Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student

Make a list for yourself of good ways to pursue a problem.
My own favorite is to try small examples. By comparison,
DAVID GRIES's favorite is to put himself in the middle
of a (presumed) solution. An example is his coffee can problem:
Given a can of black and white coffee beans, do the following: Pull out two beans: if both are the same color, replace them with a white bean. If the two are different, replace them with a black bean. What color is the last bean?

 

Brains are muscles.
They grow strong with exercise.
And even if they're strong, they grow weak without it.

 

Don't expect your thesis advisor to give you a problem that he or she can answer. Of course, she might.
* She might give you a problem to which she already knows an answer.
* She might give you a problem that she thinks is answerable,
but that she hasn't actually answered.
* She might give you a problem that is deadly hard.
* If the problem she gives you is hard enough,
I suggest you look for a NONSTANDARD answer.
More on this later after I get done cooking the thesis advisor.

 

Whatever you do, you got to like doing it....
You got to like it so much that you're willing to think about it, work on it, long after everyone else has moved on.

 

A PhD knows more and more about less and less
until he knows everything about nothing.

 

When working on a PhD, you must focus on a topic so narrow that you can understand it completely.

 

When working on proving some statement S true,
you should spend at least some time trying to prove it false.
Even if it's true, trying to prove it false can give insight.
And in any case, too often, our intuition is dead wrong.

 

The point is that the answer may not lie where you expect it.

 

[url]http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mblum/research/pdf/grad.html[/url]

 

看完那文章，觉得很搞笑的是

A PhD knows more and more about less and less
until he knows everything about nothing.

可是想想也没错。

很多人都说要弄清楚自己是不是做研究的人，再去申请读博。

我现在不是很清楚自己是不是适合的，我知道自己是希望能懂得很多甚至什么都懂的那种人。

研究一小块领域而成为专家，是我想要的吗？

很多时候也说不清楚到底什么是自己想要什么是不适合自己的。所以需要去经历，再告诉自己。

Whatever you do, you got to like doing it....