Advice for graduate students

Not all students have access to guidance on how to navigate the unique world of academia. Importantly, equity and diversity in academia are hurt by this uneven playing field. To play a small role in addressing this problem, I am providing the following documents to share my perspective about academic research.

If there are other topics you are interested in, or other mechanisms you think would be useful to disseminate this content, e-mail me your idea! I will continue developing these documents, and so would appreciate your feedback on what is most effective. I am particularly interested in assisting students who must overcome systemic inequalities and racism in order to advance and feel welcome in their academic institutions. Please reach out if I can be of assistance.

 

General

Advice for graduate students

Expectations of graduate students

Meeting with your advisor

Establishing an online presence

Building expertise

Collaboration

Further resources

 

Writing

Being a productive writer

The process of writing a paper

Writing an abstract

Literature review

Paper formatting advice

Sharing papers and source code

The peer-review process

Choosing where to publish your work

Reviewing a paper

Latex template for paper review responses

Getting published in Earthquake Spectra and beyond (video)

 

Presenting  

Attending a conference

General strategies for preparing presentations (video)

Creating effective graphics (video)

 

For faculty

New: Don't wait for things to get easy

Stand-up meeting format

 

About me

Why I am writing advice articles

An honest bio

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, 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 my faculty articles.