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.

  1. From matt.might.net…
  2. 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.
  3. Why academics need to focus on structuring their time from University Affairs.
  4. 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.
  5. Some people need help taking notes. You might be interested in Cornell Note Taking or the 5 other methods described here.
  6. 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:

  1. General Advice on an Academic Career Path (which is filled with useful advice, especially for those studying biostatistics.)
  2. Advice for Applying to Data Science Jobs from Emily Robinson
  3. Academic job search advice from matt.might.net
  4. Career Advice for Data Scientists was a panel at rstudio::conf 2020 focused on building a career around R.