Academic Time Management

As usual, there is a great advice on the subject from Terence Tao. See also a paper in the Science Careers. The comments with further suggestions and links are welcome!

Another useful tip from the Lifelong Scholar’s blog: whenever you take a break, make you sure you have a specific task to do when you get back to work.

Update: there are many more resources on the academic productivity. To list a few,

• AcademicProductivity.com
• Getting Things Done in Academia
• Academic Lifehacker
• Study Hacks

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How to Write a Letter of Recommendation

Some advice on the subject can be found in the article by Richard Reis and in the book by Steven G. Krantz (the second link is from the discussion of the Secret Blogging Seminar’s post on the subject). As for the letters of recommendation for students, see also here, here and here.

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Advice for the (Would-Be) Graduate Students

A great collection of advice and links on the subject is here. For the (prospective) graduate students in mathematics, Terence Tao provides excellent advice here, and there is a whole new blog on the subject. As for the physics students, go here and here. See also my earlier posts, especially here and here. Some interesting material can be also found here and here.

Update (via ZapperZ blog): More advice from the Science Careers: here, here, and here.

Update 2: excellent advice for the graduate students in math is available at the Secret Blogging Seminar, here and here.

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How to Succeed in Science

I have recently come across two papers on the subject (addressed primarily to the biomedical scientists but mostly of general interest too) by Jonathan Yewdell in Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology: here and here.

As usual (cf. e.g. this discussion), this advice should be taken cum grano salis.

More related advice can be found in the other posts on this blog.  I especially recommend the talk You and Your Research by Richard Hamming, and the advice from Terence Tao,  James D. Watson,  and Steven Weinberg. See also advice from E. W. Dijkstra and J.H. Conway

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What They Don’t Teach You in Graduate School

This is a series of four articles at Inside Higher Ed by David E. Drew and Paul Gray:

Part I Part II Part III Part IV

These authors have also recently published a book on the subject but I haven’t got it yet.

However, I’ve just found a presentation which appears to be a nice summary of the book (important note: the link in this paragraph works even though Snapshots says it doesn’t!).

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Career Advice from the Nobel Prize Winners

S. Weinberg:  Scientist: Four golden lessons

R.P. Feynman:  A Letter to a Former Student

(more advice from R.P.F. can be found in the book Feynman’s Rainbow by Leonard Mlodinow)  

J.D. Watson:  Succeeding in Science: Some Rules of Thumb

(see also his book Avoid Boring People)

A. Ciechanover:  Nuggets of Career Advice

The above materials make for an interesting comparison with the advice from the Fields medal winner Terence Tao.

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How to Do Great Science: You and Your Research by Richard Hamming

Richard Hamming in his famous talk You and Your Research offers superb advice on how to do great science.

Update (via Stephen Kinsella):  This talk was also recently published here, so now one has an official reference to cite.

Update 2 (via the Unruled Notebook): the videos of a more recent version of this talk given by Hamming himself in the 90s are available here.

Further advice can be found in the other posts on this blog, e.g. here and here. Also, there are two recent  followup papers (On the Process of Becoming a Great Scientist and Ten Simple Rules for Doing Your Best Research, According to Hamming) that could be of  some interest.

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Gian-Carlo Rota: career advice and more

Gian-Carlo Rota:

1) Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught

2) 10 Lessons of an MIT Education

3) Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Learned Before I Started

Teaching Differential Equations

For more information about Gian-Carlo Rota see e.g.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070630211718/http://www.rota.org/

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