General advice & self-care

Putting yourself in position to succeed, handling stress, coping with disappointments, all these are foundational to the rest of what you do.  

• Please read this. Shape, meaning, fulfillment, advice. 

• Follow your passions, choose a lab wisely, and improve your writing: This is solid advice. 

• More on choosing a mentor, who should be both a good scientist and a good mentor.  

• Ten Simple Rules for Graduate Students. 

• The Table of Contents here reads like a list of great advice tips. 

  • • Care and maintenance of your supervisor

    • Write and show as you go: This is show and tell not hide and seek

    • Be realistic: It's not a Nobel Prize

    • Say no to distractions: Even the fun ones and the ones you think you must do

    • It's a job: That means working nine to five but you get holidays

    • Get help: You are not an owner-operator single person business

    • You can do it: A PhD is 90% persistence and 10% intelligence

• A wide-ranging essay with much useful advice for getting the most out of graduate school. 

• Doing research means feeling stupid and learning from failure. 

• Advice from grad students, to grad students. 

• Written in a tough-love style, this classic essay still has much wisdom but if after reading it you need an antidote that covers the same territory here it is.  

• Mental health challenges in graduate school are common, and sorely overlooked, but communicating your work broadly is one thing that can help. 

• We all could do a lot worse than following the six rules set forth in the Kaspari manifesto: 

1. Change the world;

2. Always be finishing something;

3. Quality = style*content;

4. Teaching=writing;

5. Become *the* authority on something;

6. Work is play.