poloclub/awesome-grad-school

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
  • Statement of Purpose
  • Letters of Recommendation
  • Choosing PhD Advisor
• General Advice
• Job Search (Academia)
• Job Search (Industry)
• Giving Job Talks
• Post PhD Advice
• Doing Research as an Undergraduate Student
• Internships (as a PhD student)
• Meetings
• Paper Writing
• Paper Accepted, Then What?
• Writing Rebuttals
• Handling Paper Rejections
• Research Novelty
• Broadneing the Impact and Visibilty of Your Research
• Conferences
• Presenting Posters
• 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

• Boaz Barak: How to write “statements of purpose”
• Yisong Yue: How to Write Statements of Purpose for PhD & Fellowship Applications
• Roman Feiman on how to write statement of purpose (SoP)

Letters of Recommendation

• Polo Chau: How to help your recommendation letter writers submit on time?
• Gautam Kamath: How to Ask for a Letter of Recommendation
• Cornell University: Requesting Letters of Recommendation
• Chriselle Sy @ The Grad Cafe
• Jia-Bin Huang: How do you get a strong letter? 🤔

Choosing PhD Advisor

• Polo Chau: How to Choose PhD Advisor?

  • Focus on the people you will interact with every day during your PhD study (e.g., advisor, lab mates). Research is important but without the right people, research won't happen!

• Casey Fiesler: Choosing a PhD Advisor | Questions to Ask to Find a Good PhD Supervisor

• Andrew Kuznetsov: Questions to Ask a Prospective Ph.D. Advisor on Visit Day, With Thorough and Forthright Explanations

General Advice

• Jimeng Sun: "Speed is Everything for AI research"
• 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"
• 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 I’d 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

• Remzi: "Graduate School: Keys To Success"
• Sophia Sun: "How to graduate your PhD when you have no hope"
• Fei-Fei Li: "De-Mystifying Good Research and Good Papers"

Job Search (Academia)

• Ben Lengerich: Thoughts from my Faculty Application Experience
• Elizabeth Bondi-Kelly: A blog about my experience on the CS faculty job market
• Daniel Seita: My Experience Applying for Faculty Positions
• Faculty Application : EECS Communication Lab
• Rose Cersonsky: Academic Jobs
• Arjun Raj: Thoughts on applying for faculty positions
• Workshop on Faculty Hiring Process — YouTube
• Faculty job talks: tips from the faculty — MIT EECS
• MIT Faculty Applicaiton Resources
• CS Faculty Interview Questions
• Guide to Professorspeak
• The academic job search for computer scientists in 10 questions

Job Search (Industry)

• Dr. Scott Freitas: Landing Your ML PhD Dream Job
• Dr. Scott Freitas: Top 60 ML Interview Questions

Giving Job Talks

• Jonathan Birch: Tips for Giving Job Talks
• Jeannette M. Wing: Tips on the Interview Process

Post PhD Advice

• Heng Ji: How to Seek and Secure Funding

Doing Research as an Undergraduate Student

• Omar Shaikh: Opinions on Undergrad Computer Science Research

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."
• Yong Zheng-Xin: AI Research Internship Search as a CS PhD Student

Meetings

• Reflections on Successful Meetings with Undergraduate Researchers

Paper Writing

• Devi Parikh, Georgia Tech: Planning paper writing
• Devi Parikh, Georgia Tech: Shortening papers to fit page limits
• Christos Faloutsos, CMU: Lessons from 1K rejected research papers and an example meta paper resulting from applying the lessons
  • 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
• Diyi Yang, Georgia Tech: Paper Clinic for checking paper structure, organiziation, overall impression
• 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
• 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 — the process
• Jia-Bin Huang: How to Write a Good Research Paper
• Sasha Rush: How to Write an "okay" 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

Rebuttals for AI/ML oriented venues

• How we write rebuttals by Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra, Stefan Lee
• How to ML Rebuttal – A Brief Guide by Tim Rocktäschel and Jakob Foerster

Rebuttals for HCI/VIS oriented venues

• Jeff’s Rebuttal Guide by Jeff Bigham
• Writing Rebuttals by Niklas Elmqvist
• My Rebuttal-Writing Process for HCI Venues by Meredith Ringel Morris

Helpful if changes need to be highlighted (to accompany rebuttal)

• Jay Wang: How to mark up paper revisions with LaTeX?

Handling Paper Rejections

• Aditya Parameswaran: "Coping with Rejection"
• Niklas Elmqvist: "Dealing with Rejection"
• Robert Kosara: "Dealing with Paper Rejections"

Research Novelty

• Marco Tulio Ribeiro: Coming up with research ideas
• Marco Tulio Ribeiro: Organizing and evaluating research ideas

How to Review Papers

• Sauvik Das: A quick guide to reviewing papers quick
• 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.

Broadneing the Impact and Visibilty of Your Research

• Polo Chau: Should PhD Students Have Websites?
  • Yes, for multiple benefits. 1: craft professional brand. 2: enhance visibility. 3: facilitate sharing. 4: broaden audience.

Conferences

• Ten Tips for Newcomers at an Academic/Industry Conference
• 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 (URL currently not accessible)

Presenting Posters

• Jay Wang: Print Academic Posters on Foldable Fabric

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 and Research Group Handbooks

• Spencer Bryngelson
• Eric Gilbert
• Mor Naaman
• Jon Froehlich
• Collection of Lab Handbooks
• Graduating advising philosophy, David Darmofal

Getting Help

• Talk to your ombudsperson
• Ask the internet
• General advice

Academics Blogging about Academia

• Matt Might
• John Regehr

Other Grad School Advice Pages and Sites Like Ours

• Jason Hong, CMU: Grad School Advice
• The Tao of PhD (UW course)
• Awesome PhD Advice
• Awesome Tips from Jia-Bin Huang