Some suggestions for graduate students to be successful

This page provides some suggestions for graduate students to be successful.

Table of Contents

  • Writing

 

  • Crystalizing the ideas through the process of putting things together
  • Hone the paper to a razor-sharp, articulate, polished work
  • Write the paper as early as possible, sometimes before even starting the research work
  • Will discover the important things that you have not thought about
  • The process of writing results in a flood of ideas
  • Even if a paper is not accepted, the process is energizing and often lead to new ideas for the next research problems
  • Submitting the paper is often the start of a new line of work
  • Get Results First than Writing?
    • Conventional mode
      • Idea-> Do research -> Write paper
    • How to write a great research paper” by Simon Peyton Jones (PDF, PPT)
      • Idea -> Write paper -> Do research
        • Forces us to be clear, focused
        • Crystallizes what we don’t understand
        • Opens the way to dialogue with others: reality check, critique, and collaboration
    • My way
      • Idea -> Write paper -> Do research -> Revise paper -> Do research -> Revise paper -> …
  • Interesting Title
    • Cool titles attract people
    • Grab people’s attention
    • But don’t be provocative

 

  • Start Working Early!

Write, write, write…

Ask others for comments

 

  • Work Hard in the Summer

  • Tell A Good Story

Good ideas and convincing results

  • More high impact papers are about how to get things done right!
  • Math Equations
    • Minimal number of equations

No more, no less

Too many details simply make a paper inaccessible

Have you encountered the  following similar situation?

At (professional or casual personal) gatherings,  we do not remember at all who does what.

This article offers some tips for making a memorable self-intro.

 

  • Lessons

    • Several influential papers have been rejected once or twice

    • Some best papers make little impact

    • Never give up in the process

 

  • Quotes from Steve Jobs

      • “ I’m convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. ”
      • Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. ”

 

  • Other Quotes

      • Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.“– Albert Einstein.
      • Many things look difficult and mysterious at the first glance. But once we take the time to deconstruct them, the mystery is replaced by mastery!
      • Be so good, they can’t ignore you.” — Steve Martin
      • “Behave for the job you want, I always say!” — by Prof. Niklas Elmqvist
      • TBA

 

  • Time Management

Calendar. Not to-do lists. (Viewing time as space.) [by Professor Devi Parikh, Apr 25, 2018, PDF if not retrievable]

 

  • Tips for Paper/Poster Presentations

The most common size for posters is 48″x36″. But check out your conference for the specific poster size instructions when you prepare for your poster.

 

 

  • Watch those, I think most of you will realize that we are able to do anything very well if we really want

    • Golden Buzzer: Kodi Lee Wows You With A Historical Music Moment! – America’s Got Talent 2019  (YouTube, Published on May 28, 2019)

After watching this amazing performance, we have no right to complain about life. We can do anything if we want to do.

    • Mandy Harvey: Deaf Singer Earns Simon’s Golden Buzzer With Original Song — America’s Got Talent 2017 (YouTube, Published on Jun 6, 2017)

Deaf singer follows her dreams and earns a Golden Buzzer from Simon Cowell with her original song “Try.”

 

References and Further Reading List

Academic Research is defined by the father of the United States space program:  Werner von Braun

Basic research is what I am doing when I don’t know what I am doing?

Another definition of research :

Systematic investigation into a problem or situation, where the intention is to identify facts and/or opinions that will assist in solving the problem or dealing with the situation

The definition from the Cambridge English dictionary:

“Research: a detailed study of a subject, especially in order to discover (new) information or reach a (new) understanding”

Another realistic and practical adage for defining the research process for a PhD

“A PhD is about finding out more and more about less and less until one eventually knows everything about nothing (Anon.)”

Other definitions of academic research includes:

          • Making a rigorous and relevant contribution to knowledge.
          • Understanding of a cause and effect relationship of a given phenomenon or uncovering a new phenomenon
          • Organized inquiry to provide information for the solution to a problem (Emery&Cooper`91)
          • A careful and systematic investigation in some field of knowledge, undertaken to establish facts or principles (Kumar `96)
          • Scientific or scholarly inquiry or investigation and the proper communication of the findings (McCuen `96)

Useful Links:

    • The Power of Concentration by Theron Q. Dumont (Audio version freely available on LibriVox; note that you can download the .mp3 files — HERE you can download the Whole book (zip file) if its not retrievable on LibriVox website.)
    • TBA

My favorite books and online materials about writing and effective reading

This page provides some excerpts from some of my favorite books and some online materials about how to improve writing and write well — write concisely and clearly.

Writing is a game of language, meaning, and connection — it is a high level communication between a writer and his/her readers on paper or on computer screens.

Reading is a game of understanding, conversation, and questioning —  it is the conversation between you (the reader) and your writer.

Easy writing makes hard reading.

—Ernest Hemingway

Note: so hard writing makes easy reading.
I love smooth words, like gold-enameled fish
Which circle slowly with a silken swish.

—Elinor Wylie

 

=====Some excerpts from books about writing======

An excerpt from the book (the emphasis is mine, the same for all excerpts below), “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell.

Old version of the book can be found online: William Strunk, Jr., The Elements of Style.

The Elements of Style (Audio version freely available on LibriVox , now you can read by your ears by free of charge:). By the way, you can download the audio .mp3 files — — HERE you can download the Whole book (zip file) if its not retrievable on LibriVox website.)

 

“Writing is a craft you can learn,” says Roy Peter Clark. “You need tools, not rules.” 

An excerpt from the tool 21:

In “Why I write,” George Orwell explains that “good prose is like a window pane.
The best work calls the reader’s attention to the world being described, not to the writer’s flourishes.
When we peer out a window onto the horizon, we don’t notice the pane, yet the pane frames our vision just as the writer frames our view of the story.

An excerpt from tool 13 (Play with words):

“Just as a sculptor works with clay, a writer shapes a world with words.”

 

Review about the book: On Writing Well has been praised for its sound advice, its clarity and the warmth of its style. It is a book for everybody who wants to learn how to write or who needs to do some writing to get through the day, as almost everybody does in the age of e-mail and the Internet. (check more reviews about this book here.)

Some excerpts from the book:

  • A Writer’s Decisions (pp 261 – 262) on the edition I bought (30th anniversary edition):

‘This has been a book about decisions — the countless successive decisions that go into every act of writing. Some of the decisions are big (“What should I write about?”) and some are as small as the smallest word. But all of them are important.’

‘Learning how to organize a long article is just as important as learning how to write a clear and pleasing sentence. All your clear and pleasing sentences will fall apart if you don’t keep remembering that writing is linear and sequential, that logic is the glue that holds it together, that tension must be maintained from one sentence to the next and from one paragraph to the next and from one section to the next, and that narrative – good old-fashioned storytelling – is what should pull your readers along without their noticing the tug. The only thing they should notice is that you have made a sensible plan for your journey. Every step should seem inevitable.’

  • Clutter
    Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds — the writer is always slightly behind.

New varieties sprout overnight, and by noon they are part of American speech.
Consider what President Nixon’s aide John Dean accomplished in just one day of testimony on television during the Watergate hearings. The next day
everyone in America was saying “at this point in time” instead of “now.”

 Examine every word you put on paper. You’ll find a surprising number that don’t serve any purpose.

“It is raining”. There is no need to say, “At the present time we are experiencing precipitation.”
I laughed out loud when I saw this.

“Experiencing” is one of the worst clutterers. Even your dentist will ask if you are experiencing any pain. If he had his own kid in the chair he would say, “Does it hurt?” He would, in short, be himself.

  • Definition of a careful writer  (pp 302 – 303) on the edition I bought (30th anniversary edition):

My favorite definition of a careful writer comes from Joe DiMaggio, though he did not know that’s what he was defining. Dimaggio was the greatest player I ever saw, and nobody looked more relaxed. He covered vast distances in the outfield, moving in graceful strides, always arriving ahead of the ball, making the hardest catch look routine, and even when he was at bat, hitting the ball with tremendous power, he didn’t appear to be exerting himself. I marveled at how effortless he looked because what he did could only be achieved by great daily effort. A reporter once asked him how he managed to play so well so consistently, and he said:‘ I always thought that there was at least one person in the stands who had never seen me play, and I didn’t want to let him down.’’’

 

This is a very good book, very inspiring.

Praise for the book:

TOC

One of my favorite parts from the book (see the two pics below):

 

See below for some more excerpts from the book (the emphasis is mine):

“But, in fact, sentences promise more. They promise nothing less than lessons and practice in the organization of the world. That is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated. If you can write a sentence in which actors, actions, and objects are related to one another in time, space, mood, desires, fears, causes, and effects, and if your specification of those relationships is delineated with a precision that communicates itself to your intended reader, you can, by extrapolation and expansion, write anything: a paragraph, an argument, an essay, a treatise, a novel. ”

 

 

“In the digital age, short writing is king. We need more good short writing — the kind that makes us stop, read, and think.”

“Simplify, but not at the risk of clarity and comprehensibility.”

“Keep it short, but not so short that it creates ambiguity.”

“Understand your audience.” “A good writer is a good explainer. With knowledge of readers and their needs, the writer translates jargon, builds definitions based on what is already known, and leads an audience to greater clarity and new knowledge.”

 

“The essence of metaphor is understanding and experience one kind of thing in terms of another.”

This book is not categorized under writing guide, but believe it or not, our writing can be improved or at least it will have an impact on our writing after reading it. This book highlights so many issues in language. It is not like a style manual or how-to-write book, but what makes a difference is: in the context of metaphor(s), the subtle implications of a sentence and the inferences that readers might make from its construction.

Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are “metaphors we live by”—metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.

In this book, Lakoff and Johnson not only discussed how we use metaphorical language absentmindedly in our day-to-day living, but also delved into how we utilize metaphor to structure, conceptualize, and share our understanding of reality. It might not be obvious what exactly the difference is. The authors argue that metaphor is not just a matter of language, but also a process of internally organizing our understanding of the external world. The first half of the book makes the positive case that our perceptions of reality are built upon metaphors. The second half of the book makes the case that other philosophical views fail to adequately account for such conceptual structuring. In the end, the authors argue that an “experientialist” view of truth and meaning not only account for our metaphorical comprehension of reality, but also retain and unite the most compelling aspects of other schools of thoughts that fail to do so.

The first half of the book is a success. The authors provide many and thorough examples of how our understanding of reality is structured metaphorically and how these metaphorical concepts are organized into coherent systems. They provide an explanation of why some mixed metaphors work and why others appear absurd.

 

The first couple of chapters are pretty good.

 

The author says “it is good to write clearly, and anyone can.”

Most authors cut weak words when they find them, but some have organized their cutting strategies into useful categories, see below for 5 Principles of Concision from the book:

  1. Delete words that mean little or nothing [actually, certain, really, kind of]
  2. Delete words that repeat the meaning of other words [various and sundry]
  3. Delete words implied by other words [final outcome, each individual, terrible tragedy]
  4. Replace a phrase with a word [There is a need for voters to –> voters must, the thing to do before anything else –> first]
  5. Change negatives to affirmativesunless you want to emphasize the negative [not many –> few, not notice –> overlooknot include –> omit]

=====Some books about reading======

 

=====Some online materials about writing======

My notes: This is just for basic and fundamental writing skill improvement. For more advanced and subtle skills, we need to reference some books such as those I mentioned above, and practice the skills in our everyday writing (such as emails, tweets, Facebook messages, and blogs) and work related writing (such as course assignments, papers, reports, and proposals). With the time goes, we will improve our writing and (writer-reader) communication skills in our grant proposal and scientific article writing.

My notes: I saw Prof. McGranaghan’s this particular great post about proposal writing when I searched for assistant professor positions. I still remember it very well and clearly even though I read it about one year ago, and thought I would like to share it with you:)

It is about the use of ‘however’ and it is quite good. It also provides some guidance on commas and semicolons in the process.

=====Grant writing resources======

“Left-aligned text may not seem as crisp or neat as justified text due to the ragged right margin, but it provides a relaxed and inviting look. Most websites use left-aligned text and email is never justified. Unlike justified text, left alignment requires no adjusting of uneven spaces between words because imbalances in line spacing always occur at the end of the line (see “left aligned” example above). Also, the ragged right edge of left-aligned, single-column text can enhance legibility by helping the eye find the start of the next line after leaving the end of the previous line; the eye tends to get lost trying to find the beginning of a new line when both margins are flush. For that reason, left-aligned text may increase the ease and speed of reading. Ragged right margins also add variety and interest to text-heavy documents like grant applications.”

“The bottom line is that, while there is no “right” or “wrong” way to align text in a grant application, our recommendation is  that applicants use left-aligned text as a way to maximize the readability—and thus reviewer friendliness—of their proposal(s).”

  • a set of ‘rules’ to use in judging whether a proposal is ready to submit (and to be used by reviewers in judging them) .

    Thanks goes to my postdoc supervisor Prof. Alan MacEachren for sharing this with me.

    *** How Long Does It Take to Write a Grant?

     

    This is a long list and it is also why I think you need time to develop your proposal. So without further ado, I give you the list (mostly in order of how it should be done):

        • Read solicitation/guidelines
        • Alert your grant specialist to your intent to apply
        • Check out sponsor/program for priorities, funding history, strategic match
        • Identify and contact collaborators, including—if needed—external evaluators
        • Work with collaborators on roles within the project
        • Develop concept paper
        • Communicate with program officer regarding the concept paper
        • Draft abstract
        • Draft narrative/description
        • Draft evaluation plan
        • Draft budget
        • Draft budget justification
        • Draft project timeline
        • Draft facilities section
        • Draft current and pending support
        • Draft references
        • Request, draft, and collect letters of commitment
        • Collect bio sketches from collaborators
        • Do internal paperwork for proposal submission, including conflict of interest, IRB/IACUC, and financial disclosure information
        • Draft/revise your bio sketch
        • Develop figures and tables
        • Review and edit drafts based on solicitation review criteria
        • Identify colleagues to review drafts
        • Send drafts to colleagues for review
        • Review and edit drafts based on colleague feedback
        • Revise drafts based on feedback
        • Send revised drafts to colleagues and Office of Research editors
        • Edit and revise drafts based on reviews
        • Finalize proposal package, including placement of figures, pagination, special characters, fonts, margins, institutional information, and correctly naming files and placing them in correct format
        • Submit complete package to grant specialist

    • about proposal writing

     

    This stuff, especially the list of attributes in the “Elevator pitch 101” page (PDF), is very relevant to writing a good grant proposal.

     

  • TBA

 

=====Info related to scientific writing======

Kosslyn employs a points system, which is explicated on his lab website. Anyone who works with him on a project that results in a paper can earn up to 1000 points, based on the extent of their contribution to six different phases of the project: idea, design, implementation, conducting the experiment, data analysis, and writing. The first and last phases—idea and writing—get the most weight. Those who make a certain cutoff are granted authorship, and their score determines their order on the list. Those who earn less than 100 points are acknowledged in a footnote. “It’s very, very rare that there’s any sort of issue,” he says.

Stephen Kosslyn’s point system mentioned in the post (pdf).

  • TBA