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.

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.

2. Maintain an Electronic Bibliography:

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/

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.

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:

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.

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. 

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This is the first draft of this document, if you have any comments,
additions, or corrections, please feel free to mail me.

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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
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Comments from others at CoC

I would just add two things.
Remember that you are part of a community of people with common interests. That means treating them all with respect, but it also means remembering that they will be the people who will help you advance in your career. No one has ever done it alone. So:

1. Get out and meet people at every opportunity. Tell them about what you are doing if they ask but more importantly ask them about what they are doing.

2. Figure out a way to organize all those business cards you are going to accumulate. You need to be able to recall: who gave it to you, when, why, what you talked about. I would say scan and OCR them, but they will usually have something handwritten on them. Perhaps you just need to tape them chronologically in a journal with a note on each one.

Take advantage of the people you meet to advance your research interests and career. Most of them like to help people.

Paul J. Camp
Good stuff Idris!

> 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.
>

Incidentally, Bibtex has an "annote" field. I use it for the same thing you describe.

Also, I would suggest you don't worry about *organizing* your bibtex file. Even 300 papers isn't too rough to keep track of using search tools. Just dump them all into a file and start going.

(The nice thing about Bibtex is, of course, its integration with Latex. There is a good Emacs mode for it, too. But anyway, don't worry about the format at first....)

> 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.

The printed docs I don't care about, personally. I hear all the time from people who have boxes of papers but decide to print them out again instead of digging them up. I get almost everything from citeseer and ACM Digital Library nowadays. I might even drop ACM DL, since citeseer has all the papers on 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.

I agree. My foremost advice to new PhD folks would be to trust themselves and get to work on what you think is important. If you've made it to a Georgia Tech PhD program, and you're at all interested in your area(s), then you will intuitively know what kind of work will be interesting to your community, and you will know roughly what steps are needed to move forward with it.

Do NOT wait for your advisor to prod you. If you don't have an advisor, then do not wait to be approached. Don't treat the college like a big happy family. It's not. It's a research institute, and it has a lot of opportunity for those who are trying to become researchers.

Finally, one small thing I'd add to the list: be loose with your independent project classes. If you find you want to do something different than what you wrote up, then do it (after talking with the sponsor, of course). Losing time is much worse than having imperfect documentation.

-Lex Spoon

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