Tips and Tricks

Here are some collected links to various "tips and tricks for success" (mostly for students, but possibly useful for old dogs, too).

General

• If you're not sure where to look for something, try starting at AstroBetter ("Tips and Tricks for Professional Astronomers"), or at Jonathan Sick's Awesome Astronomy list of resources for professional astronomers.

• There's a fantastic 107-page overview of Astronomy as a Field: A Guide for Aspiring Astrophysicists that was written and distributed as a part of the IAU's Women and Girls in Astronomy Program.

Advice for Success in Grad School

• Back in the 1990s, Marie desJardins wrote a short guide that described "How to be a good graduate student," that everyone seemed to be passing around via grainy photocopies. Over the years, this guide has been expanded and updated, and is now published as "How to succeed in graduate school." Find it at its official home online, or see this local PDF copy.

• Stellar astrophysicist Jeff Linsky wrote up some Unexpected Advice for Beginning Graduate Students in Astrophysics for a book on Organizations, People, and Strategies in Astronomy.

• There's a free e-book online titled Planning and Managing Scientific Research: A Guide for the Beginning Researcher, by Brian Kennett. I haven't read it yet, but it appears to "do what it says on the tin."

• Austin Henley, an EE/CS professor, wrote some insightful Lessons from my PhD that are more about planning, communicating, and thriving in an academic environment, than about any one topic of study.

• HERE is an excellent blog post on how to come up with ideas for future research projects. The examples from the author are from the field of ecology, but the top-level principles are much more broadly applicable.

• On the other side of the desk, here's a very nice article by Penn State's Jason Wright on how to be a good graduate adviser. If I'm not living up to any of these precepts, please give me a good talking to!

Giving Good Scientific Talks

The links below take you to some informative articles that condense some useful "tricks of the trade" for giving effective presentations. I've tried to stick to suggestions by people in the physical sciences (mainly physicists and astronomers, but there's one by a chemist and one by a computer scientist) rather than more general "public speaking" guides from other fields of academia or business (which have different traditions and norms).

• Ten Secrets to Giving a Good Scientific Talk, by Mark Schoeberl and Brian Toon, from the AGU's Atmospheric Science Division.

• Suggestions for Giving Talks, notes by Robert Geroch from 1973 that can still be useful today.

• Another older article is James Garland's Advice to Beginning Physics Speakers. It's got some outdated content, but some useful parts, too.

• Oral Presentation Advice, by Mark Hill, Computer Sciences Dept., University of Wisconsin-Madison.

• A Seminar on Seminars, by Kenneth Suslick, a humorous presentation on what to do and what not to do.

• Some interesting tips from Will Ratcliff on giving a presentation in the form of an engaging story (i.e., "David Attenborough style") are described in a 2023 paper by Ratcliff, or can be found in briefer notes that I've archived here.

• Patrick Winston's one-hour lecture "How to Speak," on MIT's Open CourseWare YouTube page, comes highly recommended.

Scientific Writing

• Astonomer Lynn Hillenbrand teaches a course titled Writing in Astronomy, whose web page contains many links to helpful resources (scroll down in the above link).

• Each journal has its own "author instructions" for preparing papers. The one for the Astrophysical Journal is close to being a community standard for astronomers; find it HERE. The AIP also has a good online Author Resource Center HERE.

• A two-part series of Nature Astronomy papers on: (1) How to plan your astronomy research paper, and (2) How to write and develop your astronomy research paper.

• Other possibly useful articles include The Science of Scientific Writing (Gopen & Swan 1990; American Scientist) and English Communication for Scientists (Doumont et al. 2014; Nature ebook) and The Art of Writing Science (Plaxco 2010; Protein Science).

• A brief and fun editorial on how to properly include equations in scientific text.

Scientific Reading & Peer Review

• I've collected a few different resources and links on the general topic of "How to get the most out of the experience when reading a scientific paper" and have posted it here.

• Most of the major journals in astronomy and planetary science don't provide detailed guidance about how to get started when serving as a peer reviewer for the first time. One nice resource is this online guide by Matthew Stiller-Reeve.

Meetings

• Although this AstroBetter page is focused on "getting the most out of AAS meetings," I think lots of the advice therein is helpful for other conferences, too.

• If you need lists of upcoming conferences, the main one for astronomy is hosted by the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre, and a comprehensive one for solar physics is hosted at helioanalytics.io.

"Doing Science"

• Some frequently-shared bits of lore about how to choose research projects include Jack Oliver's "Incomplere Guide to the Art of Discovery," and Uri Alon's "How to Choose a Good Scientific Problem," and Martin Schwartz's "The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research."

• Would you like a 143-page "Beginner's Guide to Working with Astronomical Data?" THIS was written by Markus Pössel to get you started with image processing, spectroscopy, and modern astronomical catalogs.

Funding Sources

What follows is an extremely incomplete list of links and information. I hope to continuously augment and update it...

• NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP): Application deadline usually in late October; awards announced in early April. Reference letters due early November. Eligibility: can apply only once, either in 1st or 2nd year of grad school. Must be US citizen/national, or permanent resident.

• Overview of NASA student opportunities, including:

  NASA Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science & Technology (FINESST): Application deadline usually early February. Eligibility: foreign students enrolled at US institutions are allowed to apply, but US citizens & permanent residents are given preference when all else is equal.

• National Defense Science & Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship: DoD opportunity for three-year support. Application deadline usually in early December. Eligibility: US citizens/nationals only. Connecting research to topics of national importance (e.g., space weather) is probably a priority. Apply in senior undergrad year, or have completed no more than 2 years of full-time graduate study.

• The Department of Energy's Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (CSGF) provides funding for PhD students in fields that use high-performance computing to solve complex problems in science and engineering. Applications are usually due in January.

• Some postdoctoral fellowships:
  • Jack Eddy Fellowship (Heliophysics)
  • NASA Post-doctoral Program (NPP)
  • NRC Research Associateship Programs
  • NSF Atmospheric and Geospace Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (AGS PRF)

The Job Search

• Bryan Gaensler and Sarah Maddison wrote up some detailed notes on getting an academic job.

• A whole lot of great advice on non-academic careers from the AAS. See also some statistical results from a survey of employment fields for new physics PhDs.

• See also Joshua Pepper's wiki page on navigating the faculty job search.

• Some fascinating thoughts from the business world about the importance of interpersonal skills that are just as important (or more?) as the more specific research & education skills we tend to talk about more.