Advice for Early PhD Students

Preamble

Andrew McCallum’s lab at UMass (IESL) has a tradition: after receiving a handful of niceties from their labmates and colleagues, graduating PhD students return the favor by reciting a few pieces of advice. This serves a dual purpose, giving the newly minted PhD a chance to reflect on the path that got them to the defense and, hopefully, sharing wisdom that will increase the next generation’s chance of success even by a small margin. Here’s what I said¹, heavily paraphrased and organized by topic:

On Strategy (Part 1)

Embrace Brevity It is frequently said that “The PhD is a marathon, not a sprint.” Well, try running a marathon at Kelvin Kiptum’s pace² and you may think differently… There is no time to rest! I have a different take: “The PhD is a series of short-distance runs, so make sure to get rest and recovery in between!” I believe this framing is not only more accurate but more useful for life after PhD. Finishing the PhD is not the end; it is only the beginning of the next adventure.

Pursue Positivity When reading research papers, be scrutinous but also extremely optimistic. It’s often harder and requires more creativity to find good takeaways than criticisms. More generally, you will probably benefit more when you approach each opportunity with the goal of “How can I find something good here?”

Cliches

The next few points are often mentioned by previous PhDs in some form. They’re still worth mentioning, although by now I hope they seem obvious!

Maintain a Foundation (said with a harsher tone) Make it your responsibility to build a strong foundation and keep up with the field. There are many tips & tricks to do this: read lots of papers, read abstracts every day, follow researchers on social media. This is a field of change, growth, complexity, and entropy.

Refine Soft Skills Develop your soft skills. Be a good communicator. Be generous with your judgment, since you won’t know when someone has a good and private reason for being slow on email. For decision-making, internalize how your choices influence your long-term goals, and try to avoid “going with the flow”.

Actively Engage Participate in the community. Go to conferences and workshops. Email random researchers to praise their work or ask questions. Help and support other people, no matter at what stage of your career.

On Strategy (Part 2)

Solicit Feedback The PhD is structured in a way so that at all stages you have many chances to get detailed feedback on your progress and ideas from experts. This is one the most special parts of the program, and it’s definitely something to take advantage of. To get more valuable feedback, you will eventually need to present your work in a more opinionated way. With that in mind, it’s still important to refrain from being overly stubborn. Being a good listener and staying open to feedback will pay dividends.

Prioritize Problems As much as possible, get more excited about “problems” rather than “methods”.

Support Network

Resist Isolation Do not put your life on pause just because you are a PhD. As the saying goes, “The typical PhD takes 5-7 years to complete, but if you really focus, ignore your friends and family, work late into the night, and dedicate your whole self to your work then it only takes 10+ years!” [I can’t remember where I first heard this. Please send me the source if this sounds familiar!]

Leverage Your Environment (Inspired by similar comments from Rajarshi Das) UMass is truly world-class. Plus Andrew and Mohit are exceptional advisors! The university has an abundance of resources and a diversity of departments and specializations, especially within computer science. There are a vast amount of special opportunies that are hard to find almost everywhere else, such as collaborating with the brilliant Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval. I would encourage you to lean on your network. As an example, I’m always a slack, or email, or twitter message away.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to members at IESL and UMass NLP for providing valuable feedback and discussing different pieces of advice, and Wenlong and Rajarshi for their comments on the writing and format.

Dedication

This writeup is dedicated to Baba Roza. She was a teacher and knew what was important in life. Everything you did was “unbelievable”.

Footnotes