Once you’ve got your committee sorted, it’s time to get to work. You’ll need to write up a document and then present it to your committee. But, you already know that. Really, the first step is to discuss your plans with your committee. I’m going to assume you’ve done that already because I’m probably not […]
Author: sauvik
Lessons Learned From Proposing My Thesis: Committee Selection
I proposed my thesis in March of 2016. So, I am now ABD (“all-but-dissertation”) and it’s awesome — I genuinely have no work responsibility apart from Research. Still, it was nerve-racking getting to this point. I remember clearly being on the other side of the proposal and thinking of it as a wildling thinks of […]
5 Ph.D. Survival Tips
I recently had to give a short presentation on “survival tips” as a Ph.D. student [1]. I thought I’d summarize that presentation in written form, too. Now, there’s a lot of material out there on how to succeed as an academic and as a professional. This post is going to be a rehashing of those […]
How To Conference, Pt. 1: Networking
Conferences can be fun and exciting. You get to travel, meet new people from all around the world, reconnect with old friends, and learn about bleeding-edge work. If you are a student, you even get to do all of this for free [1]. But, conferences can also be nerve-racking — for newcomers and veterans alike. […]
The Day You Became An Academic Writer
I went from being a good writer to being an academic writer after five years of grad school. I couldn’t believe how convoluted it was. I’ll tell you the main tricks here so you don’t have to waste half of your life in academia. Academic writing is about self-aggrandizing and duplicity. The main technique is […]
Live Success Spiral Walkthrough Conclusion & Recap
[1] A success spiral is an immediately usable, powerful tool that can help you overcome inertia and make effortless progress towards living your ideals (e.g., exercising regularly, playing an instrument). The concept is simple: start small — so small, in fact, that it is effectively impossible to fail — and gradually build on your initial […]
Academia or Industry? A Societally Significant Choice
This is the final installment of a four-part series of posts I’m writing to crystallize my own thoughts on “The Question”: Academia or Industry? The question is framed dichotomously, but what it really is getting at is something deeper: You’ve deferred being an adult for a while now, but what do you want to do […]
Academia or Industry? A Professionally Profound Choice
This is the third in a series of posts to unwrap my thoughts on this oft-asked, simple, but notoriously difficult question. The question is framed dichotomously, but what it really is getting at is something deeper: You’ve deferred being an adult for a while now, but what do you want to do with your life? […]
Academia or Industry? The “Dichotomy”
So, academia or industry? In a previous post, I explained what that meant and unwrapped all of the hidden options [1]. I feel as though that post was incomplete, though. It was impersonal: just a summary of the choices and how those choices differed along a few dimensions: amenability to Research, pay, intellectual freedom, work/life […]
Live Success Spiral Walkthrough: Update 1
Right now, I am keeping track of some of my success spirals publicly on this spreadsheet. You can read more some details about why I’m doing this in a previous post, but the basic point is to do a live walkthrough of using success spirals to fight off procrastination and actually accomplish things. My plan […]