How to be a successful phd student

1. Do not learn from the course, but need to design a new course

2. Problems with solution vs. open ended problems

3. There is no text book. only a huge body of confusing and possibly inconsistent literature

Typical Phd Experience

Phase1: Excitement

Phase2: Depression

Phase3: Excitement

Phase4: Extreme depression or extreme excitement

Advices:

1. Not only focusing on your own research, but read broadly on many different areas.

Generalization and abstraction can reveal hidden connections.

2. Do something, don't just read

Implementation, details reveal issues.

There are always untold secrets in papers

3. A* search vs. depth first search

Most valuable vs. most difficult

4. Don't believe everything on the paper. (Lots of tricks not mentioned in paper)

Questions:

1. How to get the best award paper? New data, and the relevancy of the technique to the problem. Gotta to be early.

2. Read news and see the recent technology, thinking about how to apply you learned on the new problem.

3. When to hunt for job, you need to have some practical skills, because most of the companies are interested in what kinds of contributions you can make and most of the companies cannot afford so many research positions. Thus, you need to build a variety of techniques.

4. Failure always happens. You should expect that the method you utilize may not work. Thus, keep trying and thinking out some back up methods.

5. Nathan has a passion on technology which can change human's life. Having this curiosity, he would like to design solutions. Because of his core inner value, he would like to learn techniques.