Advice for Graduate Students

Beginning graduate school is a challenge. Many students deal with 'imposter syndrome', the feeling that they somehow don't belong. I felt this as a graduate student, then later as an assistant professor! It's important to realize that most, if not all, feel this way. Surrounding yourself with good mentors, both students and faculty, is also an important way to overcome this feeling. 

This page is far from complete, but has some links to resources in an attempt to remove or alleviate some of the barriers that many graduate students face.

• Here are my written expectations from, and commitment to, graduate students in my research group.

• Specific to our department, here is a document outlining requirements for graduation for PhD students and here is one for MS students.

• Writing scientific papers is a challenging effort. One of the most important aspects is learning how to logically structure it in a way that readers can easily understand the importance of the research, follow the methods and be able to reproduce the authors' work. Here are some nice references on structuring individual paragraphs and full papers. This link has more details and tutorials on science and engineering writing.

• Information on presenting at and traveling to conferences for CSU students.

• Jack Baker at Stanford University has shared a number of helpful tips for graduate students.

• Jeremy Maurer at Missouri S&T also has some nice resources (some of which have already been pirated here!)

• Michael Pyrcz at University of Texas has some excellent suggestions on coming up with new ideas as grad students, writing papers, and advocating for yourself!