Kit de camping

Survival Guide for new PhD Students

To properly launch my new blog, I am going to share some of my good addresses with you!

In the following, you will find a curated selection of resources that I used to read and that they have really helped me throughout my PhD. These resources are about various subjects (humor, methodology, books, etc.) and, therefore, they are not only specific to Computer Science and Computer Networking.

I hope that all this can be helpful to some new PhD students who are recently launching (or who are considering to launch) themselves into a PhD journey… I tried to regroup the different resources by categories.

Do not hesitate to drop a comment if you want to add any good resource that you would have added. After all, this list is really a personal selection.

Doing/completing a PhD Thesis

Nice blog run by Associate Professor Inger Mewburn, director of research training at the Australian National University. This blog is a veritable gold mine and you will be amazed how often you will find new blog posts. There is almost everytime something new to read!

The Thesis Whisperer has also a Twitter account for those who might want to follow it.

Another blog that deals with every kind of PhD-related aspect. In particular, I really liked the serie regarding interviews of PhD students, which explain how they work on a daily basis on their PhD thesis and how they plan their working days.

Bibliography and State of the Art

An excellent blog post from The Thesis Whisperer that goes through a spider-diagram methodology to correctly choose the right keywords when searching for bibliography. There is also a step-by-step example with Google Scholar, which remains one of the most used search engine by academics. Really interesting.

Another blog post about methodology. I am a big fan of the post title.

Conferences et paper submission

A wiki that lists a great number of conferences to come as well as the different deadlines associated to them. There is a possibility to search by keywords, fields, etc.

Ranking of some conferences and some online journals made by the Australian Research Council.

The latest version has been released in 2012. Then, they gave up the idea of ranking conferences. Nevertheless, it is still a valuable resource in order to figure out the difficulty in being accepted in some conferences.

Writting

You too, use the “Why and What for (Four)” method!

You cannot find the right formulation for starting to write a section, explaining some results or making a transition? You are in the right place!

Feel like writting shorter sentences and improving your writting skills in English? Copy and paste your text paragraphs and the online tool will suggest improvements that you could do! Well, just remember to check grammar at the end, you never know…

In the same spirit, you can also visit this website: http://writersdiet.com/?page_id=4

The website appearance is horrible but the content is not.
You can also check this page out, about the same topic:  http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/etc/writing-style.html

See also this blog post about Pomodoro techniques:  https://thesiswhisperer.com/2011/06/02/another-way-to-write-1000-words-a-day/

Useful Methods

To use in conjunction with Pomodoro techniques (see above “How to write faster?”).

Everything depends on the size of the journal article we are talking about but I think that it gives interesting advice anyway.

Procrastination

Do we still need to present this website?

Exemple de BD proposée par PhD Comics
© Jorge Cham

The French 9GAG dedicated to PhD. To be also found on Twitter and Facebook.

If your PhD defense is approaching, you can advertise it here. In bonus, the announcement of my own PhD defense can be found here.