Grad philosophy according to Gerald Pearson^*

^*Transistor pioneer and inventor of the silicon solar cell.

• Your first goal is to make yourself absolutely indispensible

  • Get going in lab (shadow senior students, ask lots of questions)

  • Help improve the group (build a new test setup, automate something unpleasant, build a Wiki)

  • Take over tasks (e.g. purchasing, PL duties, etc.)

• Your second goal is to do great work, write papers, and give conference talks

• Your third goal is to make yourself completely dispensable

  • "Train the next generation of students — otherwise your advisor can’t afford to let you go."

Richard Hamming - You and Your Research

At a seminar in the Bell Communications Research Colloquia Series, Dr. Richard W. Hamming, a Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California and a retired Bell Labs scientist, gave a very interesting and stimulating talk, 'You and Your Research' to an overflow audience of some 200 Bellcore staff members and visitors at the Morris Research and Engineering Center on March 7, 1986. This talk centered on Hamming's observations and research on the question ``Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run? From his more than forty years of experience, thirty of which were at Bell Laboratories, he has made a number of direct observations, asked very pointed questions of scientists about what, how, and why they did things, studied the lives of great scientists and great contributions, and has done introspection and studied theories of creativity. The talk is about what he has learned in terms of the properties of the individual scientists, their abilities, traits, working habits, attitudes, and philosophy.

David P. Stern - All I Really Need to Know...

This 1993 article in Physics Today gives a NASA physicist's view of what a researcher needs to know to succeed:

Open

George Whitesides - How to Write a Paper

This paper discusses how to write a peer-reviewed journal paper. Many of the same ideas apply to writing abstracts (these are just written at a higher level of abstraction, i.e. with fewer details). Whitesides is a really famous chemist and knows a thing or two about writing good papers.

English Communication For Scientists

English Communication For Scientists, illustrated by the PhD Comics guy.