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 play a small role in addressing this problem, I am providing the following documents to share my perspective on academic research. All thoughts here are my personal opinions and not the policy or views of my employer.

If you have ideas for other topics or dissemination mechanisms, e-mail me! I will continue developing these documents, so appreciate your feedback. I am particularly interested in assisting students who must overcome systemic inequalities and racism 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

Advice on paper sections

• Title

• Abstract

• Introduction

• Conclusions

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

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

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.