“I don’t know what I need to know next, but I want to get to that next stage”.
— Jacob Collier
To me, this quote by my favorite musician perfectly summarizes the key challenge in maturing as a researcher.
Over the last couple of years, I have been fortunate to pick many senior researchers’ brains on exactly this question. Entering the final year of my PhD and with several Master’s student supervision experiences, I now more and more often end up on the receiving end of that question.
If I were to write a longer piece on the lessons I’ve learned in the last couple of years, a key piece of advice that I would forward is: read more!
In that spirit, let me share a couple of resources that other’s have pointed me to in the past. At this time, about 95% of what I would have to say is in these posts already:
General Advice
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A great resource for incoming PhDs (perhaps even to make an informed decision about whether you want to pursue a PhD at all) is Andrej Karpathy’s blog post “A Survival Guide to a PhD”: https://lnkd.in/da9GUApQ
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Tom Silver recently extended his blog post reflecting on his PhD. He has many great pieces of advice, covering communication skills, technical skills, and ways to identify meaningful research topics: https://lnkd.in/dHhZBbdB
Reading
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A great “pep talk” for reading more is the post by Julian Togelius on “The differences between tinkering and research”: https://lnkd.in/dnuWhP5Q
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Andrew Ng’s Lecture 8: Career Advice / Reading Research Papers: https://lnkd.in/d3CrJn7z
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Eugene Vinitsky’s post on “Paper Games”: https://lnkd.in/dxknGWdR
Writing
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A classic is Marc Raibert’s post “Good Writing”. To me, this post is as much of a “pep talk” for getting into the “writing-zone” as it is a source of good technical advice on “how to write”: https://lnkd.in/dbYVc65b
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If you prefer videos over blog posts, Cyrill Stachniss’s talk on “How to Write Good Papers” is a great resource: https://lnkd.in/ejfFJ7Gk
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Not all advisors can spend vast amounts of time with all of their students — especially if they have other demanding roles in their institution. If you find yourself in that situation, you may enjoy reading Patrick Kidger’s advice on “How to handle a hands-off supervisor”: https://lnkd.in/dwsHdxes