The PhD Grind读后感

今天把The PhD Grind这本书读完了。总体来说写的很流畅，可以纯当小说来读，对我而言吸引程度甚至大于娱乐活动。这本书分年份讲述了作者在读博士期间的经历，非常适合计算机科学的博士新生阅读。相信大家会仁者见仁智者见智。我仅列出一些我自己觉得有趣的片段：

"Many of my college friends who interned at first-rate companies such as Microsoft and Google loved their experiences and signed on to work at those companies full-time after graduation"

"I found a master's thesis advisor and, like many ambitious kid, began proposing my own half-baked quasi-research project ideas to him. My advisor patiently humored me but ultimately persuaded me to work on more mainstream kinds of research that fit both his academic interests and, more importantly, the conditions of his grant funding."

"I acknowledged that it was only a fuzzy dream with no grounding in formal research methodologies that the academic community would deem acceptable."

"I was afraid that they would inevitably ask me what I was working on, and I didn't have a respectable answer to give."

"The wiser course of action during those weeks would have been to talk to Dawson more frequently, and to actively seek out collaborations with other professors or senior students."

"Be proactive in talking with professors to find research topics that are mutually interesting, and no matter what, don't just hole up in isolation."

"Thus, it's crucial to think about experiment design at project inception time."

"The underlying cause of our publication troubles was that we were not 'insiders' in the empirical software measurement subfield to which our project belonged."

"In the cutthroat world of academic publishing, simply being passionate about a topic is nowhere near sufficient for success; one must be well-versed in the preferences of senior colleagues in a particular subfield who are serving as paper reviewers."

"Cristi was in his final year of Ph.D. and didn't need to publish any more papers to graduate, and Dawson already had tenure, so he wasn't in a rush to publish either."

"It was now the middle of my third year, and many of my fellow students and I fell into a state of 'limbo' where it became difficult to motivate ourselves to consistently come into the office every single day."

"(In MSR), researchers get students to assist with manual labor, and students get the chance to publish top-tier papers with famous researchers outside of their universities and possibly get letters of recommendation for future jobs."

"Tom defined the high-level scope of my internship project and set a realistic yet ambitious goal of submitting a paper to a top-tier conference at the end of the summer." -- It is possible to submit a paper within three months, J. V. King added

"Since Tom had published and reviewed dozens of empirical software measurement papers, he was definitely an 'insider' who knew what sorts of results and write-ups were well-liked by reviewers in that subfield."

"I discovered that this strategy of finding and setting short-term deadlines for myself would work wonders in keeping me focused throughout the rest of my PhD years."

"I programmed day and night, often dreaming in my sleep about the intricate details that my code had to wrestle with."

"Google Tech Talks" -- what is that, I certainly need to know this, J. V. King added

"Professors in my department usually discourage late-stage PhD students from doing internships, since they want students to focus on finishing their dissertations."

"Back when he was a PhD students, Jeff published 19 papers mostly in top-tier conferences, which is five to ten times more than typical computer science PhD students. That's the sort of intensity required to get a faculty job at a top-tier university like Stanford."

"what often makes the difference between an accept and a reject decision is how well a paper's 'marketing pitch' appeals to reviewers' tastes." -- sounds quite reasonable, like the project I did in MSRA, added by J. V. King