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Being a PhD student: Experiences and Challenges
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These slides provide some guidance to the prospective PhD students. The content reflects my personal experiences together with useful feedbacks I received from my colleagues/friends.
Faegheh HasibiFollow
Assistant Professor in Information Retrieval (IR)Advertisement
Being a PhD student: Experiences and Challenges
- Being a PhD Student: Experiences and Challenges Faegheh Hasibi March 16, 2016
- PhD machine
- PhD machine
- You are the engine Take the responsibility and carry on
- Research process Read Experiment Publish Networking
- Time (#semester) Reading,confusion Start early … Do not waste time in early years Find your research topic M. Shokouhi. “Recipes for PhD”, http://www.slideshare.net/shokouhi1/recipes-for-phd
- Research topic • Find a common ground between you and your supervisor’s interest • Not too mature area • Not too immature area • Trendy area M. Shokouhi. “Recipes for PhD”, http://www.slideshare.net/shokouhi1/recipes-for-phd
- Reading
- Read high quality papers • Read papers from top venues in your field • Read papers of top researchers in your field • Follow the citations and read the related papers Write a summary for each paper M. Shokouhi. “Recipes for PhD”, http://www.slideshare.net/shokouhi1/recipes-for-phd
- Use a reference manager Only for writing in Latex/Word Reading, annotating, sharing, organizing
- Experimenting
- Experiments • Start with easy and incremental ones • Be accurate and avoid making careless mistakes • Create reliable and reproducible results
- Document Document Document Document Document • Keep a log of all results you get • Write neat and documented code Ben Hamner When you write code, keep in mind that you're collaborating with your future self.
- Back up • Use a version control tool • Bitbucket/ Github are your friends
- Publishing
- Publishing • Start publishing early • Target a conference • Now you have a deadline! • Plan ahead • Last minute papers are more likely to be rejected
- Writing style Take papers from the past years …, and “copy” • It is not about plagiarism • Quality papers are similar in their writing style, structure, terminology, methodology, … ✗ S. Lia-Jonassen. “Ten things I wish I knew before starting on a PhD”, http://s-j.github.io/ten-things-i-wish-i-knew-before-starting-on-a-phd/
- Be persistent and keep pushing! Paper acceptance factors Low acceptance rates ~20% 33% 33% 33% Novelty Presentation Luck S. Lia-Jonassen. “Ten things I wish I knew before starting on a PhD”, http://s-j.github.io/ten-things-i-wish-i-knew-before-starting-on-a-phd/
- Networking
- At your group • Join the coffee breaks • Talk about your research with your colleages
- At the conferences • Mingle with other PhD students (future colleagues) • Do not be shy • Help others to network and get helped! • Talk to professors
- Research visit • Choose the right time to go abroad • Early: Spending time on learning • Late: Focus on publishing
- Find a research group • Ask your supervisor • Meet at a conference • Apply for an internship • e.g., Microsoft, Google, …
- To make it productive… • Go with a clear plan • Keep in touch beforehand • Discuss about the plan/paper ideas
- Research process Read Experiment Publish Networking
- General advices
- Meetings • Have an agenda for the meeting • What you did since the last meeting • Questions you would like to discuss • Take note of all the next action items • Keep minutes of all the meetings
- Research-related activities • Become a reviewer • Mentor master students • If possible, do some teaching
- Keep an eye out! • Attend NTNU courses • https://innsida.ntnu.no/kurs • Attend summer schools • Learning, networking, fun • Find the news channel • Twitter, Mailing list, …
- Life “outside” PhD Being in the same group is more than being in the same mailing list! Photos by Jan R. Benetka
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