Career Resources

• The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey. (Amazon) Most PhD students need some help with managing their time, and this only gets harder as you go along. This is the leading book on time-management. It gives guidance on juggling competing demands on your time, setting (and keeping!) priorities, and the psychological dimension of time management. I've had a number of students who found this book invaluable.
• Tim Sheard's OGI course CSE569 on scholarship skills.
• "Efficient Reading of Papers in Science and Technology", a brochure by Michael J. Hanson updated and re-typeset by Dylan McNamee (also from OGI). This is a very handy 1-pager.
• A list of resources on How to Read a Scientific Paper.
• David Patterson's advice on How to Have a Bad Career in Science or Academia.
• A collection of Advice on Research and Writing. This hasn't been updated recently, so there are some bad links in here, as well as some gems.
• A minicourse on technical writing, from Donald Knuth.
• How to be a Good Graduate Student (from the Indiana University CS Department)
• Survival in the Academy, a guide for graduate students from Indiana.
• How to Become a Prolific Scholar. Not everything in here is applicable to our community, but lots of good ideas. From the Tomorrow's Professor mailing list.
• Ian Parberry's Guide for New Referees in Theoretical Computer Science.
• Alan Jay Smith's The Task of the Referee.
• PhDs - The Transition from Graduate Student to Assistant Professor from the career center at Berkeley. They also have pages with advice on how to get a job.
• And for when you get a job, The Assistant Professor's Guide to the Galaxy, a classic essay on how to survive and succeed in academia.
• Tomorrow's Professor mailing list, a great newsletter covering many of the thorny issues of being an academic.
• Writing a good grant proposal, by Simon Peyton Jones and Alan Bundy.
• How to give a good research talk, by Simon Peyton Jones, John Launchbury, and John Hughes. Issues in Giving a Talk and Writing a Report, by Olivier Danvy
• Norman Ramsey has a nice collection of resources somewhat similar to this one (including some links to other collections, of course!).
• So Long, and Thanks for the PhD!, by Ron Azuma.
• Notes on time management, by Randy Pausch (PPT (10 MB))
• An interesting list of the Big Ideas in Computer Science