommendation
- Chriselle Sy @ The Grad Cafe
- Prof. Jia-Bin Huang: How do you get a strong letter?
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General Advice
- Prof. Casey Fiesler: "Should You Get a PhD?"
- Bad Reasons: You're good at school; You don't know what else to do; You want to make money; You want prestige.
- Good Reasons: You want to be a professor; You love academic writing; You want to add new knowledge to the world; You want a research career.
- James Arvanitakis: "How to survive a PhD"
- Nick Feamster: "Managing your advisor"
- Austin Z. Henley: "Lessons from my PhD"
- Lead or be led; Topic sentences; Get excited; Unmotivated details; Slides versus speaker; Managers as input/output machines; Daily progress tracking
- Andrej Karpathy: "A Survival Guide to a PhD"
- Maithra Raghu: "Reflections on my (Machine Learning) PhD Journey"
- Sebastian Ruder: "10 Tips for Research and a PhD"
- Aijaz A. Shaikh: "5 secrets to surviving (and thriving in) a PhD program"
- Jennifer Snodgrass: "7 Hard Truths and a Few Lies"
- Stephen Sterns: "Modest Advice"
- Terence Tao: "Career Advice"
- Lucy A. Taylor: "Twenty things I wish Iβd known when I started my PhD"
- David A. Patterson: "Your Students Are Your Legacy" Public slide version. ACM version, may be paywalled
- (1) Show initiative, for fortune favors the bold. (2) Sink or swim. (3) Educate your professor
Post PhD Advice
- Dr. Scott Freitas: Landing Your ML PhD Dream Job
- Dr. Scott Freitas: Top 60 ML Interview Questions
- Prof. Heng Ji: How to Seek and Secure Funding
Doing Research as an Undergraduate Student
Internships (as a PhD student)
- Polo Chau: 7 Benefits of Internship
- "7 Ps of internships": People, Practice, Paper, Patent, Product, Publicity, Payment
- Anne Meyer-Miner: Engaging Employers Early in Grad Student Training
- "Anne Meyer-Minor describes the mutual benefits that occur when company managers collaborate with academics in the career development of advanced-degree trainees."
Paper Writing
- Prof. Devi Parikh, Georgia Tech: Planning paper writing
- Prof. Christos Faloutsos, CMU: Lessons from 1K rejected research papers
- How to create crown jewel figures (fig 1), pick paper title, tool name, write abstract (start with rhetorical question), think like reviewers (relevance, novelty, technical quality, presentation)
- Maxwell Forbes (UWash): Making a Figure 1
- Prof. Diyi Yang, Georgia Tech: Paper Clinic for checking paper structure, organiziation, overall impression
- Prof. Stevie Chancellor, University of Minnesota: How to Write More with Less Stress by Writing Every Day
- Toward a good scientific writing
- Terry Tao's advice
- The Serial Mentor
- Perfecting Your Scientific Writing: Tips & Tricks
- Improving your scientific writing: a short guide
- Three Sins of Authors in Computer Science and Math
- How to write a great research paper
- Notes on writing
- Adam Wierman: Advising
- How to Write a Good Article
- Ten simple Rules for Responsible referencing
- Tips for being concise in academic writing
- Marco Tulio Ribeiro: Writing, part 1 β the process
- Jia-Bin Huang: How to Write a Good Research Paper
Paper Accepted, Then What?
- Casey Fiesler: what ACM copyright model should I choose?
- Jay Wang: arXiv submission instruction
- Jay Wang: tips and tricks to make ACM TAPS happy
Writing Rebuttals
- How we write rebuttals by Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra, Stefan Lee
Handling Paper Rejections
- Aditya Parameswaran: "Coping with Rejection"
- Niklas Elmqvist: "Dealing with Rejection"
- Robert Kosara: "Dealing with Paper Rejections"
Research Novelty
- Michael Black: Novelty in Science: A guide for reviewers
- Reviewers regularly mistake complexity, difficulty, and technicality for novelty. A better way is to replace novelty with beauty.
- Marco Tulio Ribeiro: Coming up with research ideas
- Marco Tulio Ribeiro: Organizing and evaluating research ideas
Conferences
- 7 reasons why every PhD student should attend academic conferences; Alessandra Bassey
- The Great Benefits of Attending Academic Conferences; Miguel Otero-Iglesias
- Navigating your first academic conference; Joshua C. Palmer
Giving Talks
Department Seminars and Events
- Why seminars are important to the graduate experience
- Why invited talks are important
- Participating in graduate seminar discussions
Fellowship
- Dr. Scott Freitas: Tips & Tricks to Land a PhD Fellowship
- TL;DR
- Understanding the Benefits
- Comparing Fellowships
- Application Process
- Gaining the Edge
- Five tips for a successful Facebook Fellowship application from the people who review them
- Morgan Klaus Scheuerman: Tips for Applying to PhD Fellowships in HCI / Social Computing
- Jazette Johnson: 7 Tips for Applying for the Microsoft Research Ada Lovelace Fellowship
- Ada Lovelace Fellowship was discontinued, but the tips apply to other fellowships
- CS PhD fellowship list (CMU)
- CS PhD fellowship list (GT)
- Graduate Fellowship list (Johns Hopkins)
Ph.D. Syllabi
- Eric Gilbert
- Mor Naaman
- Jon Froehlich
- Collection of Lab Handbooks
- Graduating advising philosophy, David Darmofal