It’s not funny how many cultural, socio-economic, and even religious assumptions can be implicit in the design of a simple form. Here’s the form I was greeted with today when I tried to log on to ShareBuilder. Note, I don’t want to single out ShareBuilder here; many other companies have such silly forms as well. But it just so happens to be the form I chanced upon today.

Here’s a list of the assumptions made by whoever was tasked with designing this particular form. It’s quite easy to see why these assumptions are not universally applicable. Though not outright discriminatory, these questions suggest a subliminal discriminatory preference for car-owning, married people, both whose parents are currently alive. And no, you cannot create your own questions.

1. “What was the make (Chevy, Ford, Honda, etc) of your first vehicle?”
   This question assumes that you own a vehicle. Many people in several countries worldwide do not own a vehicle, either by choice, or because their governments had the good sense to invest in public transportation instead of highways.
2. In what city does your father currently live?
   This one assumes that your father is currently alive. This doesn’t sound discriminatory until you realize that it is far more likely for younger users’ fathers to be alive than older ones’. There you go: it’s ageist.
3. What is the first name of the maid of honor at your wedding?
   This question assumes (1) that you’re married and (2) that you follow a religious tradition where the concept of ‘maids-of-honor’ exists in relation to weddings.
4. What is your mother’s father’s first name?
   This is probably the only question that’s universally answerable.
5. What is your father’s middle name?
   This particular question assumes that everyone has a middle name. I know people from a lot of communities where there is no concept of a middle name.
6. What was the first name of your manager at your first full-time job?
   This question whispers: ‘Hey students, hope you’ve had at least one job so far in your career, else we don’t quite want you here. Now go away!’
7. In what city were you married? (Enter full name of city)
   This one (again!) assumes you’re married. If you happen to be gay or lesbian in the wrong state or in the wrong country, you’re not even granted the right to marry, so making an assumption about marriage is adding insult to injury.
8. What was the name of your first pet?
   Everyone’s had a pet at some point in their lives, right? </sarcasm>
9. What color was your first vehicle?
   Again, this assumes you have owned a car in the past.
10. In what city does your mother currently live?
    Finally, this one assumes that your mother is currently alive. (again, ageist as in the second question.)

We have—thankfully—grown out of the age of blatant racial or gender discrimination (for the most part). But behind every user interface widget and every design decision we make is an invisible representation of the subconscious biases we hold in our minds. If you build a team comprising only of like-minded individuals from similar backgrounds, this is the kind of sign-up form you get. If your team includes people who have experienced a rich diversity of life experiences, you can bet their designs will be much more universal.

From July 2010 to June 2011, I will be mentoring 8 undergrad students from my alma mater, Fr. Conçeicao Rodrigues College of Engineering for their Senior Projects (a.k.a. Final-Year projects). We plan to work together on two projects in the area of Personal Information Management. This is an experiment of sorts, because as far as I know, final-year projects in Bombay University have never been mentored remotely, and only a small proportion are research-oriented.

Why it’s the right time for this.

There are several reasons why I’m doing this: several years ago, a few of my friends from undergrad — Salil Wadhavkar, Ninad Pradhan, Vikram Iyengar, Noel Tide, Rahul Saxena, Raghu Cowlagi — had discussed mentoring our juniors to participate in tech contests. At the time, we all had just finished our Masters degrees, and felt that we could nudge a few students to take up research and grad school by such encouragement. That conversation died down for several reasons about 4-5 years ago, but the spark remained.

I enjoy building things. That’s why I had decided I wanted to be in industry (instead of academia) even before I started my Ph.D. program. But it’s also fun to conduct studies and find answers to interesting questions, and it’s incredibly hard to do the latter while my job at Google enables me to build Awesome Stuff™ full-time. Collaborating with students seems like a win-win situation for all of us: the undergrad students gain exposure to research, and we all are able to build, study, and publish what we find.

Proposing the collaboration

With these ideas in mind, I visited my undergrad college (under Bombay University) when I was in Bombay this February. I met the Principal, Dr. Srija Unnikrishnan, and the Head of the Department of Information Technology, Prof. Mahesh Sharma. Both found the idea promising, and Prof Sharma asked me to address the 3rd year classes (junior-level in the US system) that were in progress at the time. Although I felt a little bad interrupting classes to deliver my 15-min spiel, the students, professors, head of the department and the principal were not only supportive but also enthusiastic about this. My concerns about the distance & my lack of physical availability in Bombay were brushed aside by Prof. Sharma (“when there’s chat and Skype, why do you have to be here personally?”)

Soon, two groups of four students contacted me, and we worked on defining the projects between February and now (June 2010). I was impressed by their initial emails, which clearly showed they were not only interested, but had also done their homework before proposing a project. I will be collaborating with one team on an email-related project, and on a task-management related project with another; both within Personal Information Management. (We will publish the details of these projects and the entire source code developed as part of this project as and when we have something to report.)

Other voices

Luis von Ahn from CMU recently published a blog post about outsourcing his research group. While he proposes doing this mainly for monetary reasons, I figured this could be more of an academically-enriching mutually-beneficial experience. There are a few neat opinions expressed in his blog post, as well as in the comments.

Next steps

I expect to learn many valuable lessons about cross-continental collaboration from this process as much as I expect to learn from my new colleagues — who are no doubt better versed in technologies of the day than I am. I will continue to blog about our experiences as we proceed.

If you have any tips for us as we embark on this year-long experiment, please leave us a comment.

In this post, I have typeset many more sentences in bold than I usually do, so readers can quickly skim through it.

I applaud the efforts of U. Colorado’s EPIC Group in assisting the victims of the Haiti earthquake in calling for help using Twitter, and to make their tweets discoverable and actionable. I just performed a Twitter search for the terms #haiti -RT -http (includes all Tweets tagged #Haiti, except retweets or links) to inspect some of the tweets that are directly related to happenings on the ground, and they are (as expected) only a minuscule percentage of the total number of tweets about #Haiti. Syntax is thus sorely needed to achieve a decent signal-to-noise ratio to assist relief efforts.

Though, in my opinion, the current version of the tweet syntax seems too formal, too rigid and a tad too complicated for victims or rescuers on the ground. I am a programmer, and even I had trouble mentally parsing a few of the examples provided. We must keep in mind that Haiti is a bi-/tri-lingual country (and neither of them is English), so any syntactic terms used should preferably be semi-obvious to non-native speakers of the language as well as rescuers.

Roles of Microsyntax

1. Make tweets discoverable: Microsyntax can assist local search-and-rescue efforts and unaffected Twitter users in determining if a tweet is actionable. This task is partly a Signal Detection Task and partly a Data Mining problem. In both situations, microsyntax can prove helpful: all that’s needed is a single tag that emphasizes that a particular tweet is actionable (versus not), e.g. #haiti #rescue (or #haitirescue, to avoid having to type a second # (hash) sign). This will greatly increase the sensitivity parameter d’ of the signal detection task.
2. Make data mining easier: Once a tweet has been detected to be actionable, its contents must be parsed into a form that local efforts can take action upon. While it’s true that all the other proposed microsyntactic tags make it easier for applications to parse the data, this is at the cost of requiring users to learn new syntax. This seems to me a little too much to expect from victims of a recent calamity of this scale as well as from rescue workers with other higher priorities. Instead, as long as our tools can identify relevant tweets, computers should be able to perform the second task of parsing locations, names, and verbs from tags quite easily.

Also, microsyntactic terms need not always be prefixed with # (hash) signs; they are often difficult to type using cell phone keyboards, and on some handsets, may hamper input methods such as T9. Because of the intervening # signs, Tweets containing the proposed microsyntax decrease typographic readability for someone browsing through tweets.

To summarize, this imposes a heavy cognitive load on victims and search-and-rescue efforts while making parsing easier for machines. However, the task of parsing details from tweets can also easily be performed by large numbers of humans a.k.a. crowdsourcing via volunteer efforts or via tools such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Simpler, Lighter Microsyntax

The following are examples of microsyntax that are more readable, yet also parseable by machines. All situations are based on the ones in the original proposed microsyntax. Most are directly based on the EPIC microsyntax, with a few simplifications.

• Rule 1: Always write in the third-person. This takes care of part of the name problem.
• Rule 2: Instead of using #loc for locations, use “at”. It’s much more natural and not much more difficult to parse.
• Rule 3: Verbs are actionable. Not syntactic verbs, but English (or French or Haitian Creole) verbs. It’s a trivial task to populate a tool with a dictionary to detect all word forms correctly.
• Rule 4: Anything that cannot be parsed ends up as the equivalent of the #info tag (see EPIC syntax).
• Rule 5: The entire text of the tweet should always be available to a human, so whatever information was incompletely parsed can be understood manually, and optionally added to the parsed version by a human.

The general aim is to require as little syntax knowledge as possible, and to keep as close as possible to the natural way people write tweets.

Examples

TWEET-BEFORE: Sherline Birotte aka Memen. Last seen at 19 Ruelle Riviere College University of Porter a 3 story schol building
TWEET-AFTER: #haiti #ruok #name Sherline Birotte aka Memen. Last seen #loc 19 Ruelle Riviere College University of Porter #info a 3 story schol building
Simplified Microsyntax: #haiti #rescue Looking for Sherline Birotte aka Memen. Last seen at 19 Ruelle Riviere College University of Porter, a 3 story school building

This tells the computer us:
What = Looking for someone.
Who = Sherline Birotte aka Memen (identified fuzzily based on initial capital letters)
Where = 19 Ruelle Riviere College University of Porter (automatically parsed based on “at”)
What else = “a 3 story schol building” (i.e. everything else in the tweet)

TWEET-BEFORE: Mirna Nazaire lives in P-A-P at Bizoton 6#12. Entire neighborhood without food. People are dying.
TWEET-AFTER: #haiti #need #food #name Mirna Nazaire lives in #loc PAP at Bizoton 6 #12 #info neighborhood w/o food. People dying
Simplified Microsyntax: #haiti #rescue Mirna Nazaire at PAP at Bizoton 6#12 needs food. Entire neighborhood without food. People dying.

This tells us:
What = needs food. (automatically detected from the verb in the sentence.)
What do they need = food (automatically detected from the object in the sentence.)
Who = Mirna Nazaire (heuristically determined from initial capital letters.)
Where = PAP at Bizoton 6 #12 (detected from microsyntax “at”)
What else = “neighborhood w/o food. People dying.” (Rest of the tweet, unfiltered.)

TWEET-BEFORE: French hospital is now open and ready to receive the wounded at the french lycee in rue marcadieux bourdon
TWEET-AFTER: #haiti #offering #med #loc french lycee in rue marcadieux bourdon #num 30+ #info French hospital is open and ready 2 receive wounded
Simplified Microsyntax: #haiti #rescue French hospital ready to offer help to 30+ wounded at the french lycee in rue marcadieux bourdon

This tells us:
What: Hospital. Also, something to do with medical efforts. (no need to tag explicitly, we can infer that from ‘hospital’.)
Where: The french lycee in rue marcadieux bourdon. (Automatically parsed from microsyntax “at”.)
How many people: 30+. (It’s already a number, no need to state “#num” explicitly.)

These are just a few suggestions. I will be contacting the PIs (principal investigators) of the EPIC project directly with some of my recommendations, but please continue to follow their syntax until they recommend anything different. The current syntax proposal isn’t perfect, but it is more important to avoid fragmenting the tagspace.

This is a collection of tips compiled for a seminar series at Virginia Tech for Computer Science Grad Students in Fall 2008, compiled by Manas Tungare, with contributions from (in alphabetical order) Manuel Pérez-Quiñones, Rhonda Phillips, Pardha Pyla, Naren Ramakrishnan, Bill Schilit, and Andrea Wiggins.

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1. Introduction

This document is extremely terse, so you don’t end up spending too much time reading it.

2. Getting Started

2.1. Classes

In your first few semesters of grad school, you will be required to take classes. They provide an opportunity to learn about new areas, and gain some depth in your area of focus. But grad school is not about getting an A in every class. Don’t ignore research in favor of getting good grades.

Be clear about the requirements of your program: you don’t want to discover that you missed taking a required class and have to take it towards the end of your Ph.D.

Quote from a professor (used with permission):

Students need to know what advisors do when writing a letter of recommendation. I get requests to write letters of recommendation, and all I can say is “s/he was in class frequently”. Students need to know this, not just to avoid that awkward moment of asking for a letter of recommendation that might not be the one they want, but also so this might serve as motivation for them to attend class. They can’t be shy. They need to be known by professors. Ask questions. Go to research group meetings. Read their papers, etc.

2.2. Choosing an Advisor

Find an advisor whose research interests closely match yours. This is obvious. What is not obvious is the next part: find an advisor whose work culture and personality match yours. You will be working with this person for the next several years, and if you do not enjoy a great working relationship with your advisor, things might get rough.

How do you find out about an advisor’s personality? Talk to their current students and ask around. You’ll need to read between the lines of such conversations, keeping in mind that because they work with that advisor, (1) they either genuinely love working with him/her or (2) they will not talk ill of him/her for fear of retribution.

Ask around: some advisors graduate students rapidly, while others are seldom around, so their students take longer to graduate. Some advisors will provide for frequent, short interactions (face-to-face, email, etc.); others will require you to have completed a significant amount of work before they agree to meet you in person. Some encourage independent work that is mentored sporadically; others may engage in more frequent collaborations. Hardly any will provide hand-holding-this is grad school.

Faculty members can be roughly classified in two very broad groups: senior versus junior. Junior faculty looking for tenure must publish prolifically, while senior faculty have more experience in the field-both are good qualities that will ultimately help you. Weigh these factors if you ever need to pick between one from each group.

Before entering into a long-term relationship with someone you’re interested in, a good way to figure out if you’re compatible is to … do an “Independent Study” with them. This is a no-commitment research-oriented one-on-one project. It’s OK to double up class projects or follow them up as independent studies – talk to the faculty member involved.

Understand what professors want/need from you: support for the primary area of research they are interested in, and willingness to take that research forward in meaningful ways. Funding for graduate students comes from research grants, and if you help write one, you may get the money that the grant brings in.

Here’s a quote from a faculty member (used with permission):

For example, I often email students things like “Hey, this conference call seems close to your work. What do you think?” A negative work student (which, I might add, I have learned to spot quickly and don’t often want working with me) will often reply “Interesting, do you really think we should publish there?” That is clearly the wrong answer. If I didn’t think we should publish there, then I wouldn’t have forwarded this to the student.

The other extreme student (which is typical of the students that I work with) replies: “Very interesting. I went to their website and looked at a couple of papers from last year. They definitely seem similar to my work. I have taken the liberty of jotting down some notes about possible papers that we could write. Let’s discuss these next time we meet. Thanks for sending it.”

2.3. Mentoring

Your advisor isn’t your only mentor; find a senior student in your program with similar interests (and, if possible, the same advisor) who is willing to give you some sage senior advice and help you avoid a few common pitfalls. Peer mentoring can be truly invaluable. Astronauts and professional athletes aren’t the only role models; find a high-performing person at the next higher rank from you and emulate their behavior.

Quote from a Ph.D. student:

When I was a Master’s student, I tried to adopt the practices of a successful PhD student, and it really paid off. As a PhD student, I try to meet the expectations for junior faculty so I’ll be better prepared for that role.

While a dissertation is a very individual activity, there are patterns that all grad students go through that are similar (that’s why Ph.D. Comics is funny). Cultivate early, a group of peers, including a few more advanced students, that have experienced the ups/downs of doing a Ph.D. This will help you survive the difficult parts and help you celebrate the high points along the way.

3. Research

3.1. Literature Review Basics

Any research project begins with a review of the existing literature in the field (or at least, that’s how it should be.) Be exhaustive while citing sources; do not open yourself up to claims of plagiarism, even if you are honestly pursuing your own research. Look up citations for stuff that seems like it may have been done before. Ask your peers (lab mates, professional colleagues at other institutions) if they are aware of any papers near your area.

Posting specific questions about related work to your social network is a good way to learn about work that might not have been widely cited. Some colleagues might offer you a sneak peak at unpublished work. Respect the confidentiality that is implicit in the sharing of such work.

3.2. Managing Research

Research requires as much management as pure effort. You must be able to manage your time, your resources, your sources, information you collect, information you come across, information you generate, samples of stuff you record from experiment participants, interview transcripts and recordings, videos, log files from computer software, etc. Make sure you store these items safely.

There is software to conduct every kind of research activity: pick the best tool for the job.

Word-processing programs that were once adequate for undergrad-level reports and essays cease to scale up to the demands of academic publishing. Consider LaTeX for academic writing: it is free software available for all major operating system platforms, and will not cause corrupt documents, a common occurrence with proprietary software that reads/writes undocumented binary file formats. The effort required to gain familiarity with LaTeX pays itself back several times over during an academic career.

BibTeX is a tool and file format for managing bibliographies, along with several applications that help manage BibTeX-formatted bibliographies. Keep a single library of bibliographic material starting from Day One. This will save you several hours when collating annotated literature to cite in a paper or article.

3.3. Communication

Do not underestimate the value of communication in research. Not only will you perform research by yourself, but you also will be required to talk about it with your advisor, discuss it to lab-mates, write about it in papers and articles, and present it at conferences.

Get feedback from your colleagues before communicating with a wider audience – many heads are better than one. You will be surprised at what other people will spot in your work that you had somehow managed to overlook. This applies equally to papers, talks, presentations, defenses and everything in between.

4. Conferences

Starting to write early on makes your writing better over time. Make your presence known in your research area: publish interesting stuff, but not for the sake of publishing something. Some call this the `least-publishable unit’ model of publishing and many disagree with it. Submit meaningful, completed works of research to the appropriate conferences and journals.

Be proactive in submitting to conferences: do not wait for your advisor to come across a CFP (`Call for Papers’). Subscribe to announcement lists in your field where a lot of CFPs get posted. Your advisor can help you locate these.

Attend conferences even if you’re not presenting during that particular year. It is important to stay abreast of research in your area. Often you will have to pay your own way to attend a conference in another country; this money is well-spent.

It is said that during conferences, hallways are where the action is, not the session rooms. That is where the networking happens. Meet people from your field: these are the same people whose work you build upon, who will build upon your work, and contribute to the same scholarly community. In addition, some of these may be interviewing you after you’re done, either as faculty search committee members or as industry researchers.

Attend smaller research meetings too: departmental get-togethers and seminars are not a distraction from your regular work, but a part of it. Don’t be left out!

If you’re in your second year or higher, prepare an elevator pitch. Be ready to talk to complete strangers about what you do. Prepare individual spiels for the following sets of audiences: your grandma/grandpa, your friend from high school who is pursuing a degree in fine arts, your friend from undergrad in Computer Science, your lab-mates, people in your research area, and finally, your advisor. These are sorted by increasing levels of awareness of the field and research experience. This means that you can dig into several levels of detail as the need arises (sometimes also known as the pyramid model of communication.)

4.1. Presenting at Conferences

A conference presentation is not a verbatim recitation of your paper. Often, the time available to presenters during a conference session is barely enough to whet the appetite of your audience and entice them to read the entire paper. Do not try to cram every single finding from your paper into the 20-minute talk.

Practice presentations before a crowd of your peers before you go to that big conference. There is no substitute for rehearsing. Do not ever read from your slides. Do not EVER read from your slides. There are numerous tips for how to be a better presenter and public speaker, far too many to include in this document.

4.2. Student Volunteer Opportunities

Check whether conferences of your interest waive registration fees and/or provide additional perks in exchange for volunteer service during the conference. If you feel you are capable, take up service positions and be of assistance to the community at large. Apply to be a Student Volunteer as soon as (or even before) you submit your paper. Often, deadlines for Student Volunteer applications are earlier than paper submission deadlines (though this varies by conference.) If accepted, the conference organizers will pay a significant part of your travel expenses (registration, hotel, etc.)

`SV’-ing also is a great opportunity to meet your peers. These are other students who will one day be your research colleagues, collaborators on grants, paper reviewers, co-authors and life-long friends. Meet them, keep in touch.

But remember that your academics come first; service should not come at the cost of your research output.

5. Internships

Internships offer students a perspective on where their skills might be useful outside of the academic realm. Even if you do not intend to pursue a career in industry, opting instead for an academic career, an internship provides a unique perspective into your own work and how it fits into the research community at large – something that a summer at school would not be able to provide.

Make sure you plan this with your advisor well in advance. Do not spring a surprise on him/her after you receive an offer and rent an apartment. Some advisors may prefer that you not go on an internship, but continue to work on your research so you may graduate earlier. Others encourage their students to pursue internships, while a few others may actively provide you leads for promising internship positions. Most research internships are gained either through your own research reputation, or through your advisor’s professional contacts. Thus, a conversation with your advisor on this topic should be held earlier rather than later.

Researchers from industry often scrutinize their intern candidates at conference presentations and other socio-professional venues. You might even receive a spot offer over a casual conversation with your would-be mentor if they are impressed with your work.

While the internship application process is not as rigorous as that for a full-time position, there are few positions and they’re filled as soon as a candidate with matching skills is found. Apply early. Quote from a Ph.D. student:

Don’t be afraid to pursue opportunities. I was always intimidated when I saw solicitations for fellowship applications, travel funding, student grants, awards, etc, but I learned that it doesn’t hurt to apply, and sometimes you’re more qualified than you think you are.

Some research institutions offer internships that do not involve rigorous research, but instead utilize your prototype-building skills to push their research agenda. If you’re in your early years of the graduate program, these are fine ways to get you the proverbial foot in the door and a deeper insight into that institution’s research program.

While at an internship, do not completely ignore the research you conducted back at school. Advisors will understand that your current time demands must favor your current employer, but a three month hiatus in school research can lead to problems resuming it once you’re back.

6. Networking

Know your community and try and get them to know you.

Solving an important research problem sitting in one’s windowless cubicle is good, but networking with peers at research conferences and other academic venues increases one’s chances of getting a real job.

Most academic networking happens at conferences. Make sure you carry business cards so you can exchange contact info easily if required. Though, quite often, you will end up exchanging cards with your peers – who also just got their cards printed! – you never know when you might meet someone who really would like to get in touch with you. Since most academic positions are filled via word-of-mouth, it’s always good to be easy to contact.

You may be invited to spontaneous group lunches or dinners with newly-made acquaintances, which often lead to excellent conversations to remember for a long time. After all, these are people from your own research field who have all congregated to exchange ideas with one another. (But of course, don’t be pushy or show up uninvited.)

If your advisor, committee members, or senior students are attending, they may introduce you to their acquaintances from other schools/companies.

Many advise removing your social networking profiles, such as Facebook or Twitter profiles. While this advice has some merit if your profile has objectionable content, that is likely not the most common case for this audience. As information grows, one’s social network is a valuable resource to be tapped into for relevant, up-to-date news from your field. Often, such nuggets might be found in your friends’ status updates. After several conferences I’ve been to, attendees have taken the initiative to start online groups to continue the conversation beyond the conference. It is a good idea to participate in these.

There also are networking conferences designed for specific audiences; if you are a woman, consider attending the Grace Hopper Conference. If you belong to a minority group in computer science, consider attending the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing. There are likely be others in your own field as well.

7. Preparing for the Real World

7.1. Tenure Track (Academic Positions)

For an academic position, you will be evaluated on your ability to chart your own research agenda, and pursue it to fruition. This includes coming up with hypotheses, conducting experiments and publishing your results. As the first two steps are opaque to an external observer, you are thus judged primarily based on your publication output. Whether you like it or not, it’s a publish-or-perish world.

Always keep an updated copy of your résumé and CV available online. A CV (curriculum vitae) is a complete record of your relevant accomplishments and forms part of your application dossier for academic positions.

If your university supports student involvement in school governance, become involved in governance committees. This may seem like a distraction from your studies, but it is excellent preparation for a faculty position in which you will be expected to contribute in service roles in addition to research and teaching.

Do as a student what faculty do: writing research grant proposals. You may start off by assisting your advisor in writing sections of their grant proposals that are related to your research. It is often possible to turn your dissertation proposal into a grant proposal. Even though students cannot be officially co-PIs (Principal Investigator) of a grant, the experience you will gain even from being a nameless contributor is priceless.

7.2. Industry Track (Research Laboratory Positions)

Industry values slightly different skills in budding researchers than does academia. Industry often runs on much faster timelines than academic research, especially in terms of bringing products from the laboratory to the mainstream. Thus, in addition to fundamental research, an industry researcher plays an important secondary role in “productizing” research ideas. This involves developing prototypes and working with development teams to implement these on a larger scale.

It is a belief among some graduate students that a career in industry limits one’s freedom in what you may work on. While it is true that an individual researcher’s broad research direction may need to align with the company’s strategic vision, there is often wide scope for researchers to define the specific problems they are interested in working on and pursue those with their team. It is often the case in academic (though lamentable) that choice of research direction is dictated by available funding opportunities.

8. Closing Statements

Take care of yourself first. Paper submissions, assignments and pending work can take their toll on your health if you ignore yourself. Make sure you eat well, on time, and maintain the energy that is the foundation of everything else.

Enjoy your time here. You’re doing this because you love it!

9. Resources

• Strunk and White’s Elements of Style: ISBN 9780205309023.
• How to have a bad career in academia – David Patterson [PDF]
• Graduate Student Resources Page – Dan Horn
• Tips for Grad Students – Yuhong Yuan
• So Long and Thanks for the Ph.D. – Ronald T. Azuma
• How to be a Good Graduate Student – Marie desJardins
• Grad Student Humor – Dan Horn
• How to write a dissertation – Douglas E. Comer
• Ph.D. Comics – Jorge Cham (and his spies who seem to have a window into every grad student’s cubicle)
• Presentation Zen – Garr Reynolds

How often have you found yourself calling a friend to get the phone number of a mutual friend? And then having to hold the phone while your friend pulls up the contact list on their phone, then recites the number to you, and then you write it on paper because your phone won’t let you add contacts while you’re on a call, and then you misplace the number you wrote on paper, ad nauseum. Why isn’t there a single button that says “Send this Phone Number to the Current Caller”?

It’s a common problem. You’re out and about, and realize you need to call a specific person, but you don’t have their phone number (or more often, you have it on your desktop computer, or your laptop, but that doesn’t do you any good in the current situation.) So you decide that the best thing to do is to call a mutual friend and ask them.

When they receive a phone call from you, they’re fumbling to hold the call while they look in their address book. (That is, if they’re lucky, and if their phone actually lets them open the contact list while they’re on a call.) More often, what happens is that they tell you to hang up while they consult their address book. And then you have to hunt for a piece of scrap paper because your phone won’t let you add a number to the list like that.

What the world needs is a button next to each phone number in the contact list that only appears whenever you’re on a call. The button, when pressed, sends an SMS from you to the current caller, and contains within it the information from the contact record you just selected. It doesn’t have to be too fancy, a two-line VCF record should do nicely.

If the recipient’s phone understands this method of contact transfer, it can prompt the user and import it automatically. If not, the user can still read the SMS herself, and dial the number. No more paper, no more fumbling, no more “let me call you back”.

It’s so easy, a caveman could do it. If only phones implemented it!