美国教授关于如何读phD的忠告advice.doc

Always Prepare for the Worst. Some of the greatest catastrophes in graduate education could have been avoided by a little intelligent foresight. Be cynical. Assume that your proposed research might not work, and that one of your faculty advisers might become unsupportive - or even hostile. Plan for alternatives. Nobody cares about you. In fact, some professors care about you and some dont. Most probably do, but all are busy, which means in practice they cannot care about you because they dont have the time. You are on your own, and you had better get used to it. This has a lot of implications. Here are two important ones: 1. You had better decide early on that you are in charge of your program. The degree you get is yours to create. Your major professor can advise you and protect you to a certain extent from bureaucratic and financial demons, but he should not tell you what to do. That is up to you. If you need advice, ask for it: thats his job. 2. If you want to pick somebodys brains, youll have to go to him or her, because they wont be coming to you. You Must Know Why Your Work is Important. When you first arrive, read and think widely and exhaustively for a year. Assume that everything you read is bullshit until the author manages to convince you that it isnt. If you do not understand something, dont feel bad - its not your fault, its the authors. He didnt write clearly enough. If some authority figure tells you that you arent accomplishing anything because you arent taking courses and you arent gathering data, tell him what youre up to. If he persists, tell him to bug off, because you know what youre doing, dammit. This is a hard stage to get through because you will feel guilty about not getting going on your own research. You will continually be asking yourself, What am I doing here? Be patient. This stage is critical to your personal development and to maintaining the flow of new ideas into science. Here you decide what constitutes an important problem. You