Advice for graduate students

Not all students have access to guidance on navigating the unique world of academic research. 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 — see also Communication by Design, Ch. 5

Establishing an online presence — see also Communication by Design, Ch. 5

Building and maintaining your CV — see also Communication by Design, Ch. 5

Collaboration

Building expertise

Picking conferences to attend

Attending a conference — see also Communication by Design, Ch. 5

Requesting letters of recommendation

Further resources

Writing

Productivity and process

• Being a productive writer — see also Communication by Design, Ch. 6

• The process of writing a paper — see also Communication by Design, Ch. 3

• Three reader-centric academic writing principles — see also Communication by Design, Ch. 1

• Literature review — see also Communication by Design, Ch. 6

• Paper formatting advice — see also Communication by Design, Ch. 3

Sections of your paper

• Title

• List of authors

• Abstract

• Introduction

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

• Conclusions

These topics are covered with a step-by-step design process and worked examples in Communication by Design, Ch. 3.

Peer review

• Overview of the peer-review process

• Choosing where to publish your work

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

• Five challenging peer-review situations, and what to do about 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)

For a comprehensive treatment of peer review—including response templates and strategies for difficult situations—see Communication by Design, Ch. 4.

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 a detailed guide to designing presentations and graphics, including assertion-evidence slide design, see Communication by Design, Ch. 2.

Open science and ethical publishing

Increase your impact by sharing papers and source code

The corrupting effects of academic citation metrics

What an academic misconduct accusation taught me about sharing research (in Nature Career Column)

Sharing data and code facilitates reproducible and impactful research (Earthquake Spectra opinion)

For faculty

Don't wait for things to get easy

Promoting classroom discussion

Stand-up meeting format

Group technical meeting format

Being a professor

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

Teaching and proposals are also covered in Communication by Design, Ch. 5.

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

My 20 published mistakes (and counting)

 

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.