- Join our LinkedIn Group!
- Your first few months will be rough. You’ll make it through as long as you keep trying. We’ve all been there, and other new students are going through it too, so don’t be afraid to talk to us and others.
- Stay ahead of schedule. Projects and research will take months, even years. Pace yourself, and don’t fall behind. But at the same time, don’t feel guilty taking a day for yourself every so often when you need it.
- If you don’t know what to do, look at what other papers in your field have done. It’s possible that they have already solved a problem you’re having. Compendex from the PSU library database is a very good tool to learn.
- Speaking of papers, put all your figures into a powerpoint. Add arrows or combine pictures in ppt. Then take a screen shot and paste that into your word documents. Images take less processing power, and can be moved more easily.
- Check out Mendely, a free citation and pdf manager. It works very well with Word, and manages your pdfs. You can view them in program, and have Mendely automatically rename the files, since they usually have meaningless file names when you download them.
- Stay organized. You’re not going to remember what you did February 17 three years ago, so don’t organize your work like that. Try naming your folders as if they’re each chapter of your thesis (e.g., “3 – BTSCM Optimization”), then in each folder have standard sub folders (e.g., “Code”,”Images”,”SMASIS2014″)
- I really recommend using the ISO date convention in documents and document titles. yyyy-mm-dd
- Don’t get into the habit of making incredibly long filenames. Try this: btscm_v1-03.mph. If you want to add a description, btscm_v1-03_multilinear.mph. This will be much easier to see the progression of your files.
- Use Assertion-Evidence format for your presentations. You may not like it at first, but you’ll understand why it’s useful down the road.
- Try out the Web Plot Digitizer for extracting numerical data from charts.
- Bring a paper notebook with you to every meeting. Computers are great for being formal, but it’s hard to beat a pen and paper for speed.
- It is highly recommended that you download Flux. The program gives your screen a red-ish hue that will drastically reduce eye strain. You can control how strong of a color it is, so you can tailor it to your needs. You really should try it, at least for a week.