Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student - Manuel Blum (CMU)

There's a lot of filler in there, but one advice that I found interesting was to write right back what you're reading (I take it to refer to technical material and not exposition - e.g. proofs and definitions). Anyone has any experience with trying that?<p>(I've tried this with math books before, but it always felt too tedious to keep up. But I suspect I may have tried to hard, going for a nicely formatted shortened exposition of the entire material; I didn't try to simply jot proofs and formulas down as I was reading them).

I found this article extremely insightful and decided to prepare it for the print so that I could read it more carefully and add some notes on the margins.<p>While I was doing it, I realized how awfully true was the fact that science people _can't_ write.<p>No disrespect to Mr. Blum, but really, what is going on with the writing in this article? New line every several words, unconsistent emphasis, various writing styles, quick abbreviations in some places, but not in others, inconsistent division in paragraphs, several misspellings.

When I was a kid, my father (an EE guy) used to tell me the importance of writing while reading. I mostly ignored that in my career and now a very smart person(Manuel Blum) has validated it. I hope there aren't many things (as told by my father) that I would want other smart people to validate ;(

Did not realize this: "the median of n integers can be found with just O(n) comparisons."<p>Must figure this out!

"Scrolls must be read like the Torah from one end to the other." - Associating Islam with being outdated can be good for your demographic I guess.

I used to love to read these essays on how to be a good and productive grad student... until I came to grad school. Same with phdcomics.

This is actually quite good advice. It's not overly preachy and it's not overly poetic.

Advice to a beginning graduate student: do a start up instead ;)