What are /r/GradSchool's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

I admit, I'm an older student and had rituals long before grad school. Routine has been a part of my life for a long time.

1. I get up, take a shower, and get dressed. Then I wake the kids and I make a 4 cup pot of drip coffee every morning. It's cheaper and helps me regulate my intake down to only that coffee.

2. Once I send the kids off to their respective schools, I drive in to mine.

3. At 8am I either go attend a class or go read a new paper until it is time for class. In short mornings are for reading and doing homework. Also, I use Mendeley and file each paper by catagory as I read it.

4. Lunch is social. My friends and I get together to talk and laugh whether we packed our lunches or headed out to eat.

5. Afternoons are for research. My afternoons can be highly variable, but with the kids there is a regular schedule of picking them up and doing their stuff in the evenings.

6. Go to bed before 11 pm.

I've found Habitica to be helpful for keeping track of to do lists and routine things.

Yeah you really just have to learn to work efficiently. I would highly recommend reading Deep Work by Cal Newport, and using the Pomodoro time management technique. Those really, really helped train me into being an efficient worker.

I find it surprising that your school doesn't require you to verify coverage. Ours has us submit paperwork to prove it if we're with an outside carrier.

>I should mention that I am very healthy, exercise regularly, and generally take good care of myself.

Good for you, but that won't stop you from getting hit by a car, slipping on ice and breaking your knee, having your retina start to detach, getting cellulitis from a random scrape and requiring hospitalization, etc. All of these things have happened to me or family/friends in the past few years.

Insurance in the US is a terrible mess, but all in all I think going without insurance is a bad idea, especially if it might impact your enrollment status.

Edit: Have you checked out Healthcare.gov?

Oh boy cracks knuckles this is my jaaaaaaaaam. As an aside, I work full time (split between marketing for my university and teaching CW to middle schoolers), in addition to a full course load (in my case, that's 3 classes- MFA program), and volunteer (running the school's annual poetry festival).

So, I do a mix of paper and electronic: in class, I write all my notes out by hand in the same notebook, along with drafts of what I'm working on. This makes it easy for me to flip to say a poem that was discussed in class, and look at my notes on it while working on something else.

I also have a basic, self-designed planner that I write in by hand (1 page/day, two columns- one for time, one for commitments, with space for goals or reminders for each day). At the start of every week, I go through anything I've put into iCal on my phone, and block it into the week, along with my 'steadies' (class, teaching, meetings). At this time, I also check in with ToDoist and make sure that's up to date (I use TD to keep track of assignments, as well as project or thesis check-ins e.g. send out invitations to the Festival, send recent pages to thesis adviser). I also keep track of exercise in this planner (and my runs through the Strava app)-- while not technically school-related, I think having an outlet to burn stress (running, yoga, bouldering) keeps me from losing it.

I also use Evernote to keep track of notes during meetings-- part of this is so that whoever runs the Festival next year will just get a dump of all of my notes attached to specific dates and meetings to work off of, rather than the zip of random emails I was handed.

Hopefully this novel is helpful. Basically, play around and figure out what works for you. Paper is helpful for me because it seems more tangible-- and because my brain tends to work in flow charts but electronic is nice for posterity and because at the end of the day, paper accumulates and causes pile up.

A power strip. This was my mom's original travel hack and it's genius, especially for when you're in a homestay or hotel without a lot of outlets, or where the outlets aren't conveniently placed. I use this one because it packs up nice and has USB ports in addition to regular plugs, but pretty much any one on the market works. If you're traveling internationally, just make sure it's dual voltage - otherwise you can bust a perfectly fine power strip.

I fucking love it! (I just started though, so my viewpoint might change in a few years, haha.) I finally get to be around people who share the same passion and interests as I do. Are there moments where I hate my life? Sure, but stress in life is a given. All I know it that I'd rather be doing this than anything else (housewife, office job, retail, etc.). Here's a book I recommend that helped me conceptualize grad school better before I committed: https://www.amazon.com/Getting-What-You-Came-Students/dp/0374524777

yes, it's about half older material and half things she didn't put on the site, definitely worth getting if only to gift it to someone who clearly needs it after you've read through it and snortled yourself silly

I had strong aversive feelings about my research for roughly a year. Reviewing literature for the first resulting paper has fixed my aversion and replaced it with enthusiasm. What a great feeling :)

 

^(Reading Strunk and White's The Elements of Style has temporarily rendered me incapable of writing normally :<)

Don't make any decisions while you are in this state.

Get some exercise. Even if you don't like exercise. A good solid 30-45 minutes of something that raises your heart rate, even if it's just brisk walking. It will feel good, even if it doesn't sound like it right now.

Get some sleep. You're a PhD student, you almost definitely haven't been getting enough sleep. Try to sleep for 9 hours to help you catch up a little.

If you can take some time off, do so. And go somewhere. If you can't afford to travel for your vacation, then at least don't spend it at home, schedule a bunch of fun things to make sure you're getting out of the house - go see a movie, go to an animal shelter and play with cute animals, try to restart an old hobby, find a fun meetup.com group to visit, go to a plant nursery and walk around enjoying the greenness, go to a local museum (not related to your field of study)... fill a week with fun. You need a change of pace to help clear your head.

Hopefully you'll feel better after all of that. If not, consider consulting a mental health professional to get checked for depression.

But *don't* make any decisions while severely stressed and burnt out. Sentences beginning "I was getting really fed up, so I..." almost never end with a good decision. Wait until you're in a better place mentally, and can really think about what matters to you in life and whether or not a PhD contributes enough to that to be worth all the shit. Then make the decision.

My wife has this problem, not in Graduate School, but in work. She's brown and English isn't her first language. Others (in her case she mostly works with women) are constantly talking over her and not listening when she talks.

I've worked with her on becoming more dominant in conversations. And she read a couple books on workplace dynamics and such. Here is one of the books she read. Maybe it would help in your situation.

P.S. I'm sorry people are douches.

> 1) Use Excel to document your citations. Reserve a few columns for a precis (or a link to one) and some quotes. This will let you help you reuse research easily.

My friend, do you have a minute do hear about our Lord and savior Zotero? It's got a great cataloguing system, cloud storage, can keep PDFs, has built-in notes, a word and libre office plugin, and can usually manage to automatically pull all of the citation information and the full-text pdf right off of a journal page/google scholar. The dark ages of keeping these things in an .xls file are over!

I just defended last month in STEM and I wore a black businessy dress similar to the ones you posted and got positive feedback about it. I’ll post a link if I can find one. I brought a cardigan to wear if I got cold but didn’t end up wearing it.

Edit: this was my dress

R

Extremely customizable, lots of packages for different types of graphs. There's definitely a learning curve, but it's fantastic for graphics (and statistics). You might want to check out the ggplot2 package.

Edit: forgot to mention that R is free and open source since price is a factor for OP

> Yale is asking the National Labor Relations Board to review the Local 33-Unite Here union's organizing tactics. The university also intends to ask the federal labor regulator to reconsider its policy ruling last year that graduate student instructors at private universities are employees and therefore eligible to organize.

Source is from NPR

I used to have the same presentation anxiety. For me, it went away when I had to present more (akin to exposure therapy). A brief 10-minute guided meditation (e.g. https://www.headspace.com/meditation/10-minute-meditation) a bit before the presentation may also help.

This is great! Zotero is also great - extension for Firefox and Chrome and a standalone desktop version, all neatly synced. You're able to store PDFs that you have downloaded and you can cite straight onto MS word with just a few clicks. I mainly use it for taking and organising notes. I've just installed the Scholar extension now. You can never have too many places to have citations saved!

It sounds to me like the bigger problem isn't his pay, it's that you aren't being compensated appropriately for your work.

That alone is still worth having a conversation with your PI. You don't necessarily have to bring the new hire into it; just explain that you work X number of hours a week and you feel you deserve to be compensated at that rate... Or, if she'd rather, you can maintain your paygrade and work at the number of hours for which you are paid. If they pay you 32 hours a week, you can explain, then you're going to work 32 hours a week.

Put that on the table and mean it. Stay firm. There's a lot of hair-shirting, "I work 127 hours a week!"ing in academia, but the reality is that martyrdom isn't worth a penny. If they don't pay you for your time they don't value your time. That's not something that's said in academia very often because the institution tries to guilt you into asserting your rights as an employee, but that's the truth: pay us what you owe us. This is an article from the tech sector but it's just as relevant here.

They will squeeze as much out of you as possible. It's nothing personal; it's business. So get your stolen 8 hours a week back-- because if they're free and you're working, they are stolen-- or get them paid.

> That's just how the package worked for some stupid reason.

Now, I'm not a lawyer or a financial advisor, but you should speak to someone who is. /r/legaladvice and /r/personalfinance are a good place to start. If you're not being paid what you deserve, and your contract which is "stupid" is the reason, then you need support to ascertain your rights.

How do I import a Mendeley library into Zotero? from the Zotero website.

It might be the online service of Zotero, which is totally optional, and the free tier has a limit IIRC. You can sync PDFs and config with something like Dropbox too tho, for no added cost. The online tool has some extra features around collaboration if I'm not mistaken but I never used it.

LaTeX is a typesetting system. All you have to do is worry about what to write and LaTeX handles all the formatting for you. It's widely used for scientific publishing.

EDIT: Introductory video.

Maybe not strictly in the topic, however very, very motivational - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman.

Use a color filter on your devices.

Windows: https://justgetflux.com Linux: redshift

Macos has built in, as does windows 10 but I like flux more.

Find one for your Android or ios device too. There are a couple.

I was in a similar boat; I loved (and professionally recommended) Mendeley until they started having problems. Parallel to those problems was a decision to encrypt data in a way that makes it inaccessible to its users. It made me concerned that the software may transition away from a fee-free model. Now I'm adopting Zotero.

Yes, you could easily take out the drive and plug it into another computer. Still a good idea to back stuff up though in case your disk fails or stuff gets corrupted. 3-2-1 is a good rule of thumb

I always try to have someone else in my lab review my writing before it goes to my advisor. Practically, it uses your advisor's time more efficiently, and psychologically, it is less crushing to get a paper dripping in red from a labmate than from your advisor.

Other than that, english is hard no matter who you are or how long you've been writing it.

If you haven't read it, The Elements of Style is short and full of great writing advice.

>I tried photocopying a book...

Shoot it with your phone, using a direct-to-PDF app like CamScanner. I've scanned many thousands of pages using my phone and it's very handy-- and often faster than using the big scanner in the library.

Spend $30 and read The Professor is In and A PhD is not Enough. These two books go over, in copious detail, how to get a job with a graduate degree (specifically a PhD). Key take-aways are: go to a top school and/or work with a top researcher in your field. Publish a lot. Don't be an adjunct if you want to be a researcher. For STEM fields: Assistant Professorships aren't all they're cracked up to be and you should consider working for industry or government labs as well (and then trying for a fast-tracked Associate Professorship - if you're still interested in that - after building up your body of work.)

It's a bit old, but this book is very commonly recommended for psych grad school and is probs in your library: https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Step-Step-Admission-Psychology/dp/1591477999/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1536719364&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=getting+in+psychology

Your department may also have this giant hunk: https://www.amazon.com/Graduate-Psychology-American-Psychological-Association/dp/1433828111

You can also email the department head and ask if they have any presentations or meetings on the grad school process. This is pretty common in psych programs. You may also want to set up an appointment at your career center.

If you have any specific questions, please feel free to ask. I'm getting my doctorate in Counseling Psych.

1.) Decrease the brightness of the screen.
2.) Use f.lux

or Transfer them to Paperwhite

The Statistics One Coursera class started four days ago and the Khan Academy section on Probability is also a good resource.

Both are free.

Zotero, of course.

Automatic metadata retrieval from just a PDF, one-click download of full text and citation from thousands of websites, big reference style directory, you can make timelines and generate reports, and you can attach notes to items. The advanced search is great too, and the organisation of items (they liken it to nested iTunes playlists) works really well.

• Dropbox for storage.
• Zotero for reference management.
• Evernote for storing general notes (diagrams, meeting notes, etc).
• Plain text for writing:
  • Write using Markdown formatting in MarkdownPad 2. Markdown's far easier to read and write than Latex.
  • Use Pandoc to convert the plain text into .docx format when it's time to send it back and forth for revision.

Writing in plain text is far more rapid for me, it means I don't have to worry about spacing and stuff. It also means I can do work across any device I own (phone, tablet, even an AlphaSmart word processor) without the slowness and agony normally associated with using an office suite on a portable device. When Pandoc does the conversion it also applies the styling of a template document I've made, so I've set all that stuff once and been able to forget about it. You can also do fancy things like have different template documents for each journal, so you've already got their preferred line spacing, numbering, font settings, blah blah.

I've been using the online LaTeX environment sharelatex. I have also heard good things about overleaf.

They're nice because you don't have to download and install LaTeX yourself and provide a lot of nice features similar to Google Drive/Docs.

If you plan on writing in LaTeX at all (which I highly recommend), my favorite LaTeX editor is TeXstudio (http://texstudio.sourceforge.net/) and I highly recommend JabRef for Bibtex editing (http://jabref.sourceforge.net/).

> I can't stand school. I hate homework. I hate lectures. I hate the whole idea of school

Honestly, grad school is not up your alley, at least not now. You will need to take the GRE, the 2.49 is really going to hurt your chances of getting in, but you will probably be ok on the letters of rec.

The minimum I've seen for grad programs is 2.7, and you really don't want to be just clearing the minimum. IF you got into a program, I'd be willing to bet the restrictions would be pretty tight. A lot of programs have a 3.0 requirement while you attend Grad School.

Sign-up for some MOOCs in bioinformatics to see how you do, and find out if it really is something you want to pursue. Until you get excited about going back to school, I would highly discourage applying to programs. You don't have to go to school for this kind of work, but you will have to teach yourself a lot, and any position you find will probably be limited in terms of advancement. Best of luck.

I wish I knew that budgeting shouldn't be stressful, and doing it well is enjoyable, freeing, and can change your life. I had been doing alright with budgeting but not planning for future expenses, and it was very stressful when I had a sudden, large expense. This was exacerbated by my meager grad student stipend. I switched to a more future-looking method (using YNAB, which is free for students for the first year), and am doing so much better.

I will see what I can do! It currently has no GUI, and it does take some editing to get it just right, but in the end, it works just fine for me. I had been using Speechify back when it was free. But now it runs around $130/year and I decided I shouldn't have to pay for that..

This one is pretty good too:

https://www.naturalreaders.com/online/

Agree with a lot of the comments in here. Grammar checkers are a great tool, but as any tool, it isn't perfect. All languages have a long list of grammar exceptions or complicated nuances, and automatic tools tend to have problems with the more obscure ones, such as some aspects of academic writing. I'm just starting in my field, and English isn't my native language, so I find a grammar tool invaluable. It doesn't save you from learning proper grammar, as you should know when the tool is wrong, because it will be wrong in some scenarios.

I personally find that Grammarly Premium is prohibitively expensive for me, and looking for alternatives I found LanguageTool (https://languagetool.org), it is an open source grammar checker with a cheaper hosted premium option and good extensions for browsers.

I use Zotero for organizing PDFs and don't really print anything. Zotero has the capability to sync across computers using a small amount of free cloud storage they provide. I also have a "Current Readings" folder in DropBox that I use as my primary way of moving articles to and from my tablet/other computers.

Someone also posted a quick guide to using Amazon's S3 as way of syncing Zotero across multiple devices. I haven't done it, but I've been thinking about doing it over winter break.

It might be worthwhile to talk to your advisor and colleagues about the system they use: there are many websites and software packages that provide very similar functionality, so if everyone in your department uses one thing, it might be best to just go with the flow. Because many things are so similar, once you find a system that is functional, I'd just go full throttle on using it rather than trying to make it the single best system. You can always tweak your workflow later.

I've used a variety of programs for this on a variety of operating systems. The best program I always come back to is OmniGraffle for the mac. It's not free, but I paid for this as a graduate student (neuroscience, lots of network diagrams) and it was honestly worth the $60 it costs with the student discount.

Another program to look into is GLE. It's a layout and graphing program that uses scripts instead of a UI (although there is a rudimentary UI). If you can get very proficient at the GLE language it's incredible. New data? Just replace your data file.

As for to-do lists, there is Remember The Milk that you actually can integrate with Google Calendar. It could also serve for note taking, but it is not half as versatile as Evernote.

I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure the whole VPN security thing is super overrated. As I understand it, the measures NordVPN and everyone else that sponsors half of YouTube are built into modern websites. But don't take my word for it, I'm an econ major

Sounds like you just need some self confidence. Exposure does not seem to be the problem. Confidence is easy. Step 1: Lift. Step 2: Don't be a pussy. Step 3: Read some books. Models by Mark Manson is very good. The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida is a bit kooky but really good if you can look past that stuff. Those would be my best two recommendations.

Probably the most important thing is: Don't put pussy on the pedestal--that's where you belong. Or in nicer words, have (1) expectations, and (2) self-respect.

Good luck!

I don't know of anything in particular, but I would suggest 2 things: read Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style", which is a generally great guide to writing. Second, read LOTS of papers in your field. Research papers are a lot easier than creative writing once you learn the "language formulas" other academics use. This will help you to establish a clear, neutral voice. Good luck!

Semantic Scholar includes an automatic TLDR for the papers that it indexes. But as someone already mentioned, reading the abstract and conclusion is probably more useful.

Edit: typo

Depends on the location. This is the sort of degree that will do OK in primary markets and state capitals (and obviously DC). Check out some indeed search results to get a feel for job opportunities.

Mine's only 20 minutes in rush hour on city streets, but I've done something similar to your commute before.

My main tip is to get into podcasts or audiobooks. There are apps for your phone where you subscribe to podcasts and it downloads them to your phone while you're on wifi. I can recommend This American Life, Radiolab, pretty much anything by NPR (I like Planet Money), Serial, Freakonomics, Intelligence Squared Debates, 99% Invisible, or you can just look at this list. There's a podcast for everybody.

I use PocketCasts on Android and I've heard Overcast is good on iPhone. Overcast has premade lists based on certain categories that you can subscribe to which is helpful when you're starting out.

Other than that you can subscribe to Audible to get a new audiobook every month. I'm just now getting into that so I don't have any good recommendations.

I find that listening to people talk works a lot better than listening to music for those long driving trips.

It sounds like Poll Everywhere might be what you're looking for. I think it's free as long as your class size is below a certain number, and your students can simply respond by texting and don't need to download an app. Disclaimer: I haven't actually used this myself, I just heard about it from another grad student.

From the Encyclopaedia Brittanica:

>LIBERAL ARTS, college or university curriculum aimed at imparting general knowledge and developing general intellectual capacities in contrast to a professional, vocational, or technical curriculum. In the medieval European university the seven liberal arts were grammar, rhetoric, and logic (the trivium) and geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy (the quadrivium). In modern colleges and universities the liberal arts include the study of literature, languages, philosophy, history, mathematics, and science as the basis of a general, or liberal, education. Sometimes the liberal-arts curriculum is described as comprehending study of three main branches of knowledge: the humanities (literature, language, philosophy, the fine arts, and history), the physical and biological sciences and mathematics, and the social sciences.

Just wondering, what exactly is a college algebra course, content-wise? It sounds really vague (since algebra is a huge topic) so I googled it and found this Udacity course. I have a hard time believing that a masters program would accept this as a "college" level preparatory course, though, since it's material that you would learn in high school. Thus, I am confused!

A couple of years ago I set up an instance of DokuWiki (https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki) for my lab.

> Which service do you use?

Self hosted DokuWiki.

> What do you use the wiki for?

We use it to unofficially continually share details with our sister lab in the government (they use Atlassian's Confluence which is amazing, but we can't access it). So common tasks have internal howtos, links to other resources, templates for various things we do, etc.

I also like to use it as a more permanent, but less detailed, version of my lab notebook. I keep a log of what I've spent time on and create a weekly blog entry summarizing my week.

Regarding features

We self-host on an old (this is low volume web traffic) lab machine, give everyone a user account, and force all traffic through SSL. The self hosting along with university policy gives us the URL labname.collegename.university.edu, which is quite nice.

The storage is plain text files. So there's a markdown-like syntax that is used to render pages. Every page is just a text file that you can actually read. There's a hierarchy concept which is rare for wikis (and actually the feature that made me use it) that is implemented as text files in directories (or folders if you're more used to a Windows world)

I post a ton of code snippets and there's nice syntax highlighting.

I use Zotero, which is available on Firefox. It's an open-source Mendeley-like that doesn't support in-place notes (it's a more pure save-for-later system), but it works pretty well.

> Zotero has a limit as to the number of papers I believe for the free version. Mendeley does not.

Zotero does not offer free unlimited cloud storage for PDFs (and Mendeley doesn't either), but there's no limit on metadata storage:

> Data syncing is free, has no storage limit, and can be used without file syncing.

The book Pro Git by Chacon is considered the authoritative reference and is available online for free at: http://git-scm.com/book. If you are working on your project alone and aren't doing anything too extravagant, chapters 1 and 2 should be enough to get you started. If you get stuck, use google to see if the question has been answered somewhere (hint: it most likely has) or post on StackOverflow.

Here's something that I wish I was taught before using git: Practice before using git on your actual work! Set up a small test project and familiarize yourself with the basic commands. It's quite possible to accidentally delete stuff you didn't mean to delete if you're not 100% what you're doing.

To be honest, most of the building side I did months ago as part of a The Hacker Within tutorial; I don't remember much of the details besides everything being really finicky. As far as I remember, we followed the Jekyll Quickstart Guide to build a webpage, pushed the resulting directory to a GitHub repo, and that was all it took for the page to be visible online. This guide seems to be pretty comprehensive on the GitHub Pages side. One of the hardest parts was getting my domain to point correctly at the GitHub page so that I could use <first name><last name>.com instead of the .github.io url. It took a lot of fiddling on both my domain's registrar and the GitHub pages menu, and it wasn't clear why the settings I ended up with were what worked versus what other tutorials said.

Once the site existed though, I could just edit the index.md page using markdown and jekyll automatically built a new corresponding HTML page for me. That's the nature of all the changes I've made in the past few weeks.

I'm sorry I can't be more directly helpful - if I can find the slides to that original tutorial I'll link them here.

Depends on your future path.

If your route takes you into the sciences, learn how to use LaTeX (http://www.latex-project.org/). It is a document preparation software that helps you format publication quality documents (a lot of journals provide style and bibliography files for LaTeX).

You can create diff documents to track version changes (latexdiff), and do some really cool stuff (make presentations, posters, flowcharts, various graphics and all sorts of things).

I use OmniGraffle for Mac. It's perfect for figures. It has a natural user interface and has deeper stuff (eg, you can draw lines to shapes then drag the shapes around and the lines stay connected). You can even drag in Latex equations and edit them in OmniGraffle by double clicking!

https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle

I like using Texmaker as the frontend for LaTeX.

You write it as a normal Latex document, but you have all the additional UI to help you write it. More user friendly than texworks, much neater than Lyx :)

Well, cheaper can bring peace of mind in that you don’t have to worry about damaging and expensive laptop/tablet. I picked up a (gasp) cheap Amazon Fire Tab 10, side loaded google play store so I can run a terminal, Jupiter lab in a browser, MS Office and other quality of life apps. Bought it in case my 2012 MB pro decides to die. Honestly it’s excellent for the price, long battery life. What makes it even better is the case/keyboard they make for it, get a cheap Bluetooth mouse and your set with a cursor as well. I don’t have to really worry about damage because it was cheap and the case it honestly quite sturdy. It’s a perfect size too IMHO. USB-C helps for physical connections. If interested: https://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Keyboard-detachable-Generation-release/dp/B08SB72Q8F/ref=mp_s_a_1_6?dchild=1&amp;keywords=amazon+tab+10+plus+with+keyboard&amp;qid=1633884907&amp;sr=8-6

Hi there! While /u/Flerburt8919 has some incredible ideas, I just wanted to share my .02 on food making. I have a 6-month old who is eating solids and making my own food has actually been quick and easy (Jeez, I sound like an infomercial). But truly, I don't find it difficult at all. Eg.:

1. Throw a sweet potato in the oven for 45 minutes. Write/read while baking.
2. Let sweet potato cool.
3. Blend with water.
   

I mean, the whole thing takes me maybe 5 minutes of actual work. Everything is basically bake/boil, then blend. Occasionally I go a little wild and toss in a tablespoon of olive oil, mix peanut butter and banana together, or I scramble an egg to throw in oatmeal but truly it doesn't feel time excessive and it does save a ton.

Another option that is definitely not for everyone but has saved us hundreds, if not eventually thousands, of dollars is cloth diapers. They're not like your grandma's cloth diapers with a big pin, they're very easy. I registered for them as baby shower gifts and so I've not spent a penny on diapers or wipes. We have enough diapers that it's one extra load of laundry per week. There are subs dedicated to cloth diapering (r/clothdiaps) but I haven't found it complicated or stressful. I use these from Amazon for diapers, these reusable wipes and diaper liners, and this dispenser to hold the wipes. We do use disposables during travel outside of home. If you feel like giving it a go I highly recommend it!

Congrats and good luck!

things for a comfortable office set up. Good lighting, a comfortable chair!! (or at least get a ergonomic seat cushion if your chair sucks like so many university office chairs for grad students do lol), water bottle, external monitor, extra usb chargers/docking stations are always handy. I use a bullet journal so like a good planner but if you plan digitally thats fine too. When i am having a hard time being productive i do pomodoro method and i like having a timer on my desk for that (something like (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07L2NTXX5/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_3?smid=A2LGW2LWX2J6KK&amp;psc=1).

Once the pandemic is over and you can go back to the office I liked having an office survival kit lol. I had a stash of snacks (granola bars, individually portioned trail mix, nuts, dried fruit, candy, cans of soup etc.), toiletries (deodorant, a travel toothbrush etc.) for in case you stay super late at night and feel gross and want to freshen up or if there is an unexpected famous professor visiting and you get invited to meet with them. And finally I always get cold especially indoors in summer with air conditioning so I had a blanket in my office and a comfy oversized sweatshirt I kept in there. Obviously this stuff is if you get an office space but having this stuff in the office is super handy.

Not OP but I like Zinsser's On Writing Well for academic writing and Stanley Fish's How To Write A Sentence: and How To Read One which is admittedly geared towards creative writing.

Also, read books, people. Outside your field. It'll teach you sentences and grammar if you pay attention. It's called close reading and it's a super useful tool. Consider from time to time what a clean sentence is and what makes it clean.

Or even reading in your field. Ask yourself what makes a particular paper boring or difficult to read vs. enjoyable, clear, and concise. And then apply that to your own work.

tl;dr Sorry, writer here, totally entered a stress induced fugue state or something; I'm not a scientist.

No offense, but that article is really not very helpful in explaining what "good" writing is or how to achieve it reliably in a range of potential writing contexts.

I would rather point folks to something like They Say, I Say or On Writing Well or Everything's An Argument or any of the numerous books or articles written by writing scholars to help students learn to navigate genres, or rhetorical contexts, or drafting & revision practices, or ...

This. Mental effort is a limited resource, so you can't expect yourself to be able to (or want to) read something in depth or complex after doing just that all day.

If my job is to run marathons, and that's what I do all day, I am not going to feel like stepping on that treadmill when I get home. Comic books (and reddit) are your brain's way of relaxing.

And yet I'm going to recommend a book: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman is a good read that touches on this in a very accessible way (he writes to a generally educated reader, not a psychologist).

Here it is: Link

I hope I did that right. Okay, if you don't die from boredom, I will be happy. Feel free to leave comments, maybe in a different color.

I work on collaborative projects a ton and Trello has proven particularly useful for task flow (it is an online Kanban system essentially).

Look at this - right up your street :P https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;id=6cHUAwAAQBAJ&amp;oi=fnd&amp;pg=PA1&amp;dq=restaurants+postmodern&amp;ots=GqMuglA5Yc&amp;sig=UJoqV9rRU9GXUIdm_72wdalxtbI#v=onepage&amp;q=restaurants%20postmodern&amp;f=false edit: I'm on a rooolllll

You download it onto your desktop and it adjusts the brightness of the screen based on the time of day. It significantly reduces the stress on your eyes. It is available for download here.

This was such a much needed post for me, thanks OP and everyone else for making great suggestions!!

I personally don't have anything to add except for maybe flux. It changes the temperature (color) of your computer screen to match softer indoor lighting at night. I struggle with a lot of sleeping problems and it does help me a bit. So it's not really a productivity or data/writing tool, but sleeping well and staying healthy is really important in grad school.

Take the compounds with you, and finish the project. Be sure to credit your old PI when you do - you don't want to burn bridges there.

Regarding the complaint about the postdoc - if you do anything other than what he wants you to do (publish the paper with him as first author) you are already at risk of retaliation, including him trying to damage your reputation with his own warped version of the story. Submitting the complaint now makes you the first one to come forward and gives your side of the story more credibility.

If you have any witnesses, get written statements from them now while their memories are still fresh. Save all of your emails, even ones that seem innocuous (several methods for doing that here) so that when your old university closes your account you'll still have them.

More likely than not, your complaint will be "investigated" and then nothing will come of it. Especially since this guy is leaving for a faculty job at another institution anyway. But since he's going to be faculty, in a year or two he's going to be someone's advisor. Someone in an even more difficult position than you (since you're leaving for a good school, have the support of your current PI, and aren't depending on the crazy guy for your funding). In which case a previous history of complaints against him may help that grad student get her/his complaints taken seriously.

Yep, here is a link to the github pages website. https://pages.github.com/

I also love this resource if you are new to git/github and just want to get started with Github Pages. Git is basically like a video, and youtube is the hub where you can publish videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZsgPgGdOzQ

There are a couple of interesting courses on Coursera (and they are free!). Coursera host many online courses from great universities. THese are some options for you:

Mathematical Biostatistics Bootcamp I (Johns Hopkins University) https://www.coursera.org/course/biostats

This will teach you the basics in statistics. I am pretty sure it covers all the topics you mention in pre-requisite (100% sure about I-VII, can't remember for sure about the rest).

There is also a follow-up course, Biostatistics Bootcamp II. Officially Biostatistics Bootcamp I is 'closed' and II almost closed. This just means you won't earn a certificate. But you can still see all the videos and make all the online quizes.

An easier start is Case-Based Introduction to biostatistics (also Johns Hopkins): https://www.coursera.org/course/casebasedbiostat This is a course where you get a more general idea about statistics, but won't learn you all the pre-requisite subjects you mentioned.

I don't think they have a course about Java, but you should check.

I did all the three courses on biostatistics that I mentioned and it really has helped me prepare for my PhD (starting next week!). I think Coursera is a great way to learn, because there are video lectures but there are also quizes and homework assignments that you can do online. Plus, it's for free!

Let me know if you have any questions.

"While I have no problem grasping difficult concepts, when I actually implement them into code"

It sounds like you're jumping into pretty complex code pretty quickly, and that's exacerbated because coding formulas is pretty condensed. I'd recommend visiting a site like https://leetcode.com/ and practicing writing formulaic code in steps. Start with the expected, obvious use case, test it until you're sure it works, and then add edge cases gradually, testing after every addition. Like how you start a jigsaw puzzle with the borders.

This is the book we're using for my research methods class, if that helps! It's really easy to read.

http://www.bookdepository.com/Essential-Guide-Doing-Your-Research-Project-Zina-OLeary/9781446258972

I've found that The Most Dangerous Writing App is especially good for stuff like this, if only to get me to keep writing continuously. Just make sure you have hardcore mode disabled, and you can export your end results to a word doc.

You say you want to streamline the bookmarking process. I can't recommend enough this program called InnoReader. It's completely changed how I approach this topic. It's effectively an RSS feeder, so you can add all your favorite journals there. You can view all your feeds together or individually by journal. It will "gray out" the ones you've already read and in general is a beautiful app. It also has a bookmarking feature where you can read articles later either on the app or on their website when you get to work. It honestly feels a lot like Reddit. I just scroll through the new articles of the day before going to bed. Takes like 30 seconds to identify potentially interesting articles based on title/abstract and save them for later.

I use vPulse earbuds because they sound great, have a fantastic friction fit for my ears (hooray passive sound isolation), and perhaps best of all, don't leak sound and bother the people around me.

Also, check out A Soft Murmur for slideriffic customizable white noise!

I did not know pollen till now and I must say it looks pretty neat. However, you might want to have a look a Pandoc which can convert from Markdown and may other formats to LaTeX, HTML, ePub etc. I haven't gotten to toy around with it much, yet, but it seems to be able to do the task.

I went to a seminar on this, and heard Inkscape is good, and is also free. Never used it myself though.

And EPosters is supposed to be a good site if you just want to see what different kinds of good posters look like.

For lab classes or things that require hands-on demonstration, I totally get the difficulty in adequately showing it on camera. I don't know what resources one might have have, but an action camera (like a GoPro), a phone, a tripod, or some other mounting device lets you record your protocols. If you have a second person to help move the camera around or get close-up angles, that's also great.

My personal pro tip when putting up video recordings of protocols or lab techniques, DO NOT TALK DURING THE RECORDING. It can often distract the viewer from what you're doing. In fact, unless the native audio of the video is absolutely necessary, don't use it all! Instead, when you're cutting/editing the video together later, just record a separate audio track of you speaking, timed to the final cut of the video on screen. This makes narrating so much clearer because you won't have the pauses/fumbles/interruptions/heavy breathing/cursing that will inevitably come up because you're trying to narrate live while doing your task.

If you want a nice, very powerful, and most importantly, FREE video editing software, I recommend DaVinci Resolve - as of March 2020 it's on version #16, and is incredibly useful.

I am also staring my deadline in the face (July 31) and am exhausted as well. It's also much easier to give advice than than to get it, so hopefully I say something useful.

1. Definitely take time off. I really hate doing it, it feels very unproductive and lazy, but I'm usually able to put in some good work the next day.
2. I listen to an upbeat music station to stay focused. I can't focus if the music has words, and classical puts me to sleep. I prefer instrumental electronic music. It doesn't sound like just noise, honest.
3. Mornings are the far superior time for me to work. If I can swing it, I try to get up at like 5:30 so that I can either be at my desk or favorite Sbux by 7 (this hasn't been working lately because our psycho kitten is keeping us awake).
4. I try to oscillate between coffee and tea. I find that the caffeine affects me differently depending on the source, though that could all be in my head.
5. And lastly, if all else fails, aim for a non-zero day. Just do something, even if it's just making a list of what you need to do. I've even heard of making a to-done list so that you can see what you've accomplished. Lists are productive procrastination.

Good luck! Stay strong, and dissertate like the wind!

Edit/Addendum: I just want to say to all of us who are exhausted and struggling - your feelings and experiences are justified, valid, and to be expected. This is hard (if it was easy, everyone would do it ::eye roll::). But it's ok to feel like this. It's ok to wake up 5 times a night to jot down thoughts, or in a panic that you didn't email the draft that you really did. It's ok to have dreams about that one committee member berating you. This doesn't feel good, but it's temporary and will be over eventually. You are enduring with all of us and we will all persevere.

It depends on what the structure is. For some recently discovered metabolite, it's important to state the source of the structural data. However for any image that you re-use, you need to follow proper attribution guidelines. As /u/superhelical stated, the proper action is to re-draw the structure using chemdraw (your university probably has a free license) or other similar program such as ChemSketch.

Okay so I sort of found a workaround. Maybe someday someone will be in the same situation and find this useful:

• 1a. Download free BibDesk for Mac.
• 1b. Open BibDesk and select (File), (Open), and then open the BibTex file downloaded from Europe PMC.
• 1c. Select (File), (Export), and export to RIS.
• 2a. Open EndNote X7 and import the RIS file you just created.
• 2b. Select all references you just imported and right-click and select (Find Reference Updates). This will search for all fields in your references that might be missing, in this case primarily keywords and abstracts. You'll be shown a comparison of info that EndNote found and what you've just imported from your RIS file, and you can select "Update empty fields" to add the abstract/keywords and still preserve the URLs to Europe PMC's citations.

I stopped after completing step 1 because I'm dealing with over 800 references and don't have the time to populate every field for every single reference. Now I have an RIS file I can use, but without abstracts. It's not a perfect solution, but better than nothing.

Hmm, that's totally outside my comfort zone but I think maybe Jamovi can be a (partial) replacement? It's a GUI package built on top of R, but it's point and click like SPSS. There's also JASP which IIUC is similar but the UI is a bit different, maybe more SPSS like.

https://www.jamovi.org/ https://jasp-stats.org/

Hey, thanks for this response. Zotfile works pretty well, and I also signed up to be a beta tester for the Zotero iOS app which is working even better so far. If you want to try it, you can sign up here: https://www.zotero.org/iosbeta

I use Zotero, which works very well for me. You create a library with all your references, then you can split them into certain subjects (they call them collections).

Importantly, you can write and save notes about the paper/reference and use the notes as search criteria when you are trying to locate a particular reference later. i.e. I have a full library of 240 publications, a collection called "Estuary Processes" with 45 references, and a few sentences from each paper that are of interest to me in the "notes" section, which I can search and use when I am writing a paper. Here is a good tutorial. There are several others out there.

Or if you don't want Papers, Zotero has WebDAV backup. There are many free WebDAV providers, or if you have web hosting you can create a WebDAV repo there. It works really well with ZotPad for mobile paper-reading and annotation too!

Definitely go ask the librarians. Don't start by asking your PI - you don't want your first interaction to be about how you haven't yet mastered a basic skill. Give it a few days/weeks, build up some familiarity with the literature, and then you can ask them if you're missing anything once you've shown your own initiative.

There are two approaches for lit searching, and you should use both:

• searching databases: PubMed, Web of Knowledge, Scopus, google scholar. They each have their strengths/weaknesses, and the librarian can help identify the most appropriate one(s) for you. Try them all otu and see which you like best. You can search by keywords, by papers that cite a certain paper, and by authors, for example.
• Paper reference trails: find one of your PI's papers, then look at the papers they cite, then look at the papers those papers cite, etc etc. Repeat the process for other key papers as necessary.

Last but not least, make sure you keep good track of what you find & read. I use Zotero for reference management and there are also lots of other good options. Take lots of notes, you'll need them later and it will save tons of time in the long run.

Try https://swirlstats.com, it is a bit more interactive if you aren't the type to pick up a coding book and work your way through it.

RStudio can also help to be able to visualize what you are working on. https://www.rstudio.com

Ever tried Grapher? Easy to learn, easy to use and...^ahem... ^^easy ^^to ^^find...

EDIT: R (with packages like lattice or ggplot) have some pretty neat graph tools too if you're willing to learn how to use them. But that shouldn't be a problem for someone in computer sciences I guess.

Sounds like a sensible plan; I would definitely put that in your personal statement.

If you haven't yet, I'd start getting acquainted with R and Bioconductor now, as they can have pretty steep learning curves.

Here's my workflow:

Dropbox for storage/backup

Zotero for pulling references (I export these references to Bibtex later, which is simple in Zotero)

LaTeX/Bibtex for writing and generating formatted references. There's a learning curve here, but it's worth the investment, in my opinion. I'll take working with LaTeX code over fighting with Word any day.

Sublime Text 2 as a LaTeX editor/builder (it's really an incredible text editor in general, and works well to build LaTeX via a plugin)

I've written several papers for publication and all of my "milestone" works (masters, qual, dissertation) this way. The setup is very author-friendly, but, unfortunately, not very collaborator friendly. I do a lot of collaboration, though, it just ends up that my collaborators have to make comments on a PDF, rather than editing text directly. I know there are a few options for "collaborative LaTeX" out there, but I prefer it this way. It tends to keep them from making silly wording changes, and instead they comment more generally about things they have issues with. Then I fix those things with my own words, which helps keep the document more cohesive, in my opinion. This won't work for everyone though, especially people who need a lot of help with wording/grammar, etc.

Someone else here suggested MarkdownPad, which seems interesting. I've never used it, but the only concern I would have is its availability of templates. (Does it have templates? I have no idea.) For example, Word and LaTeX are so common, that many journals have templates for them that take care of formatting your paper correctly for you. That can save a ton of time when you're writing a paper with a specific journal in mind.

Everything I mentioned above is 100% free BTW. So check it out if any of it sounds interesting to you.

I know this post is ancient by internet standards, but during my own studying I came across another resource that'll probably benefit you when you get around to your own studying: a guide to PGRE practice exams with lots of review formulae and explanations for a large chunk of the practice problems. It's neither complete nor perfect, but it's a good start.

Read a lot to develop good taste and write a lot.

Once you've got that killer taste you'll find that you don't like a lot of your writing. That's because learning how to write well takes a lot longer than learning to recognize good writing - but muddle through, you'll be fine.

Try to get your writing done as early as possible. Throw it in a drawer for a few weeks and come to it with new eyes. Shave what you can, move things around to make it flow better - and at this point I usually figure out I can delete a section. Do that!

There's a bunch of great writing resources on Medium; I recommend James Buckhouse in particular.

Good luck!

I'm in the US, for what that's worth. My psych has always told me that if you feel like you're taking medication, then the medication should be adjusted. In other words, you shouldn't be experiencing side effects bad enough to make you stop taking them–skipping days can mess up your system. Now, adjustment could refer to a different medication, a different dosage, or even a generic/brand name version of the meds that you're currently on. In any case, keep working on it with your doc. It's a process.

In terms of coping mechanisms, I'm of the mind that each person needs to find what works for themselves, but I'll give you a list of strategies that made big differences for myself:

• Printing out assigned readings instead of reading a PDF on a screen cut my reading time by about 75%. Huge difference.
• I mark the fuck outta those readings. Lots of annotations and marginalia that mostly function to break up the arguments into little chunks. Makes it a lot easier to get my head around them.
• Flowstate has been an absolutely invaluable application. Increases my writing productivity by something like 300%, no joke.
• I don't work for more than 90 minutes at a stretch unless I'm being extra productive and don't mind continuing. If you look at this diagram and many others like it, you'll notice that many people only actually work for about 4-6 hours per day. If I'm being honest with myself, that's an extremely productive day for me, so I just aim for that and anything extra is even better. If I try to actually work for 9 hours in a day, I get overtired and my productivity goes down. Reading and writing is a lot more draining than most people think.

All that said, none of those strategies work if I can't even get myself out of bed, which happens occasionally. When it does, I just try my best to not beat myself up and get back on track.

I'm currently in the thick of it, desperately cranking out the last couple dozen pages of my thesis for a looming deadline in two weeks, but I just want you to know you're not alone. I was in the exact same position this time last year with my first-year thesis.

Start small. Create the overarching chapter structure, edit the table of contents, throw in a few bullet-point notes here and there with thoughts on what you might insert into the sections themselves. Gloss over your data and scribble down in the thesis document itself whatever happens to catch your eye.

Beyond that, try establishing a strict schedule and set location where you do nothing - and I mean nothing - but sit at your computer and try to work. For me, it's waking up at 7:30 every morning, making my coffee, putting my phone in another room, turning on Coldturkey, and sifting over articles until I feel inspired enough to vomit out some words on the page. Need a break? By all means take it, but don't do it in the same place you work. Want to decompress with a game? Do it in another room, taking your laptop with you if you have to. Want to watch Youtube or Netflix for a bit? Do what you gotta do - but make sure you do it somewhere else.

I'm not saying these methods are a magic pill, but I managed to crank out the entirety of my 79-page thesis last year from complete scratch - research data and all - in one month by doing this. It was one of the worst experiences of my life, and I highly recommend you start trying to establish this sort of working schedule now to avoid it, but I ended up getting highest marks and obtained my first-year diploma with highest honors. There's no panacea for this sort of thing, but it's surmountable.

You got this.

Don't compare to other GTAs when bringing it up. That sucks, but it isn't really relevant. Just really convince them that it is more than 20 hours worth of work. Time it using "clockify.me" for instance. The first week it's over you ask for ways to improve your efficiency. The second week, suggest ways to cut out time on your own (ie I will grade this question only for completion.)

If you're still over hours, give your prof one more chance and send them your actual hours, saying that is it no longer tenable - showing some professional anger seems ok now. Then go over their head if the response isn't satisfactory the next week.

You should try somethng really cool I just discovered last week!

It's called ManicTime, it's an application you can get that tracks your active tasks. It's great for seeing how much time you spend at your desk working vs. slacking, and it's already helping to keep me on task.

As silly as it might sound, the most effective planner I have found has been Habit RPG (combined with Google Calendar). I'm a lot less interested in the gamification these days but it's a highly effective to-do list for me. I especially love being able to set reoccurring tasks.

Sure thing-- best of luck. Grab a copy of Adler if you haven't read it (look for the 1972 edition with Charles Van Doren's updates). Read part II carefully (that's the general methodology) and then read the sections of part III that are specifically about reading history. It'll take you an hour perhaps and that will be time well spent I'd say.

I recommend this book https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Grad-School-Uncovering/dp/0691201099/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&amp;keywords=a+field+guide+to+grad+school&amp;qid=1614093026&amp;sr=8-1