Thread by @VisionBernie

I collected a list of resources for my future doctoral students @UniFAU at the @CogCoVi lab - on 1st of October, my first 3 doctoral students will start their adventures: here is the collection of all those resources that are hopefully helpful and might also help others?

1/n

Of course, my collection is biased and contains a lot of resources I found during my postdoc @MIT_CSAIL and @mitbrainandcog so let’s start with a classic with a very promising title: How to do Research 
dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/hand…
2/n

Bill Freeman has his own piece with the same title people.csail.mit.edu/billf/www/pape…
3/n

There are also regular up-to-date tips by @jbhuang0604 like for example those here on how to make the most out of meeting with your advisor:

https://twitter.com/jbhuang0604/status/1418407079077842944

For convenience, he put them together in a structured way github.com/jbhuang0604/aw…
4/n

Learning from failures can be a superpower - this however requires sharing of failures. Talking about failures in academia first came to my mind through @DrVeronikaCH with her series on “how I fail” - she is also sharing some other great resources: veronikach.com/phd-advice/7-t…
5/n

“Become Reviewer 2” - a nice resource shared by @anorangeduck theorangeduck.com/page/reproduce… with the bitter truth about reviewer 2 - and yes, it contains many more insights, I just selected the most catchy one from my perspective :)
6/n

“Little PhD things” - a nice reddit thread with a lot of different insights: [reddit.com/r/PhD/comments…](https://t.co/TKnNoyzwpP)

The conversation also contains a lot of ideas what topics and open questions are out there and could be covered by you?
7/n

Bill Freeman took time to collect advice from faculty all around CSAIL resulting in a nice collection of high-level advice people.csail.mit.edu/billf/talks/10…

One highlight for me is to “Be more stubborn than your advisor” by Polina Golland
8/n

A grain of salt by @ykilcher to be not as successless as he was and to not do the same mistakes he did. “if you do happen to have thousands of TPUs in your backyard you can safely ignore my advice” - cited approximately

9/n

You want more? @fredodurand collected a whole list like this one - so if you want even more resources, here you go: people.csail.mit.edu/fredo/student.…
10/n

“as a community with significant stature, we need to work towards an inclusive culture that makes transparent and addresses the real emotional toil of its members” - from my perspective a must-read for any researcher entering computer vision
vision.soic.indiana.edu/papers/affecti…
11/n

There are issues you might face during your PhD - e.g. mental health and there are valuable resources specifically for doctoral studies 

https://mobile.twitter.com/ZJAyres/status/1227503028124569600

There are also specific resources at almost any university, here the ones of @UniFAU: tf.fau.eu/info-centre/ps…
12/n

Do you ever feel like you don’t belong here and everyone is smarter than you? Like an imposter?

I did not know that this is a feeling a lot of scientists share. You might be surprised how many academics share their scores on impostortest.nickol.as via #ImpostorSyndrome
13/n

“picture a scientist” is a movie that I would like all academics to see. Watch out for screenings at your university or choose a paid options pbs.org/wgbh/nova/vide… - it is shocking and eye-opening - a masterpiece exposing longstanding discrimination of women scientists
14/n

I don’t like personality tests, and they are highly controversial: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers–Bri…. However, I think we can still learn something about ourselves through such tests and perhaps identify some weaknesses we were not aware of.
16personalities.com
15/n

And now some random other things: e.g. what machine learning method to pick for what problem?

scikit-learn.org/stable/tutoria…

Yes I know, it excludes all that fancy deep stuff - do we have a map like this for modern learning methods?
16/n

I’m a huge fan of visualizations - just an example that demonstrates how powerful they can be: informationisbeautiful.net

Visualizing intermediate steps in my algorithms saved me a lot of time debugging, and it would be my key advice to any researcher.
17/n

Going through all those resources is a lot of work - and yes, there are also a lot of resources for advisors - I’d be happy to hear about more resources for young advisors?
An example by @gershbrain
gershmanlab.com/docs/advice_yo…
18/n

Last but not least a small question to break your brain (you’ll need to do that from time to time):

why does a mirror flip left and right, but not up down?
19/19