Jody's Advice to Young Scientists

• How to read a journal article

• How to give a class presentation

• How to review a paper or grant

• How to give a conference poster presentation

• How to get good reference letters

• Jody's reference letter checklist

• How to write effective scholarship applications

• Opinionated principles for scientific writing

• Is your thesis "taking shape"? What shape?... hourglass or candlestick.

• p Values and Error Bars: What they tell you and what they don't

• “To PhD or Not to PhD?”

Others' Advice

• Guidebook for New Principal Investigators (includes good advice for writing papers and grants that students and postdocs should read)

• A CV of Failures, such as this one from Johannes Haushofer (an otherwise successful Princeton prof) is a good way to highlight that even successful people have a lot of (usually hidden) failures. If you're not failing enough. you're not taken enough risks.

• 10 easy ways to fail a Ph.D.

• Advice from Jessica Grahn

• Advice from Brian Scholl

• Advice from Blake Butler

• Tutis Vilis's Survival Skills for Graduate Students

• The importance of stupidity in scientific research

• Ramon Y Cajal's Advice for a Young Investigator is an amazing book

• Some thoughts on mentors from Stephen Jay Gould

Fix Common Writing Mistakes

• Grammar rules that you'll remember:

  • How to use an apostrophe

  • How to use a semicolon

  • When to use "i.e."

• How to hyphenate properly and why you shouldn’t hyphenate -ly adverbs

• Significant digits and why you shouldn’t report p = 0.002758001

Principle vs. principal

• Jody’s mnemonic: “Principle ends in le, just like rule ends in le so a principle is a rule. The l at the end of principal looks like a #1, “principa1” so principal means #1”

Science

How to calculate visual angle and a proper visual angle calculator (usually you want to use “centered” version).