...How to Be a Successful PhD Student (in Computer Science (in NLP/ML)) Mark Dredze (Johns Hopkins University) Hanna M. Wallach (University of Massachusetts Amherst) Version 1.0, March 20, 2012 Being a graduate student can be extremely rewarding and a lot of fun, but it’s also hard work. Like anything in life, there are ways to succeed and ways to fail. Hopefully, you will find a good support network that can help you learn what it takes to be a good graduate student. However, not everyone is able to find such a network, and it’s important to learn these lessons early. This guide was written based on our experiences as graduate students and our experiences advising graduate students, specifically, PhD students in NLP and machine learning; however, we hope many of the points are applicable to a wider audience. Where possible, we have indicated when advice is field-specific. Beyond that, the advice is listed in no particular order. No doubt there will be points with which you disagree. That’s totally fine -- there are certainly points about which even we had differing views; however, before you decide to ignore these points, it’s well worth taking the time to understand why we included them. Becoming a PhD Student Why Get a PhD? This question is dealt with extensively in other documents, so we will not discuss it in detail here; however, we want to emphasize the importance of asking this question. Getting a PhD will change your career path dramatically. Not only does getting...
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