the alm golden rules of grad school
October 18th, 2006 by Lawrence David
insanely busy – haven’t been sleeping much in weeks.
nevertheless, not so busy that i can’t transcribe the pearls of wisdom my adviser eric bestowed upon me a couple of hours ago.
1)Â never do anything (even under direct orders from your PI) that will not eventually become a figure in a foreseeable paper.
2)Â he can’t remember this one.
3)Â you have full license to shirk any responsibilities assigned to you, as long as you’re making respectable progress towards your thesis.
I think the tricky bit about #1 and #3 is that it’s often not clear whether what you’re working on will work out sufficiently well to actually be able to be used in a paper, or towards your thesis. If the connections were that clear, grad school would be much simpler
Maybe the point is more that you should concentrate on stuff that at least has the potential to fall into those buckets …
agreed – perhaps rule #2 concerns how tricky #1 and #3 are. and, perhaps a rule #2a exists, which states that once you graduate from grad school, you completely forget about rule #2.