Tag: academia

This is the best decade to be a grad student

Catching up on the literature is a daunting aspect of graduate studies. As a physical oceanographer, I regularly cite work from 30 to 40 years ago. In that time, and all the way back to the turn of the 20th century, the scientists before me got to answer all the low-hanging-fruit problems and write the papers that will be cited thousands of time. They leave behind the messy, complex, and esoteric questions for the current grad students. Surely, then, I would think the 60s or 70s or even earlier would have been the best time to be a grad student?

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Article titles are more important than your name

A webpage or CV with a list of publications serves two purposes. A useful one: to help readers discover papers related to one that interested them. And a less altruistic one: to say ‘Hey, look at how many publications I have’. These days, the latter is somewhat necessary, but shouldn’t overshadow the former. Furthermore, discovering related papers should be an easy task, but too often isn’t.

Too many publication lists that I come across these days obscure the title—surely the most important part of the citation—by bracketing it with the authors’ names and journal details. While this form is necessary for a reference list in a paper, it makes no sense in a CV or personal webpage.

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Invest in a good text editor

Scientists should invest time in a good text editor: pay the upfront cost of learning to use and customising a single editor for all of your text needs. This may be obvious to programmers, but less so to scientists who may have yet to recognise the benefits of a good editor.

Much scientific analysis and documentation can be achieved with plain text files (e.g., .py, .m, .f, .r, .tex, or .md). The default method to work with multiple file types is to use multiple IDEs (Integrated Development Environments): Matlab for m-files, Spyder or IPython notebooks for python scripts, TexStudio or TeXnicCenter for latex files, RStudio for R, or one of the countless editors for Markdown currently available.

Using a single editor has many benefits over using a range of editors within each IDE:

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Scientific posters needn’t look like scientific posters

To allude to a StackExchange thread, The problem with scientific posters is that they look like scientific posters. Defining characteristics include a lack of whitespace, unattractive borders, poor colour use, and poor fonts use. Using a recent scientific poster of my own as a example, I explain how to create a clean, elegant poster with minimal artistic talent.

hughes_poster_ds
Link to original PDF

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To make a good schematic, copy, adapt, and refine

Scientific papers are built by taking existing ideas, applying them in new ways, adapting them to fit new situations, and improving them over time. Yet when it comes to drawing a schematic, many people start from scratch or never even start. Instead, start with an image search, let Inkscape do the hard work, and refine the best parts of other schematics.

I will use a figure of mine as a case study:

channel_schematic
This schematic encapsulates the oceanographic processes that I examine in my PhD. I use it in many presentations, my thesis, and my personal website.

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Put three photos on your title slide

Placing text over a full-size photo is a standard way to create a title slide. But by being everyone’s go-to method, it’s forgettable. Instead, use a photographic triptych: three tall photos spanning the slide.

Here’s a real-life example, the title slide from my most recent presentation:

cmos_title_slide
Open Source Sans, a free font, is used in three different weights: semi-bold, light, and normal

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