14 General Advice
My most important piece of general advice to people is to be kind. That’s not always the thing I do as well as I’d like.
14.1 On Graduate School
For graduate students, I urge you to take as much advantage of this learning experience as you can. While I’ll refer to some of the pieces below during the course, I’ve gathered a few favorites here.
- From matt.might.net…
- Four Things You Should Do When You’re Bored, on YouTube (the four things are Exercise / Read / Meditate / Find and Engage a Hobby with Passion). Also, Get Up and Move. It May Make You Happier by Gretchen Reynolds, in the New York Times, 2017-01-25.
- Why academics need to focus on structuring their time from University Affairs.
- Most people are really bad at meetings, including Professor Love. In a series of tweets, Greg Wilson argues that “the single most useful training you can give an adult is how to run a meeting and how to participate in someone else’s.” He then provides some nice tips in subsequent tweets, although the link provided there to a blog post is no longer working.
- Some people need help taking notes. You might be interested in Cornell Note Taking or the 5 other methods described here.
- You may be interested in the American Statistical Association, and its This is Statistics program.
14.2 On Seeking a Job
If I have a job or internship to offer, I’ll be noisy about it in class. In the meantime, I’d consider joining the American Statistical Association as a student member and perhaps joining the Greater Cleveland R Meetup Group.
Here are some gathered thoughts from other folks that you might enjoy:
- General Advice on an Academic Career Path (which is filled with useful advice, especially for those studying biostatistics.)
- Advice for Applying to Data Science Jobs from Emily Robinson
- Academic job search advice from matt.might.net
- Career Advice for Data Scientists was a panel at rstudio::conf 2020 focused on building a career around R.