A CMU Professor's 2001 Advice to Grad Students: Write to Think, Embrace Contradiction
Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student (2001)
Manuel Blum's classic talk distills the 4 R's of graduate school: Reading, Rithmetic, Research, and Writing. He urges students to read books randomly, write while reading, and treat writing as the difference between a finite automaton and a Turing machine. On thinking, he recommends self-hints, learning from being scooped, and mining paradoxes. He also covers choosing a thesis problem and the middle years of a PhD.
Without writing, you are reduced to a finite automaton. With writing you have the extraordinary power of a Turing machine.
- john_strinlai
>Consider writing what you read as you read it.
i would add a clarification for today's students: by hand.
typing doesn't appear to have the same power, at least for myself and my students that ive talked to about it.
- cidd
Many software engineers in the bay area from abroad pursued Master's or Ph.D. degrees in the US to qualify for the additional 20,000 cap-exempt H-1B visa slots.
- dang
Related. Others?
Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7997158 - July 2014 (15 comments)
Manuel Blum: Advice to a beginning graduate student - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2037676 - Dec 2010 (16 comments)
Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student - Manuel Blum (CMU) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=832729 - Sept 2009 (32 comments)