Syllabus for Eric's PhD Students
I will just offer some unsolicited advice about PhDs, as it came up a few weeks ago also.   And the author touches on this.  Of course this mostly applies to empirical sciences, but maybe some theoretical ones too.<p>An effective PhD advisor&#x2F;thesis isn&#x27;t wandering the woods to find something. It&#x27;s a guided coaching exercise, with an outcome in mind. Test whether the PhD advisor you select knows this and has a history of taking this approach with former students.<p>An advisor (and the PhD research he&#x2F;she guides you on) should be targeting a very conscious choice of incremental versus breakthrough research results.   And for most students, you&#x27;re not going to have a whole lot of mindblowingly field-changing results -- as much as you may think you&#x27;re a rockstar.  So it&#x27;s just sensible or an insurance policy to make sure you&#x27;ve got solid steady work that you&#x27;re progressing on.<p>Learn to enable your research to have visible incremental gains on a known path every day, rather than hoping for some breakthrough at the end.   Amazing breakthroughs have high risk, and make it highly likely you&#x27;ll have a crisis when it doesn&#x27;t happen.<p>Concretely, even if you don&#x27;t know what the answer is going to be at the end of your research, you must think about, or have an idea about, the format of what that amazing answer is going to be. Write the outline of your thesis and &quot;ghost out&quot; what the major charts will be. Write the intro sentences of each chapter -- what are they? (and I don&#x27;t just mean the boring review of the field part, but your findings part)<p>You should know what major type of finding, plot, or table your research is going to output. What are the columns and rows of that table, or axes of that plot? How many data points are required? How many of them can already be guessed? Where is the surprise going to be? What is the conclusion going to be?<p>Draw out the answer you&#x27;re aiming for, now. If you can&#x27;t even articuate what the answer will look like, you may be in for a bad time, so work on fixing that. It will also push you and your advisor to be specific about what the output of your thesis will be -- and set you up for a much better PhD experience.