Advice for graduate students

Not all students have access to guidance on navigating the unique world of academic research. Importantly, this uneven playing field hurts equity and diversity. To help address this problem, I am providing the following documents to share my perspective on academic research. These are my personal opinions and not the policy or views of my employer. All names of people have been changed to protect anonymity.

If you have ideas for other topics or dissemination mechanisms, e-mail me! I will continue developing these documents, so appreciate your feedback.

 

General research advice

Advice for graduate students

Expectations of graduate students

Meeting with your advisor

Establishing an online presence

Building expertise

Collaboration

Further resources

 

Writing

Productivity and process

Sections of your paper

Peer review

 

Presenting

Checklist for effective presentations (coauthored with Sabine Loos)

Attending a conference

Developing and giving technical presentations (video)

General strategies for preparing presentations (video)

Creating effective graphics (video)

 

For faculty

Don't wait for things to get easy

Promoting classroom discussion

Stand-up meeting format

 

About me

Why I am writing advice articles

An honest bio

How I Got Here: A Career Chat with Jack Baker (video)

Being a professor

Negative proposal review comments

 

Acknowledgments: Thanks to Lukas Bodenmann, Corinne Bowers, Francisco Galvis, Erica Fischer, Anne Hulsey, Peter Lee, Dawn Lehman, Sabine Loos, Rodrigo Silva Lopez, Maryia Markhvida, Emily Mongold, Michael Scott, Neetesh Sharma, Danielle Vidal, Jimmy Zhang, Tinger Zhu, Oregon State University Civil and Construction Engineering's Write Club, and the rest of my research group for helpful suggestions and feedback on the above documents and this general project.

Thanks to Ashly Cabas, Gemma Cremen, Roberto Gentile, Yolanda Lin, Sabine Loos, Chukwuebuka Nweke, and Lisa Tobber for excellent insights and feedback on the faculty articles.

Register

Use the following link to register to receive very occasional updates about new offerings on this page. I will not share your information with anyone.

Go to the registration form