Advice for graduate students

Not all students have access to guidance on navigating the unique world of academic research. Importantly, this uneven playing field hurts equity and diversity. To help address this problem, I am providing the following documents to share my perspective on academic research. These are my personal opinions and not the policy or views of my employer. All names of people have been changed to protect anonymity.

If you have ideas for other topics or dissemination mechanisms, e-mail me! I will continue developing these documents, so appreciate your feedback.

 

Navigating graduate student life

General advice

Expectations of graduate students in my research group

Meeting with your advisor

Establishing an online presence

Building and maintaining your CV

Collaboration

Building expertise

Attending a conference

Further resources

Writing

Productivity and process

• Being a productive writer

• The process of writing a paper

• Literature review

• Paper formatting advice

• Sharing papers and source code

Sections of your paper

• Title

• List of authors

• Abstract

• Introduction

• Materials and methods (with Mark Denavit, Erica Fischer, Matthew Eatherton)

• Conclusions

Peer review

• Overview of the peer-review process

• Choosing where to publish your work

• Reasons journals reject papers (and how to avoid them)

• How to review a paper

• Responding to paper review comments

• Latex template for paper review responses

• Getting published in Earthquake Spectra and beyond (video, with David Wald)

Presenting

Checklist for effective presentations (with Sabine Loos)

Developing and giving technical presentations (video)

General strategies for preparing presentations (video)

Creating effective graphics (video)

Presenting at a conference

For faculty

Don't wait for things to get easy

Promoting classroom discussion

Stand-up meeting format

Being a professor

Developing a winning mindset when applying for research funding (with Brendon Bradley)

About me

Why I am writing advice articles

An honest bio

How I Got Here: A Career Chat with Jack Baker (video)

What I like and don't like about being a professor

Negative proposal review comments

 

Acknowledgments: Thanks to Lukas Bodenmann, Corinne Bowers, Francisco Galvis, Erica Fischer, Anne Hulsey, Peter Lee, Dawn Lehman, Sabine Loos, Rodrigo Silva Lopez, Maryia Markhvida, Simona Meiler, Emily Mongold, Michael Scott, Neetesh Sharma, Danielle Vidal, Jimmy Zhang, Tinger Zhu, Oregon State University Civil and Construction Engineering's Write Club, and the rest of my research group for helpful suggestions and feedback on the above documents and this general project.

Thanks to Ashly Cabas, Gemma Cremen, Roberto Gentile, Yolanda Lin, Sabine Loos, Chukwuebuka Nweke, and Lisa Tobber for excellent insights and feedback on the faculty articles.