Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student - Manuel Blum (CMU)

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mblum/research/pdf/grad.html

by chromophore • 17 years ago

56 32 17 years ago

cs.cmu.edu

TriinT• 17 years ago

I used to love to read these essays on how to be a good and productive grad student... until I came to grad school. Same with phdcomics.

chromophore• 17 years ago

LOL "TriinT" I know what you mean. :)

I think I'll keep reading PHD comics, just because it's really funny. I don't relate it to grad-school as such. Just the whole exaggerated sense it is written in.

Maro2• 17 years ago

phdcomics is funny, but not if you're phd student =)

pierrefar• 17 years ago

They're still funny even years after I finished my PhD :)

jmtame2• 17 years ago

Advice to a beginning graduate student: do a start up instead ;)

Ardit202• 17 years ago

Why?

jmtame2• 17 years ago

why not?

andrewt• 17 years ago

This is something I thought about a lot. I'm currently a grad student at a great school and even though I sometimes get frustrated with classes, I've never regretted it. There is a lot more to grad school than just taking classes and doing research.

For me, the main attraction and benefit of being in grad school was being immersed in an environment filled with smart people wanting to "do more". My school's heavy emphasis on entrepreneurship has also energized me about creating a startup. The caveat is that one must find a way to attend grad school for free (which actually isn't hard at all).

anatoly• 17 years ago

There's a lot of filler in there, but one advice that I found interesting was to write right back what you're reading (I take it to refer to technical material and not exposition - e.g. proofs and definitions). Anyone has any experience with trying that?

(I've tried this with math books before, but it always felt too tedious to keep up. But I suspect I may have tried to hard, going for a nicely formatted shortened exposition of the entire material; I didn't try to simply jot proofs and formulas down as I was reading them).

physcab3• 17 years ago

Yeah this is something I do frequently. I discovered it while studying for my qualifying exam. When I first took the exam, I failed using the same study methods I used in undergrad. I realized the scope of information I had to know was much too broad to be able cram or understand through past homework problems. So as I went through my study materials I wrote down the material after reading in designated sections, keeping the summaries to just one page. Then during further review I used these pages of notes. The second time I took the exam I got 100%.

JimmyL• 17 years ago

When I would study for exams, I found the process of writing notes would be almost more useful than the process of reviewing them. The process of writing notes made me boil the concepts down into more discrete forms, and the physical action of writing helped with the memorization. A few days before an exam, I would often find myself re-reading my old notes and condensing them down into briefer notes, eliminating full explanations of concepts in favor of keywords or mental links to the full note sets.

The net result was that when I was in my exams, I would find myself mentally looking at my notes, and finding a formula or something would just be a matter of 'reading' them.

yters4• 17 years ago

When I went to grammar school in England, many of the other students seemed to do this.

gintas• 17 years ago

I used to write summaries for all study materials as I was reading. It helps get a better broad view, I think, and it also encourages writing down any related thoughts that come to your head.

I have found that it is best to summarize in a question-answer format, much like a FAQ. Having questions separated from the answers is useful later when revising and the questions are more open-ended than a straight summary.

There's a website that a friend and I set up to store exactly such question lists (with answers): http://www.problemata.com . It's rough, but already usable.

tigerthink• 17 years ago

Your question-answer format reminds me of Cornell Notes.

bowman• 17 years ago

"Scrolls must be read like the Torah from one end to the other." - Associating Islam with being outdated can be good for your demographic I guess.

chumsley• 17 years ago

Er... what? Are you perhaps confusing the Torah (Jewish scripture) with the Koran (Islamic scripture)?

simplegeek• 17 years ago

When I was a kid, my father (an EE guy) used to tell me the importance of writing while reading. I mostly ignored that in my career and now a very smart person(Manuel Blum) has validated it. I hope there aren't many things (as told by my father) that I would want other smart people to validate ;(

modelic3• 17 years ago

This is actually quite good advice. It's not overly preachy and it's not overly poetic.

yters4• 17 years ago

Did not realize this: "the median of n integers can be found with just O(n) comparisons."

Must figure this out!

sparky• 17 years ago

There are a couple linear-time selection algorithms, some randomized and some not. An example of the latter is described here ( http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/161/960130.html ). The constant factor is non-trivial here (<= 24n comparisons for this one) but for large datasets it will eventually be faster than sorting.

pkrumins• 17 years ago

I found this article extremely insightful and decided to prepare it for the print so that I could read it more carefully and add some notes on the margins.

While I was doing it, I realized how awfully true was the fact that science people _can't_ write.

No disrespect to Mr. Blum, but really, what is going on with the writing in this article? New line every several words, unconsistent emphasis, various writing styles, quick abbreviations in some places, but not in others, inconsistent division in paragraphs, several misspellings.

Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student - Manuel Blum (CMU)

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