Fiebelman - A PhD is Not Enough

Tags: books, grad school

• Always a place a theme to your work
• Postdoctoral advisors do not necessarily have your best interests in mind
• Aggressively try to find a mentor
  • Most professors take a darwinian approach because it is less work and they are not at fault
  • Make sure the mentor teaches survival skills
• Postdocs are cheap labor
  • Important notes:
    • Thesis presentation
    • Not overtly long PhD time
• If fields are being changed, start reading before the postdoc position starts
• Clocks start ticking the moment you leave grad school!
• Finish something as a postdoc. Do not take on long projects with future payoff, focus on projects that can be quickly accomplished.
• Postdoc should give you 3-4 staff members with good letters of recommendation.
• Write compelling papers via:
  • The structure of a news article is a good model to follow in preparing a scientific publication. Newspaper readers, like your research colleagues, rarely have much time for acquiring new information. This is just the reason that news articles present a story several times, in increasing levels of detail. Their headlines, equivalent to the titles of your scientific papers, are there to draw readers in by providing a succinct description of what is noteworthy.
  • Missing links in logic and wishy-washy arguments require more work
• Professorships
  • Aim to teach less in the first few years to setup a lab
• Dilittantes are not looked upon favorably
• Do not waste time grant writing as a postdoc, this skill will be learned later on
• Become problem oriented instead of technique oriented

Notes Nov 13th, 2022

• Re-evaulating some of this stuff, how much of this world do I want to actually be involved in?