Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student (2001) (cs.cmu.edu)

42 points by nicoraga 3 hours ago

cidd an hour ago

Many software engineers in the bay area from abroad pursued Master's or Ph.D. degrees in the US to qualify for the additional 20,000 cap-exempt H-1B visa slots.

john_strinlai 2 hours ago

>Consider writing what you read as you read it.

i would add a clarification for today's students: by hand.

typing doesn't appear to have the same power, at least for myself and my students that ive talked to about it.

jamesforestwest 2 hours ago

I don't know, it really depends on the person. Writing things out by hand doesn't help me, and I don't see any difference at all between handwriting and typing

sssilver 2 hours ago

I'm not saying this is what's happening to you, but in my case this is exactly what I believed for many years.

And then it turned out that typing-vs-hand-writing benefits being equal was in fact due to how atrophied my hand-writing skills were.

I've learned that once I got back into fluent hand-writing in a flow-state, the benefits for learning, memorizing, and understanding, were so overwhelmingly superior to keyboard-typing, that I resented the cognitive handicap I had placed upon myself for literal decades.

Now I always carry a tiny spiraled notebook and a Rotring pen. They're as indispensable and practically useful to me as my smartphone.

ChickeNES 2 hours ago

nine_k an hour ago

Writing by hand is harder and slower. This gives you time to ponder, understand the important point better, try to formulate it shorter and thus search for and extract the key points. IOW, it forces you to study what you write, not just register.

dang 3 hours ago

Related. Others?

Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7997158 - July 2014 (15 comments)

Manuel Blum: Advice to a beginning graduate student - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2037676 - Dec 2010 (16 comments)

Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student - Manuel Blum (CMU) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=832729 - Sept 2009 (32 comments)

qubex 2 hours ago

I remember reading this as an undergraduate student already enrolled in LSE. My God how the times have changed.

ktallett 3 hours ago

The key is to make the most of the opportunity and don't take poor treatment as the norm. It is always unacceptable. Plus at some point you will potentially be the world's most knowledgeable person on your very niche area, appreciate that and run with it.

BugsJustFindMe 2 hours ago

My advice to a prospective graduate student is that if you can do literally anything else with your life, do that instead. The cost of going through graduate school is only worthwhile if you really need to be there to be happy in your life. Too many people wind up there for not great reasons, and it hurts them both emotionally and financially compared to having done something else.

remywang an hour ago

This can be good advice if worded a different way: only go to grad school if you really love doing research. If you love research, then the right graduate program is the best place for that. Getting a PhD was the hardest thing I’ve ever done but I don’t regret a single day of it.

nolamark 36 minutes ago

I agree, but...

The challenge is how do you really know if you love doing research, committing to graduate school, before really doing research? It is hard to know how the sausage is made without spending/doing time at a meat-processing plant. My undergraduate experience doing research, including be published, was much different than the graduate experience. And graduate experience was much different than the assistant professor experience.

It took me two trips to grad school to get a PhD. The first on their terms, I burned out. The second, on my terms, was a much better/different experience.

linguae 18 minutes ago

dieselgate 41 minutes ago

I understand your argument for people who pursue research degrees but there are plenty of non-research professional programs that people should be encouraged to pursue if relevant for their goals. E.g. masters in teaching

senderista 42 minutes ago

Were you the guy in the PL lab that was playing Nightwish?