Advice for New Graduate Students

It looks like it’s about time for school to start again. Inspired by Justine’s post, I’ve decided that it’s time for yet another set of unsolicited advice for new students. This is the start of my fifth (oh jeez) year as a graduate student, so I feel that I can share some things that I didn’t quite grok in the early part of my graduate career. I apologize if any of these pieces of advice are cliched or obvious. This is particularly geared toward students in the systems and networking sub-disciplines of computer science, since that’s what I know. YMMV.

I’ll start with the one that all first-year graduate students hear and most completely fail to act on: grades don’t matter as long as they’re good enough. By this I mean that, as long as you pass, your grade in a graduate-level course does not matter at all. Nobody will ever look at your grades in graduate coursework, for internships, jobs or otherwise.

This will be really hard for you to accept, because you have been in the business of performing well in classes your entire life. Resist the temptation to spend more time than absolutely necessary on coursework. Make every effort to make every course project you do relevant to your research or publishable in some way. Time spent on your research is time spent productively. Time spent on anything else is time you should be spending on research (or, heaven forbid, actually enjoying yourself outside of work).

Graduate school is an emotional rollercoaster. You will have really good weeks. Who’s-the-man, major-results-every-day, high-fives-all-around weeks. If you’re anything like me, you’ll also have weeks when you feel like you haven’t gotten anything done. This is completely normal. If it happens more than once or twice in a row, take some time to step back and reconsider what you’re doing or how you’re doing it.

Some of your papers will be rejected. Some of them will be rejected several times in a row. Some might never even see the light of day. This does not mean that you’re a failure as a graduate student or that your research is garbage. You probably aren’t and it’s probably not.

The thing that is hard to come to grips with coming out of college is that papers aren’t accepted or rejected based on some objective rubric. A great deal of the selection process is very unscientific. Program committees are comprised of people, and everyone has their own opinions and biases. You might just have caught a reviewer on a bad day.

Treat every failed submission as a learning experience. Act on the legitimate complaints, ignore the inscrutable, bizarre and mean-spirited ones, and move on. Most importantly, don’t let it reflect on your opinions of yourself or your work. It doesn’t do you or anybody else any good. The only thing you can do is consider any constructive criticism and produce the highest quality work you are capable of producing. As long as you keep doing that, you’ll do fine.

Don’t be afraid to discard an idea you’ve been working on for a while or a piece of code that took you a long time to write if it’s clear that you’re going in the wrong direction. At the same time, don’t be too quick to abandon an idea if it doesn’t work out immediately.

Write down everything you try. If you run an experiment for a paper, write down how you ran it, when you ran it, and what the results were. In general, take good notes. They will save you a ton of time down the road.

There will be times during your career as a graduate student when you’ll ask yourself, “Why, oh why didn’t I just take that job at Large Software Company X out of college, with its hefty salary and reasonable hours?” The answer, hopefully, is that you wanted to gain a depth of understanding in a portion of your field and advance the state of the art. Eventually, probably when you start to see a tangible endpoint, you’ll feel like you’ve done that. Hang in there.